PCWorld.com - Sharp Puts Its PC in the Living Room

The neverending obsession of PC companies to get PCs into the living room is a fascination of mine. For some reason, these manufacturers seem to believe that all they need to do is make it look pretty and remove the fan, and consumers will be running to the stores to buy them... I think the "PC-as-living-room-device" has a tiny amount of merit, but should be marketed almost exclusively to college students and people who live in one-room apartments (unfortunately, both represent a relatively cash-poor market).

Let's also look at the pricing factors:

For $39 you can buy a DVD player.
For $99 you can buy a PVR.
For $99 you can get a multi-room DirecTV installation WITH PVR.
For $399 you can buy a new PC.

OR...

For $3150 you can buy this new Sharp PC (of course it comes with a nice-looking LCD TV, probably worth about 2/3 of the total price of the unit)

Here's the central issue to me: In the first scenario, if anything goes wrong, I can replace one item very very inexpensively. In the second scenario, when I have a problem, everything stops working!

I'm a huge fan of convergence as a concept, but only when it makes a lot of sense from a price, reliability, and usability point of view.

Read the review at PCWorld.com