I can do everything else on my 2009 iMac
Funny enough, I just replaced my mid 2009 imac. Of course, it was the base model, so you might just have a bit more life in yours.
New machine is a lot faster.
You might want to look at MPC-BE (Black Edition). I have this as a backup and found that it can play cleanly stuff that VLC struggles with. Of course, MPC-BE seems to be only at SourceForge and is from Russia to boot, but I have experienced no problems with it. The main drawback is that it doesnât let you tweak the sound like you can in VLC.
Edit: you can also find this at the MajorGeeks.com site.
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I think itâs just the normal pace of technological change.
As an example, video codecs
my computer has an hdtv tuner dongle attached to it. It can record TV from off the air at certain times and store it. What it pulls off the air is typically 1920x1080i60 or 1280x720p60 MPEG2 at a bitrate of between 12 and 19 Mb/s. So a TV program might occupy serval gigabytes.
I could, if I wished, compress it down to h.264, so that my appleTV (acquired many years later) could play it, and so that it would occupy less disc space.
On my Core2Duo, this would take many hours, and the machine would be out of commission for the duration. After I installed more RAM, it would still take that long, but I could still use my computer in the meantime.
But my cpu was being challenged. The next generation of cpus could do it much less time. And the generation after that⌠wellâŚ
The second generation of Intel Core chips (Sandy Bridge) could do it in real time because thay had dedicated circuitry built in⌠And in short order, even tablets acquired the capability. My ipad can compress its video output, and send the signal wirelessly to my TV. Very nice feature. And of course, so can a cell phone
Do it without the dedicated circuitry, and yes, youâll need cores, and memory, and all that good stuff. But in the meantime, itâs just about standard equipment on any device made after a certain date. And sticking with ancient cpus means that youâll be stuck running tasks that never entered the wildest dreams of the designers who built that ancient chip.
At certain tasks, your new cell phone will be faster than your real, but ancient PC. At other tasks, your PC will be faster. It really doesnât have anything to do with âcoresâ. It has to do with your processorâs feature set.
If you donât care about video codecs, congratulations. Your tastes are out of sync with the mass market thatâs driving the industry.
Is this a death? Sounds like a marginalization. Hard to believe that that people are going to choose to write memos on their iphones any time soon.
Windows has laid a long series of eggs, but that has always been the case.
Honestly I donât give a shit what happens to the PC market as long as some company or another keeps making parts for DIY/repair. If grandma wants to surf Netflix on an iPad, itâs no big deal to me.
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The future of manufacturing is custom. The idea that companies need to mass-produce crap which is both cheap and âgood enough for (almost) everybodyâ is rather old-fashioned. I am not saying that they donât still do it - just that thereâs not much of a future in it.
The future of general-purpose computers is probably FPGAs. You can already use them to duplicate the circuitry of other existing computers.
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Donât mind me man. Iâm just grouchy five years is âwoafully outdatedâ is all.
Nice writeup.
The form of computing is changing. If you run servers, youâre going to the cloud. Desktops to laptops to tablets, embedded systems, and SoCs. If you have to have a local server they are 1 rack unit and I wouldnât be surprised if they shrink down further.
Sales down about 10%? A rare opportunity to use decimated accurately.
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Lucky you, our machines are now on 4y replacement cycles due to cost-cutting exercises, with 3y hardware warranties. You can imagine the amount of pain we are going through.
On the other hand, Iâm a power user. The most common 4y old Dell E6410s we have are utterly usable with 8GB RAM, a cheap 256GB SSD and the latest Kubuntu LTS on them.
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Cheers.
Haha yes.
Itâs kind of an extreme example there, as in itâs tied to a no-holds-barred max-spec gaming laptop, but i feel the idea of a mechanical keyboard on a more normal laptop is also sound.
Theres no real reason why the internals of a (for example) 11" laptop couldnât be used in a 15-17" one, thatâd give you enough extra room for a keyboard to use the full thickness of the area it occupies whilst the PCB is squished into the remainder 
The screens have fairly standardized interface. Using an adapter cable to match the connectors (why that one is not standardized too?!?) you should be able to mix and match laptop guts and screens, in many if not most cases. (Theory. Todo: more research. And taking a scope on a laptop, seeing which signal is which, to allow fast classification without much of trial and error for machines and screens without documentation. And making a method for reverse-engineering, how to identify what goes where - what pins are GND, what are the power rails, what are the EEPROM interface and what are LVDS and the restâŚ)
Technically, there could be a vendor that matches the guts of a laptop specified by performance, screen specified by other requirements, battery specified by required battery life (replace cells in the original with different or more cells, reset the fuel gauge), keyboard with real switches instead of the immitations used today, and 3d-prints or mills a chassis for the machine, possibly with added features like robustness or TEMPEST shielding.
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I think you have the base specs for a properly open spec laptop going there. Something akin to project aria for mobiles maybe?..
As long as the connectors between components get standardised, it should be possible in theory
I donât think thereâs any technical reason it couldnât be done
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At least documented pinouts! We can make adapters. There are some leaked laptop service manuals but itâs a crapshoot if you can get your one or not.
Standardization would be better, of course. But it is way less hopeful and who knows when/if we can get it, while the suboptimal solution with illicit PDFs, stereomicroscope, and manually soldering annoyingly thin wires to annoyingly tiny pads we can have today. (I had and loved the manual for my previous laptop. Iâd choose a new one Iâd have a manual for but I sort of inherited this one by ways out of my control. So, if I ever get around to the mods, reverse-engineering it will be.)
Ergonomics are getting overlooked in the rush to portability. Tablets and phones require handholding close to the eyes to pick out details on the retina screens, which is just not ergonomic for all day use no matter how lightweight they may get.
I do think that google glasses will be the solution to this problem, and I had been thinking glasses would be my next computer system. But with google chickening out, Iâm looking at desktops instead of laptops for the screen real estate. 4k displays just donât work on 13" or 15" laptops. If Apple starts making 17" laptops maybe Iâll take a look.
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Death of PC sales, not death of the PC.
Remember when people were predicting the death of copper wire and thinking everything would be optical? Well it turns out the vast majority of us are still using copper networks, mostly just because they are already there.
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27 inches, 2880p is just about perfect.
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I usually build my own desktops, but I grabbed two old (~10 years old) Dell computers out of the âto be recycledâ pile at our university. One application of Linux Mint later, they made a great file & print server for our home network, plus a desktop computer for my partner (whoâs needs ask a lot less out of her computer, admittedly.)
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Can we /please/ just ban the XYZ is dead crap? Itâs ridiculously over-used, and rarely even vaguely reflective of actual reality.
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