Intel Compute Stick review: Second time's the charm | Hacker News Reader

Intel Compute Stick review: Second time's the charm

engadget.com

63 pointsaleem38 comments

> It feels more solid in your hand

Something I learned soon after I launched my first hardware product:

People still have an instinctive physical relationship with products that must be the result of evolution making a connection with heavy or solid = more-food/safer/better or something like that.

I remember devoting a ton of time to making my first product as light as possible through sophisticated mechanical design and attention to component choices in the electronics.

During my first trade show in Europe, this Italian guy came by multiple times to look at the product. He asked for a price on his second visit. It was USD $8,000. The next day he came back one last time and asked: Why is it $8,000 if it is so light?

Absolutely blew my mind. Was not ready for that question at all. Upon return to the US I directed our sheet metal vendor to switch from aluminum to steel of the same gauge. We also added a small steel bar riveted to the inside to increase the weight a further. In all, I think we easily added about five pounds to the thing. Now it was "worth" $8,000.

Over the next three years sales and comments during sales presentations proved, in no uncertain terms, making it heavier had been exactly the right move. People would make comments when they picked up this damn paper-weight such as "wow, feels solid", "wow, lots of tech in there", "wow, I know why it cost so much now".

It was amazing to see how many times the moment the deal was done coincided with the instant they picked it up.

Amazing.

Interesting -- what type of product was this?

I've designed equipment with small, lightweight boxes that sold for similar prices ($5,000 in my case) and didn't run into that phenomenon in my (very small) niche, but I've definitely seen it in action in contexts like EEVblog teardown videos. Coincidentally, I'm working on a new design right now, and one of the items on my to-do list for this weekend is to decide whether to go with aluminum or copper for some internal shielding. :)

Beats headphones contain a bunch of metal bits whose only purpose is to make the headphones feel heavier.

Now you know why Beats cost so damn much.

Good advice. Some markets do value lightness such as Video Cameras. There, you can sell the Carbon Fibre model for a premium because its lighter. I do wonder if you had a heavy version and a light version with the light version being priced higher, would it work?

...so at one point, when it no longer is economically viable to produce two different housings, you'll paint over the carbon and glue in lead weights for the cheaper version...

> "wow, feels solid"

I have to consiently suppress this feeling a lot of times. Also, there's a relation of bigger -> more powerful, but this one is easy to suppress on portable stuff.

I have super-glued lead fishing weights into the base of my desk VoIP phone (a Yealink sip-t28p) to give it more heft on the desk and stop it from sliding around when bumped.

Steve Jobs reportedly considered adding window sash weights to the case for the first Apple II computer, for exactly the same reason.

For the money, I'd rather get one of the Kangaroo mobile desktops. They're specced the same as the compute stick, but are $60 cheaper, or for $10 more, you can get a model with 4 gigs of ram and 64 gigs of storage. The detachable dock is a bit weird, but if you're going to be swapping it between two places could definitely prove useful.

> for $10 more, you can get a model with 4 gigs of ram and 64 gigs of storage.

Is that still the Kangaroo? I can only find one model listed on their site and I want one...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856659... I found it, but the $100 variant looks like better value with it's Windows license and identical processor.

It’s got a 32-bit UEFI Bootloader which isn’t Linux friendly. Just like most compute sticks. I think even the Intel Compute Stick with Linux on it was limited to Ubuntu 12.04...

I spent an afternoon once getting Linux to run on the Lenovo stick and an HP Stream 7. I returned them because I don't ever want to have to do that again. I can't even picture using one of these on a daily basis.

Yeah, not sure why the higher capacity variant isn't that good bang for buck. If it included Win 10 Pro at that price point, I'd be all over it.

Particularly, to be used to connect to DaaS.

I didn't expect it to be a hundred and fifty dollars; that's a little high for such a product with these specs in today's world of $10 to $20 "micro computers". It's a pretty awkward price point, given that it has a niche market but is being marketed as if it didn't..

Totally agree. That's what, at least eighty ESP-8266's or at least a baker's dozen RPi's.

Intel keeps doing this, pricing their products as if they can charge a ton just because something has "Intel" printed on the box. They want to be Apple, but I think at least for these kinds of specialty products (also for example like the NUC or the Minnowboard or whatever that thing was called), their target demographic isn't the same kind of person as an Apple customer. At least, there's no way I would spend $200 on something that is only slightly more powerful than a RPi. I feel like they keep pricing themselves out of the market with these kinds of devices.

... also their naming schemes are really annoying. There are almost identical chips sold as a "Pentium", "Celeron", "Xeon", "Core"... with random features turned on (or disabled). Now we get " Atom X".

I can totally understand how it serves Intel to squeeze the most out of corporate buyers, and also it allows one to get a bargain from time to time... But I think in general it's just confusing and annoying.

I think there's a market for something in this form factor that's a bit more powerful than the ultra-cheap options. Enough that you don't have to think about performance as a limitation quite so much.

For $150 I would rather buy a NUC sized thing with VESA mount and put a small, fast M.2 SSD in it. Also it will likely have a proper 1000baseT NIC in it which is far preferable to any form of 802.11n/ac.

You can buy a whole Chromebook for that price.

I really love these little things. I use these as dumb terminals to RDP into virtual machines. It makes adding and replacing workstations very cheap and quick. Also more secure, where you can keep file sharing locked down to a internal private virtual network not exposing much of anything to the physical network. One thing I would love is an Ethernet port, but I know that it too much to ask.

Having actually used "dumb terminals", like the DEC VT-100, Qume QVT-101 and others over RS-232 connections and shoe-box sized modems way back in the 80's I found the start of your comment to be somewhat funny.

Not criticizing your post at all. Simply making the observation that what we might call a "dumb terminal" today is a million miles away from where this term originated. Just like the "film industry" is really the "digital image industry" today.

I remember running AutoCAD 1.2 on an 8086-based S-100 CP/M system with the addition of an 8087 match co-processor card, 640K of RAM, 1 MB on a RAMDISK card, a tablet with a puck that used a magnetic coil to sense position and, yes, a DEC VT-100 "dumb terminal". Sometimes I had to unload stuff from memory just to be able to plot. Fun times. Funny that today developers think stuff like vim is cool. We couldn't wait to get off those damn terminals and use "real" editors.

Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

Back in those terminals' heyday, they were "smart" terminals! Dumb terminals could handle text output (sometimes to paper), but had few if any control codes and certainly not the extensive VT100 escape-code set for cursor control, formatting such as bold or underline, etc.

Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

WordStar! And joe.

> Who knows what Ctrl-K-X belongs to?

WordStar?

GRRM's favorite word processor.

Yup.

You don't have to know, it's permanently burned into the screen.

How did you see the drawing? I had a VT-100, but they typically could not display graphics.

AutoCAD used a separate monitor connected directly to an S-100 graphics card. You'd enter commands into the AutoCAD command line interface and do the drafting on the graphics monitor.

That also explains the way ACAD works. Had the program been created in the post-terminal age it is likely it would have been a point-and-click application, like, say, SolidWorks. Instead, they relied on commands such as "line", "circle", "pline", etc. typed into the console. You could also type the parameters rather than clicking around.

ACAD also came with a version of Lisp (AutoLISP) you could use to extend its capabilities. In general terms the approach was to use AutoLISP to create a DSL that made drafting much easier for your particular application.

For example, I had a set of programs that created a DSL I could use to layout circuit boards more efficiently than through raw command drafting. If I remember correctly, I could type "dip" and my code would ask a series of question to ultimately place a, say, DIP 16 package with certain size pads and holes on the current layer.

The degree of automation one could be achieved through AutoLISP was remarkable.

Ah - that makes sense.

That pattern of cmd driven UI was very common in those days. I think just about every EDA package does that. However, instead of Lisp, they used TCL.

Thanks for sharing this. I think it is always great when people achieve powerful automation.

If you use a thinkpad external keyboard (has integrated mouse) then stick a usb ethernet dongle on there. I think I've seen around 40-50MBbyte/sec on one of the linksys/cisco ones.

I actually work daily on my Asus thin desktop (very similar specs). I run Ubuntu though. The fact that my mini pc makes almost zero noise is great and it does feel good to be a bit greener with the power savings. Funny thing is that I got the Asus to test webapps (I do mostly front-end). I use the browser's dev tools to emulate slower Internet connections but I don't know how to emulate slow processors/tiny RAM (maybe there is a way?). After a while I just never went back to my laptop, tweaked Ubuntu to make the Asus faster and more capable and ended up coding on it for good. Now, if my apps do well on the Asus they fly on 'average' hardware.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups

This post has an example on how to limit a process (in this instance it's Matlab) regarding it's memory use an the CPUs it will allow to be scheduled.

To limit the CPU further, you might want to use the "userspace" cpufreq governor and allow down your CPU clock.

I used to love Engadget but with recent redesigns it had become too hard to navigate and find what you're looking for. A simple blog format was just fine in my opinion.

You're not supposed to find things, you're supposed to accidentally click on ads.

Buy a keyboard with integrated USB hub and ports. Then you can plug your rat into the keyboard without taking up valuable ports on the system.

This PC is a little weaksauce to be running Windows, but for typical Linux applications it's overkill. I don't know what its niche is, except as a terminal server or digital sign -- not exactly growth markets for home users.

Businesses will eat it up.

Ouch, this hurts. Bought a Compute Stinks in January. Slow as a steamboat. Slower than my 3 year old Celeron netbook. Now this thing comes out that looks half decent.

Counter-anecdote: I own a first-gen compute stick, and cannot understand why every online review is so negative. My device works wonderfully, i don't have performance issues at all. But for some reason the industry has decided to tar a perfectly serviceable computer.

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