> The Centrino television ads were pervasive, everyone knew what they were about, and no one at the time had ever heard of a laptop that could get on the internet without a wire.
Apple introduced laptops with Wi-Fi (calling it "AirPort") in 1999, five years before your "eight years ago". Starbucks first started rolling out Wi-Fi (calling it "Wi-Fi")in 2001, and had most of their stores offering it by 2003. It was not an obscure technology eight years ago.
I'm sure whenever non-geeks go shopping for a computer, in any era, there are a variety of marketing terms that need to be explained to them. And yes, I'm old enough to have run through that exercise a few times. But that's not really evidence that "Centrino" hurt the growth of Wi-Fi any more than the way-more-prevalent "Pentium" branding hurt the '90-'00's highly competitive CPU market that gave us 2+GHz x86-64's.
Wi-Fi adoption rates were exceptional for a new computing technology, especially one that required infrastructure beyond what could be put "in the box".
Just like Apple was a couple of years ahead of the curve on Wi-Fi and called it AirPort, they're a couple of years ahead of the curve on double-res displays, too. I don't see how them putting the name "Retina" on those displays (while even in the OS they're still calling it Hi-DPI!) is going to harm what's surely going to be an explosion of high resolution screens in the next few years.
Apple introduced laptops with Wi-Fi (calling it "AirPort") in 1999, five years before your "eight years ago". Starbucks first started rolling out Wi-Fi (calling it "Wi-Fi")in 2001, and had most of their stores offering it by 2003. It was not an obscure technology eight years ago.
I'm sure whenever non-geeks go shopping for a computer, in any era, there are a variety of marketing terms that need to be explained to them. And yes, I'm old enough to have run through that exercise a few times. But that's not really evidence that "Centrino" hurt the growth of Wi-Fi any more than the way-more-prevalent "Pentium" branding hurt the '90-'00's highly competitive CPU market that gave us 2+GHz x86-64's.
Wi-Fi adoption rates were exceptional for a new computing technology, especially one that required infrastructure beyond what could be put "in the box".
Just like Apple was a couple of years ahead of the curve on Wi-Fi and called it AirPort, they're a couple of years ahead of the curve on double-res displays, too. I don't see how them putting the name "Retina" on those displays (while even in the OS they're still calling it Hi-DPI!) is going to harm what's surely going to be an explosion of high resolution screens in the next few years.