My wife and I have been regular viewers of The Apprentice TV series since we heard about it, three weeks into its run. During that period, we noticed that the set designers had attached a very large flat panel display to the PC that the cast members use in the suite where they live in Trump Tower.
It turns out that the PC used in “The Suite” is significantly more sophisticated than I thought. A page on The Apprentice Web Site identifies the PC as a Tek Panel 300 all-in-one 30-inch wide screen PC. This machine includes:
- 2.4-Gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 processor,
- 120-Gigabyte IBM ATA100 7200RPM Hard Drive,
- 30-inch WXGA LCD/TFT Full Color ACTIVE MATRIX with a 176 degree viewing angle,
- ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon Graphics Accelerator, and
- Bose MediaMate Sound System w/dual inputs and source mix controls.
It also has a built-in TV tuner, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and connectors for every digital input and output that I could think of. Oh yea, I almost forgot, it runs Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
This is a great system, at least as a PC for the living toom or home theater room, but it isn’t getting shown off to the extent that I think Hytek Manufacturing might have hoped. I wondered what the configuration of the PC was, but since I never saw the cast using the advanced multimedia features, I never got that interested.
I found a lot of details about the machine through an article on eHomeUpgrade.com. FiringSquad.com did a comprehensive review of the Tek Panel 300, including a number of good photos that show the excellent color reproduction of the flat panel display. Seeing these photos in the context of a review made me think that this PC may have been chosen for its technical features rather than its good looks. The Tek Panel 300 website provides links to a number of other reviews of the machine.
I think the Tek Panel 300 is an interesting multimedia PC. At over $6,000, it’s not something I’m running out to buy for myself, but, I know that our readership includes people that spend big bucks on things like this. For a single unit that could conceivably be used as the HDTV in your home theater and a state-of-the-art multimedia PC, the price is not unreasonable.