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(We can’t promise that all of these are still being sold since some models may be slightly outdated or not available anymore.)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

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

Read more

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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