On Sep 19, 5:18 pm, Bob Noel
wrote:
In article .com,
Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
Note that it comes with 17inch, LCD color monitor, $160GB hard drive,
"in-flight movie viewing system" (DVD drive and Windows Media
Player). I would want two of these machines in my airplane, so let's
say cost is $1058.

problem: the hard drive won't survive high altitude flying. Do you want
your computer to die just because you fly at 13000'?


It's true...I didn't bother to check the specs on typical hard disks.
I remember checking back in 1995, and it was over 5,000 feet.

I'd probably go with hard disks made to run at that altitude, or if
those turned out to be too expensive, a solid-state drive. Memory
available would drop dramatically though, to only a few GB. I have an
8GB model that I bought for $14, so the price is not too bad.

There would also be the cost trade-off for pressurization.

Even with hard-disk limitation, my gut feel is that the commoditized
approach would still come out cheaper. But again, this depends on
taking a wholistic approach, where most of the components are selected
from the outside with a commodity-mindset.

I _do_ agree that a company attempting to make a profit by selling,
say only USB-based altimiter sensors would have a hard time making a
profit.

-Le Chaud Lapin-