Some of the luxury computers out there have designs that are quite extreme, and some even put Apple to shame when it comes to elegance. These computers are made with expensive materials, bling, strange shapes, and prices ranging from expensive to insane.

If you fancy paying up to a million dollars for a luxury computer, here you go! The rest of us will probably just enjoy looking at the pictures.

(We can’t promise that all of these are still being sold since some models may be slightly outdated or not available anymore.)

Laptops

Tulip Ego

Tulip Ego features a “hand bag design” and has interchangeable skins made by different designers. The model in the image is designed by Rodrigo Otazu and features 470 diamonds.

Price: $5,000 for standard. The Otazu design in the image above sells for $350,000.

Read more at CNET.

Bentley laptop from Ego for Lifestyle

The Bentley laptop is a Tulip Ego laptop with a hand-built design that matches the inside and outside of their cars.

Price: About £10,000

Read more at T3.

ThinkPad Reserve Edition

The ThinkPad Reserve Edition comes in a leatherwork casing for a nice business look. Sold by invitation only.

Price: About $5,000

Read more at Engadget.

Luvaglio

Dubbed to be the world first “million-dollar laptop” the Luvaglio promises to be really luxurious and features a diamond power button.

Price: $1,000,000

Read more at Engadget.

Singulum

Featuring a wooden casing and a keyboard made out of ivory or 24 carat solid gold, the Singulum promises to be something special. Promotion images have also included a diamond trackpoint.

Price: About $23,000 for the basic model. $52,000 for the gold and ivory version.

Read more at DVICE.

Gold Macbook Pro

Custom gold Macbook Pro using 24-carat gold and about three carats in diamonds. Not available from Apple. Let’s see if someone does this using the new model.

Price: About $8,000 + laptop

Read more at Gizmodo.

Desktop computers

Jupiter

Dubbed to be one of the most expensive desktop computers comes in platinum (or gold for the “budget” model). The promotion images hardly show that it’s a computer, it really could be anything (an expensive toaster, for example).

Price: $760,000 for platinum and $570,000 for gold

Read more at CNET.

Eazo

Eazo makes computers with nice and original designs. They use liquid-cooled Core 2 Quad processors, in case you are under the illusion you are paying for performance…

Price: $9,000 - $45,000. A custom dream system costs around $70,000.

Read more at Born Rich.

Suissa Enlighten

If you want a desktop computer that looks like no other, this is one for you. Built using glass, wood and metal.

Price: $16,000

Read more at Treehugger.

HP Voodoo Omen

The Voodoo Omen is a gaming system enclosed in an Aluminum case with a built-in 7” secondary LCD display.

Price: $7,000 for the cheapest model

Read more at DV Hardware.

Floortop from IBM

Ok, we just made that term up, but we dare you to put this one on your desk. We present the IBM 305 RAMAC from 1956. And heck, that’s just the hard disk drive in the image below!

Price: Leased from IBM for the equivalent of about $25,000 per month in today’s dollar value. ($3,200 USD in 1957.)

Read more at Wikipedia and here in this post about the history of data storage in pictures.

Didn’t expect that last one, did you?

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

Read more

We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

Read more

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

Read more