News of Razer’s ambitious Project Christine, a high-concept modular PC described as “a PC for everyone,” has been sweeping the web for the past few days.
It’s certainly a distinctive-looking chassis, less a tower than a rack with slots for components. The potential user doesn’t need to know anything about putting together a conventional system or even open up a case. Specially-designed modules allow the user to plug in a variety of PC components, from GPUs and CPUs to memory, hard drives, or power supply units. Each component is contained within its sealed module, alongside active liquid cooling systems and noise cancellation. Razer’s official site boasts that this interchangeable design will allow on-the-fly swapping and automatic syncing between components.
It’s no surprise Project Christine earned “Best PC” from official CES awards partner Endgadget. Certainly a Lego-style swapping approach between standardized components offers a highly intuitive upgrade and construction model for average users. According to an enthusiastic but skeptical ExtremeTech article covering the subject in great detail, Razer hopes to have a finalized version ready for CES 2015.
But Christine is just a prototype, and Razer will have to negotiate a number of pitfalls. The most significant obstacles to my mind aren’t technical – though there are significant technical questions, as mentioned in the article – but economic. Non-Apple PCs are popular because of their open-sourced design architecture, allowing a variety of manufacturers to independently produce components. This encourages competition, pushing down prices, and gives the customer a wide variety of options from various levels of expense to choose from.
If Project Christine is a restricted environment, then all these advantages are lost. Instead, Project Christine will be much the same as an Apple computer – a closed-environment with higher prices and less component variation. That has its own potential advantages – restricting the range of components allows for greater optimization of the hardware, as is done in gaming consoles – but is also likely to cost much more than the “a PC for anyone” line suggests.
We’ll be keeping an eye out on Razer’s latest ambitious project.
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