The speed of this sort of thing insn’t anything to write home about. Now if someone could produce a card that fits flush with the slot, and is as speedy as a SSD, that would be a great hack.
I just unearthed my old Acer Aspire One netbook. It is very lightweight, pretty decent battery life, three USB ports, and not one but TWO SD card ports with the card snapping in and flush with surface when inserted. So don’t tell me it is impossible to do. For Fruitheads, maybe. For the rest, not.
(The thing is going to be configured as a mobile measuring, data acquisition, and embedded development platform. Also may get more memory. One gig is too little. But it was old…)
The priorities tend to come as a package deal. The look-over-performance ones especially tend to cluster.
No calls, but they complain routinely. And they complain about the fruits too. I actually get calls related to this, for consultations about possible upgrades. And with memory soldered to the board, guess how possible the upgrades are.
I usually do the service. Manufacturer service is overpriced as hell, it’s all third party parts for me.
People like their computers? I always thought that whatever the vendor is, you need only a bit of imagination to run into their “good ideas” that limit you in what you want to do, whether it is software or hardware or overall design. Then it is about what the platform lets you do. With the fruity constraints, from nonstandard connectors to nonupgradability to walled garden software ecosystem, some just have double heaping of the issues.
Quality, used to be; the push for thinness has flimsiness in tow. Reliability, depends; my non-fruit stuff tends to be pretty reliable even if I drive it rather harsh. Service, a friend has a laptop with failed disk in service for a month now and uses an old Thinkpad instead (the original one is a fruit) now. And has passwords to certain services on the out-of-commission one.
It is Jobs. The equivalent-or-better stuff was out there before. It took the masses of appleheads to take the also-runs and make them popular.
Small but with dedicated following. Managed to position itself as a must-have fashion accessory for those who want to show off that they “think different”, and the rest followed.
Otherwise it is Just A Computer, Just A Phone, and so on.
You must have a really really expansive view of what constitutes a fashion accessory, and yet you blithely dismiss fashion. Shame on you!
Oh, right, because the Acer netbook hasn’t made any compromises in things Apple does well. Tell me about the keyboard flex, keyboard backlighting, battery life, and performance of that netbook. Don’t tell me it’s impossible to do.
Apple does a lot of service for free. And their in-warranty service is hard to beat. Most people lack the expertise to service their computers (yet you again seem to think that your expertise should be the baseline).
Well, some people solder on larger chips. And since you seem to think that since you service your own computers this should be the baseline, I guess I can say that because some people solder on new chips this should be the baseline.
And many people find that the Apple platform lets them do what they want to do more efficiently. Others feel otherwise. And that’s fine.
Umm, you expect anyone to believe that Apple takes over a month to replace a hard drive? Really?
If equivalent or better stuff was out there, why then do you not only see huge market success for lots of their products, but their competitors redesigning their products to look like Apple’s? Why would they completely abandon their superior designs?
And with all the compromises and failures that you see in Apple designs, why do they consistently lead consumer satisfaction rankings by large margins—even after consumers have been using their products for long periods of time and should have run into all these failures that exist in Apple products and not others?
If it is carried around, and its role is to look certain way, it could be argued to count as a fashion accessory.
Why?
Keyboard flex, I had to take a look because I did not remember having any problem with it. It is there, I can see it when I look for it, it is small, it never caused me any discomfort. Keyboard backlighting, not present; I had a mod with an amber LED glued to the lid that copied the same LED from some IBM Thinkpads. It was powered from the VGA connector (you have convenient 5 volts there). Battery life, don’t ask me for the hour count but it is pretty decent even for the stock 6-cell battery, a factor in why it is my travel machine together with it fitting in my thigh pockets (I like big pockets though). Performance, decent for a 2009 (2008?) machine; you won’t do graphics editing on it, but as a terminal it is good enough. (Todo: add memory. The one gig is too little today. But that’s about cracking open my decommissioned old Thinkpad, removing module from there, and putting it into the Acer. Nothing else than a small Phillips screwdriver, and a little bit of inspiration, is needed.) Just now she’s compiling kernel modules, as I need something special with the TMC USB subsystem.
And that’s a six+ years old machine.
I don’t deal with servicing much, so cannot compare. The machines I deal with are usually too old to qualify for the in-warranty kind anyway.
I’d put the cutoff at soldering of single wires and solder jumpers for the Commons. Above that things tend to require special equipment and more skills. Even a humble SOIC-8 can be a pain when you have a bad day. I can do quite some tricks above that, and my cutoff would be at BGAs (I hate BGAs!), with merely a dislike to the bigger, finer-pitch chips, but I vastly prefer socketed parts anyway.
But your argumentum ad absurdum is amusing, that I have to admit.
Apple lets you do anything you want. If you want what Jobs wants.
It involves data recovery from a Samsung SSD. So yeah.
Fashion, cost, masses are asses.
Maybe there is a correlation with lack of technical imagination in that market segment? Maybe some self-delusion about Apple being something Special (which I hope the unfortunate trend to immitate will erase, and then, once the lousy designs become commodity and not a marker of Thinking Different, we’ll see a bounce towards something more sensible). Maybe a cognitive dissonance (“I paid so much extra money” and “it’s crap” are somewhat exclusive feelings that prefer to not coexist in many heads).
And anyway, there are many many other brands that together take a pretty big chunk of the market. If the Fruit is so good, why does it not singlehandedly win against so mediocre competition?
On a side note, referring to an older discussion, I found my jewellery scale. I weighed three standard USB-A connectors from my bag-o’-USB-goodies, and got 1.75, 1.85, and 2.15 grams. So we can agree that an average USB connector has give or take two grams. Not much an additional weight to carry around, is it? Should I weigh also some small USB hub to compare the alternative?
Wasn’t Linus Torvalds keen on the macbook at one time?
Doesn’t everybody have their silly moments?
It’s really interesting how you feel confident saying Apple engineering is horrible and consumers are delusional because their SD card slot sticks out a bit, but you’re equally confident in saying that the processing power of an Atom is good enough, the hugely inferior battery life is god enough (despite not even knowing how long it lasts), the keyboard flex is good enough, and being able to glue an LED hooked up to the VGA connector (does this stick out at all?) is good enough… and that none of these are compromises despite Apple showing that these things can be done properly. Heck, the Aspire One didn’t even get very good reviews when it was new.
It’s not ad absurdum so much as ab absurdum, and explicitly so since I acknowledged that my position was just as absurd as ours.
And it’s interesting that you put the cutoff at soldering a single wire (which most people have neither the equipment or expertise to do), but somehow consider it a failure when you only have to buy a USB Ethernet adapter (which pretty much everyone can do). And that gluing an LED to your computer and plugging it in to your VGA connector is less of a bodge, in your mind, than simply plugging in that USB Ethernet adapter.
Fine! Lots of people want what jobs wants. And lots of people want what Lenovo wants. And lots of people want what Samsung wants.
I forgot that failing to back up your data is an Apple problem reflecting problems with their hardware (especially since Apple makes it pretty darn easy to back stuff up).
You don’t think button-less touchscreen phones are commodities yet?
It is way more profitable than any other computer or phone manufacturer. It is the most valuable company in the world. It singlehandedly does “win” against the competition—at least by the metrics that the competition would consider important. And as I’ve repeatedly said, it doesn’t have to appeal to every single consumer in order to be good at what it does, anymore than BMW, of Hyundai has to appeal to every single consumer: they just have to meet the needs of a certain market segment.
That’s a great response to an argument nobody made. The shift to USB-C was about size, as was repeatedly stated in the thread about it. I suppose someone like you would be content with randomly gluing a USB-A port to the exterior of their device, but more people—including Apple customers—would not.
Seriously, you must have a very difficult time relating to people. What’s even sadder is that you seem to look down on a lot of people who don’t share your tastes.
Yeah. He went from a Macbook Air to a Chromebook Pixel, and then to an ultralight Vaio:
I used to use a MacBook Air as my laptop, because it’s the right form-factor (well, close to: the correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don’t understand why everybody gets that wrong). But I got fed up with the horrible screen, so I’ve gone through a few trials since (including a Pixel Chromebook) and am currently enjoying a 11" Sony Vaio Pro that actually comes in at lighter than my 2 lbs target weight, and has a reasonable screen). The kids use the old Macbook Airs now.
Hey, guess what computer meets his specifications exactly, at 12" and 2 pounds? That’s right, the new Macbook. And since it’s fanless, it meets another point on his wishlist: silence.
I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit).
Of course the retina display on the new Macbook will bring the display quality he loved about the Chromebook Pixel, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he switched back to the new Macbook.
You should really tell him to stop being a status-obsessed Steve jobs fanboy with more money than brains.
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I know it’d be an absurd waste of money, but I’d still really like a Chromebook Pixel.
$1,300 for the 64GB version makes Apple prices seem very reasonable, especially given the 3-pound weight.
I’m just drawn to absurd computers.
It’s why I’ve been tempted by all the Surface Pros, and the Sony Vaio P. Luckily my wife is able to talk me out of it most of the time.
Poking out SD card is something I cannot do much with, which mkes it double-annoying.
Gluing on a keyboard light is a crude hack, but it Can Be Done. The connector on the VGA port sticks out a little (stuck, the solution is decommissioned now as the machine was relegated to another duty), but only by about 8 mm, and the top was covered with hot-melt adhesive; the protruding part was therefore a compact round bump that did not snag onto things, and, more important, was robust enough to not break off. Unlike a thin, fragile SD card.
The keyboard flex worries, from some threshold down, are for purists. As long as the tactile feeling is not compromised, and the effect is only visual and not significantly haptic, flex away.
The battery life was fairly decent when new, and still adequate now on the original battery.
I know. I grumbled. But it is not that bad, cost-effective I’d dare to say, and the battery life sems to be adequate even for field measurements. I grew up on way weaker machines and only few classes of applications require wagging of CPU. (No, I don’t have time for much of gaming. 
) The money not spent on an unnecessarily powerful portable machine was instead used for other instrumentation.
The inferior specs, well, that is what you get when you are cost-limited. Still good enough as a terminal, and that is what it was bought for. Even six years past its prime it seems to be doing pretty good job as a scope interface, reader for datasheets, and a control of a laser (replaced there with another, bigger, old laptop, and recommissioned into the portable duty).
But it has enough USB ports, without worrying about a hub and additional cable, for a scope and a pair of multimeters. (Just writing code to control them.) Or other configuration. And a separate charging port that does not rob you off one USB, and a separate Ethernet socket that avoids connectivity issues.
Soldering is not that difficult, I learned it when I was about 8 years old or so. The equipment, cheap for the basic tasks.
(You have to know it anyway. I just did a teardown of a friend’s multimeter, You should’ve seen the bad solder jobs on the banana plugs. Two of four failed on a light pull. And that was a Voltcraft brand.)
With the level of technological dependence we have now, soldering should be part of shop classes at elementary schools. Not my fault that it is not.
Buying the adapter is the easy part. Carrying it around with the machine is the more difficult part. Keeping track of where it is. Not forgetting it somewhere. Not forgetting the cable, and so on. The logistics gets overwhelming pretty fast. The thing has to be built in for a frustration-free experience.
The thing has to be built in (or at least on) for a frustration-free experience.
Yes, it is a kludge. But it worked for several years to my full sastisfaction. And the machine can be modded to what I want with ease. Which is important when you aren’t lucky enough to swim in money.
Data recovery is part of servicing. Granted, there was a major omission at the operator’s side. By extension you could argue that a failure to maintain a hot spare is the cause of such downtimes.
Sadly, they are. No haptic feedback, you have to look at the thing while using it. Which is rather annoying.
See? Selling crap and adding feelings to justify the markup.
So they just need their Kool-Aid consumers who have to maintain emotional connection to the brand to be willing to pay the premiums.
I think you argued with the additional weight of the connectors. I remember an attempt to find the scale to give you accurate numbers. Which I did now, albeit with a delay. I can also measure a microUSB one, to compare; the C will be somewhere in between.
And it was a bit premature. With a new technology there has to be a transitional period when both the new and old have to be supported.
The connector can often fit flush in. Putting some into the top lid of my laptop is on the todo list; some should be on top, because things like disks and wifi dongles tend to break off when the laptop is used on the lap. Once I get enough round tuits, there will be a build log and photos.
I do. I always did, I did not start with it. It’s their fault. (To be accurate, it’s the system’s fault, they are its victims.)
I tend to wipe their posteriors when things go wrong.
What was ever wrong on prioritizing substance over style, and despising the opposite? Did you ever try to tear off the “no user-serviceable parts inside” labels and remove the “do not remove this cover” covers from the world?
Style can be a good servant, but a very very bad master; it quickly gives you limitations and sucks resources when you give in.
The noise is mostly another style-over-substance problem. The appearance dictates the position and size of the airflow holes. My Thinkpad went MUCH quieter with just a single weird trick.
http://shaddack.twibright.com/projects/mod_LaptopThinkpadR60cooling/
(A supplementary trick is checking what eats the CPU when the thing gets hot, and killing it if needed. The benefit is that you can catch other things going wrong when high CPU consumption is a symptom.)
When you get 9 hours of battery life, you can afford not to be always plugged in. Funny how a keyboard backlight but eliminating video output is not a compromise for you. Or less than half the battery life is not an issue for you. Or 8mm is not an issue for you (despite complaining about Macbooks and USB while saying they only needed to be 5mm wider).
What? Are you acknowledging that we should evaluate computers according to their owners’ desires and intended purposes? Or should we make snarky comments about the Acer being able to do what you want so long as it’s also what Acer wants?
But apparently it’s the computer industry’s fault (or maybe just Apple’s) that it is not. Regardless, the reality is that more people know how to buy an Ethernet adapter than know how to solder. You may not like that fact, but it’s a fact nevertheless.
I don’t believe any manufacturer offers data recovery as part of their service. Nor do I believe that data recovery taking a long time has anything to do with it being an Apple product, contrary to your implication.
My comments had nothing to do with feelings, and made no reference to them. I simply referred to the market. Other manufacturers make products that attempt to compete with Apple, and the price points are generally the same. It’s not Apple’s fault that they out-compete them.
Again, it wasn’t emotional connections to Apple that made the iPod a success, nor did they make the iPhone a success.
I argued about the overall weight increase required to add these connectors, based on the need to make the entire computer thicker and wider to add these connectors.
Since when did weight, physical size, and ergonomics become purely stylistic?
How can a person who loves to work in the terminal understand how I use my computer. Tech people work in text for the most part and consider this a superiority. That is not a real world position, but an ideological one. In other words; who cares?
(I am replying to you instead of Shad because I think you will understand what I am saying.)
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Note the mesh that gives virtually no airflow resistance, and the side cover of the air egress that facilitates airflow even when the machine is partially wrapped with a blanket as it often happens when working in bed.
Whoever thought that those little holes at the bottom of the chassis are enough for cooling was not entirely right in his head. Or, more likely, had a designer babbling that the lack of airflow holes at the top cover is more important than proper cooling.
The screws on the side could do with a little better anchoring; but that’s what you get when the magnesium subchassis is what it is. (They could make it from something else, too; brazing magnesium is annoying enough and there are stress concentrations that can make it crack.)
Notice also the stick-on measurement scale on the screen. That’s to provide me with size reference (my guess is abysmal) for internet shopping. The thing is laser-printed on paper and attached using double-sided tape. Later there will be software for generating such scales for laser engraving.
There are places where mouse has superiority. They are few. Graphics editing, some audio editing, a few others that require pointing coordinates in 2d space. Even the graphical interfaces would benefit from easier binding of operations to keystrokes; we have dozens of keys that can be reached with muscle memory, and instead of that we’re doomed to RSI-promoting mind-infuriating hand-eye coordination requiring mouse-slavery.
ORLY?
Who wants to get the oscilloscope to dump data to a file without having to mousing all over the screen. Who wants to script the operations done often. Generally who wants to talk with the computer instead of trying to pointclick it. Those care.
I should be able to tell the machine what I want. To script it into submission. To lob commands at it at 50+ wpm instead of looking where the cursor decided to be just now. To make it so easy to control at the common tasks that the machine feels like an extension of my own mind. A terminal window where essentials like dictionary lookups, conversions, and various calculations are on hand as simple commands - text in, text out - is fairly close to that.
For the cost of diminished battery life. The cycling wears the Li-ion cells, at least their yesterday’s and today’s variants, the tomorrow’s nanotech oxide anodes may not have that problem. If you like to pay, feel free to, though. I, for one, keep things charged whenever practical. Hint: it is usually pretty practical, when in facilities; less so when actually on the go, though.
I usually don’t use the machine in darkness so complete that the backlight would mater. When I did, I had a built-in light. Okay, I had to build it in, but it was there. The video output, on the other hand, was useful for things like minor presentations when a projector was available. No adapters needed, all standard, all fitting into the common ecosystem you find in most of facilities without need to carry bags and bags of dongles and adapters. Because that is what the standards are for.
4 hours are mostly enough for me, even in field measurements I run out of energy faster than the machine. And you are comparing a 2009 (even 2008) machine, with stock battery, with a 2014(?) one. Try another metrics, hours per dollar of machine cost.
Where did you get the 8mm? I am lost here.
Even the puny Acer gives me more possibilities than the one-port-only fruitcake wonder.
No, it’s the society’s fault. The industry just loves mindless consumers it can advertise to based on feelings and positive associations instead of on hard specs.
And that’s why the world sucks. I am doomed to live in it. Should I be fucking happy about it?
It’s a Samsung SSD. I can ask for the details.
Argumentum ad populum. Love them, don’t you? Eat shit, billions of flies cannot be wrong.
So far as I see, they generally do fairly well too.
In quite a part it did. See keywords “ipod marketing”.
I remember that. I did the calculation, and a rough guess based on assumption of homogeneous density of the computer shown low single percents weight increase, inconsequential for anything but deep space missions.
Since the time you can have both these and a standards-compliant connectivity that conforms to the existing ecosystem of other deployed technologies.
My only response to this would be to post a picture of my work and I think that is beyond the pale around here. I code too, very poorly. The point is we all have different skill sets and none of them are superior to the others.
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I have a 2011 Macbook with over 1150 full discharge-charge cycles on it that is at 89% of original capacity.
This may amaze you, but there are lots of people who work while on the go, and who can’t always be plugged in.
You only like these metrics when they cut your way. What if the metric was dollar-kilograms per hour of battery?
Here:
Why do I care? Your argument was that this was an Mac problem related to horrible Apple service. It’s not.
The application of economic principles is not argumentum ad populum.
And if I was a member of a fly species that ate shit, I probably would, too. At least, if I wanted to survive.
Unless you’re on a Trans-Atlantic flight and want to work as you bill your clients hundreds of dollars per hour, which is a very realistic situation for a lot of people. The five hour difference in battery just paid for your entire computer, paid for any dongle you might have to buy, and paid for a few hours of tech support provided by some angry guy who wants to tell you his netbook is a better computer.
And why should any of the millions of people who are happy fucking care what your idiosyncratic tastes and preferences are?
You did the calculation poorly and with questionable assumptions (such as asymmetric design, only an additional 5mm being needed for a USB-A connector, etc.). And you should tell Linus Torvalds that this difference between the 11 Macbook Air and his ideal 12", 2 pound computer is inconsequential, and that he is an utter ass for switching computers on that basis.
And the lesson, once again, is that you can’t have them all. We already discussed how USB-A wouldn’t fit in the new Macbook’s package. And note that the Chromebook Pixel is already USB-C only.
Depends on what it is. A lot of stuff can be classified as “decent start”.
If it is enough to code a way out of a wet paper bag, I’d say good enough. 10% of skills is enough for 90% of problems. And if nothing else, it helps you specifying what you need when asking a third party for something more complex; good specs are crucial.
I’d say that the technical skills are of utmost importance as they underlie physical realization of most other stuff, and can provide a solid cause-effect thinking. That, and other related meta-skills, are portable to other areas too. And they repel woo.
Not bad.
Note that my old netbook could have similar lifetime with the bigger, 9-cell battery. (Uses the 18650 cells internally. If important, I could hack together even a 12 or 15 cell behemoth. Or have a spare battery. Mom has the big one in hers, and I borrowed it for one trip when I needed the time.)
Doesn’t at all. I find myself in such situations as well, once about a while. Usually not needing a laptop, not beyond a hour here or there, but a cellphone and a camera and other little creature comforts are a must-have. See some of my battery-related hacks.
Okay, let’s have some sample here, selected by battery life.
Ahh, I see. And I remember. The three millimeters are the guesstimated thickness of the vertical wall of the case, the space that is already there. The connector can go through the wall and still be flush with the surface.
I asked. Internal facility IT support was involved in reading the data off the SSD, which was the major component of the time sink.
If we talk about mass market, and the market share, it is.
But then don’t wonder when you are told that your lunch stinks.
In that case, a Lenovo Thinkpad X240 blows your fruit out of its juice by twenty hours of battery power. See the list above.
Because their lives depend on tech and if something goes wrong they’re powerless like blind newborn mice? There are too few engineers out there and it’s getting worse. Nobody wants to think.
I spelled out the assumptions, as I don’t have time to take a tomographic shot of the device and calculate the specific densities. Not that it is impossible, I just don’t have enough resources free to sacrifice. The 5mm was for USB-C, the A is what you are putting in there to make me appear wrong; of course, getting the A in is also possible, but I’d have to look at the pics again to think up how.
You can have them all. I am even telling you how, and only a small subset of the possibilities; I could come up with more if I got a chassis to mod. It’s the people like you who unquestioningly accept the “wisdom” of the designers.
Which is an unlucky decision and should not be happening, at least not yet. USB C is too new to rely solely on it; the ecosystem has too many peripherals that rely on the A connector. By all means put in the C, but don’t remove the As. Not for next 3-5 years.
…and the newer netbooks tend to have only two USB ports. The trend is going in the entirely wrong direction. Two is too few. Three are good, more than four is in the realm of diminishing returns. So it seems after I’ll have to upgrade I’m in the mod-it-yourself realm again. And of course there is no vendor who would give me a schematics with my purchase, so I’ll have to do tricks like tapping some of the internal USB buses that I can find (webcam has one, fingerprint scanner when present typically as well…). When you actually have the money and the market does not even have what you want, it gets pretty frustrating.
More ports is always good. The cost is minimal. The benefit, well… answer yourself - what’s less frustrating - having one available port too many, or missing just one?
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