Outshone by Smaller Screens, PCs Aim to Be Seen as Cool Again
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My desktop computer is a glorious, glorious device. I have millions of different bits of software for it, many operating systems, open source, proprietary, etcetera. It's all there. It really feels like my machine. If I don't want Windows, I blow it away and install Linux, BSD, Plan 9, code my own bootloader, whatever.
My laptop is a bit less so (can't find the perfect form factor for me, can't upgrade it, etc) but it's very similar. It's mine. I have spice, vnc, rdp, ssh, sftp, ftp, irc, <insert a million other things here regardless of whether I actually ever use them> as commandline tools that just work and aren't filled with adverts or in app purchases or 'please add this to your google account'.
Phones and tablets? Complete write off. My smartphone is basically a toaster. Android and iOS make what could be a general purpose computer into a Fisher Price experience. It's really sad to me.
I'd love a modern version of the Psion Series 5. The Pyra (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/) looks like a decent candidate. All I need is a Linux distribution with an API or commandline 'sms' and 'call' tool.
The mainstream is basically focused on creating a slightly more interactive version of a portable television, which I find deeply saddening.
I'm not sure what's going on with the project. Two months later you still have to email the developer to get a beta build, even though it was supposedly open sourced.
Approaching it from the other direction, https://plus.google.com/111524780435806926688/posts/fkQ1BMjN... shows a nearly mainline kernel running on the 2013 Nexus 7, including hardware accelerated graphics. It should be a hop skip and 14 hour build step [1] to get Debian running on it.
[1] repo sync -j24 / make -j24 droidcore can be painful
Killing off Android and getting X11/Wayland on there with a regular DE would be amazing.
I can deal with WiFi only - a workaround would be to just carry around an android device or similar as a hotspot.
I've got one here but some emails sent to me in private have caused me to hold off on running anything custom on it (email for details, not sure if I can release publically).
I may have over-generalised. They're not manufactured any more, are they?
At the time I found that price, I was trying to filter out all the 2012 Nexus 7's (product marketers, please don't use the year to differentiate).
You say that like it's a bad thing. For the vast majority of people, they wish their computers behaved more like toasters, rather than finicky, customizable, yet extremely powerful pieces of computing machinery that they are.
I don't want the world to change so that these devices don't exist. I'm just sad that there aren't options. It feels like a huge waste of potential. Creation benefits us all.
In a world without something like the IBM-compatible PC we'd likely never have gotten to the point of creating smartphones because the tools simply wouldn't exist.
It's a bad thing because they are not behaving like general purpose computers anymore. Locking you in every corner you go.
Yeah. I just realized today (I don't own an iPad but used one from a colleague) that iPads can't even DOWNLOAD files from the browser. From a browser! The level of lock-in of such devices never ceases to amaze me.
Access via SSH from your PC, or use its native terminal app. Mine is even running Emacs (natively!), plus Android applications. I haven't even mentioned 'The Other Half' - which allows for hardware expansions such as e-ink displays, keyboards, sensors, etc.
With a bluetooth keyboard - the best options are currently a Jorno (https://jornostore.com/), but soon a TextBlade (https://waytools.com/) - this is a marvellous machine. Sure, I'm telling everyone about it - this is the smartphone I always wanted; it deserves to succeed!
Incidentally, I have both a Psion 5mx and Revo. This is the first device that truly feels like a successor.
[Aside: after a long delay, the TextBlade is finally being beta-tested by users, and should be shipping soon.]
I don't want a dock, or a touch-screen, I want multiple monitors, setup at the right height.
I don't want a textblade, or a bluetooth keyboard, as cool as they seem conceptually. Because fundamentally, a cool little portable keyboard is still, qualitatively, a shitty keyboard. I want actual full sized mechanical keyboards. Why would I ever use such a thing if i had an option?
I want a comfortable ergonomic chair, and a nice spacious desk. because I don't know about anyone else, but I swear I get headaches and muscle spams after I attempt to read much from my smartphone or laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I have a smartphone, and I have a little dell ultrabook for when I'm travelling. But I can't have my XX-buffers open in emacs on my phone, whether it be linux or not, and I would never try to turn my phone into a desktop computer, or pretend that it is comparable.
I don't have an ipad or tablet, i admit. I can't for the life of me figure out a use for them that doesn't take away features from an ultrabook while adding anything else.
I of course know why they (phones and tablets) selling so well. Because they aren't effectively consumed as computers. They are media consumption, entertainment and communication devices.
But if they ever manage to pry my desktop from my cold, dead hands, I think I might just have to weep and off myself. I don't think that's a world i want to live in. Thankfully, although its not "sexy", i think it'll be around for a while yet.
Although, try working at a corporate and asking for a powerful desktop to, you know, actually do work. This obsession with tablets/mobiles/laptops is already having a very harmful effect on my professional life, because its becoming standard to equip employees with substandard equipment, and the apple hipsters are...quite frankly...fully on board and driving that into professional spheres as well. The consultants turn up with their little mac notebooks, and its just "jesus christ..."...shakes head
/end rant
The Jorno looks like I'd be better off carrying a full size laptop. It's not about fitting in my pocket, it's about usability on the bus, train, standing up, etc.
The TextBlade is vaguely the same as far as I can tell?
I want something like the Pyra - a Blackberry keyboard - something I can hold and press with my thumbs. For a sit-down experience I have a laptop. The phone gets pulled out in other situations.
I don't want or need a touch screen at all. The BlackBerry was an excellent experience. I'm fully aware that I'm in a niche.
Sadly, no longer available...
I'm not sure where are you coming from with this?
With the stock roms the "Fisher Price" experience as you call it is perhaps somewhat true.
A lot of Android devices are very much rootable so once you get a modified recovery software flashed to the device.
Then you're pretty much set to do whatever you like.
It really is the sole point of light in a sea of darkness. Like, we can actually know the people making the hardware: this is something not achieved often in the open-source space.
My educated guess is that this won't win over the masses who love tablets and it will further alienate the PC core audience.
They went chasing television viewers with 16:9 glossy screens and all the productivity types held onto their old machines and wept for the future.
I don't want a paper thin Netflix viewer. I have a tablet and a huge tv for that. And I sure don't want to do work on a tablet PC.
I want to see some context on the code I am editing or view a PDF full page. Sure you can go side by side on a huge 16:9 screen but on a compact laptop my vision can't do it even at retina levels.
I get sick of squinting at everything through a mail slot.
Lets get back to productive screens and keyboards and sensible designs that aren't going to sacrifice battery life or functionality to be the thinnest and shiniest.
Dell and HP are going to be the last places to look for innovation. I suspect 90% of what they do these days amounts to slapping a badge on a generic Chinese machine.
Most of the innovation seems to be from Microsoft, Apple and Google. The future of PCs will likely come from Surface, Pixel and whatever Apple does next.
How ironic that you can get a huge iPhone and a huge iPad, but the 17" MBP is history.
I think there will always be a divide between "create" and "consume" uses of computers, of any display size. For me, the dividing line is that I need a keyboard to create stuff. As a secondary issue, I have to be able to position the display to avoid eyestrain and neck fatigue, limiting my ability to use a laptop for real work. That could just be a concession to old age. But my creative apps -- code editors, compilers, and Jupyter, require very little real computing power.
But tablet sales are flat too, aren't they?
Rather what they're looking for is to sell some reason for people to upgrade their 5 year old PC that still works fine. And all they can think of is "thinner" and crazy gimmicks.
At least for Apple, since 2012 that seems to be roughly the case. iPad sales are about on par with Mac sales, maybe a bit higher, but both iPad and Mac sales are dwarfed by iPhone sales [1].
[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-rev...
Yes, yet the hipster journalists are not claiming the "post-tablet era" yet. Maybe they will realize it in 10 years from now.
Have you seen the low-end laptop market? 1366x768 and terrible build quality everywhere.
Everyone else might love their tablets and phones, but you can pry my desktop from my cold, dead hands.
I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for fast single threaded compile times. Some basic testing on AWS showed benefits jumping from c4.xlarge all the way to 4xlarge (but not 8xlarge) and using appropriate -j parameters. I'm not sure you're IO bound at that point either because compiling into a RAM disk didn't seem to make much difference.
1. Graphics power
2. CPU power
3. RAM
4. Size (smaller)
5. Any/all of the above
(Storage wasn't included in that list as who hasn't already externalised all storage?)
I'm seriously considering not buying another laptop and instead purchasing an Intel NUC.
I've got to that point where owning a laptop has led me to have a NAS, a decent DAC and stereo, a big panel for viewing films... aside from web browsing it feels like the things I do on my laptop are not in the laptop's sweet spot (gaming, graphics, video editing, encoding, compiling, spinning up VMs and dockers, etc).
Then I look at my full-size keyboard, my external display that is better than the laptop display and I wonder why I have a laptop. A machine that is compromised in every way to make it portable when I barely take it anywhere (and always will have a work laptop I do work trips with, and a smartphone for recreation trips).
I'd rather a tiny, but powerful, silent PC.
I view my primary PC (the laptop presently) as disposable... because I've externalised storage, display, audio... I feel I just want a small powerful generalised computing machine. Nothing more.
PS: If anyone can recommend something not far from the NUC in size, but with higher CPU + RAM capabilities, and potentially that looks aesthetically pleasing then I'm all ears.
PPS: Not the Mac Mini, it's ugly, has a large footprint, tops out at 16GB (costs a lot to get there) and all of the ports seem very outdated. More towards a Mac Pro in CPU and RAM, but with a lower price tag and can run Linux (or whatever) without sulking. The NUC for me would be a cheap stop-gap until something like this emerges.
- it couldn't connect to my Fritzbox WLAN router (very mainstream here in Germany) unless I installed an old Intel driver from 2014, the last time this happened to me was 10 years ago when trying to install Linux on a laptop
- the touchpad is barely usable since it uses some crappy 3rd party driver (Synaptics), sometimes the touchpad simply stops recognizing gestures, and the Synaptics control panel has a "Reset" button which must be pressed in this case
- the keyboard tends to ignore the second keystroke if the same key is pressed quickly in succession
- HighDPI displays on Windows machines are useless since at least half of the tools (even Microsoft's own VC runtime installers) are upscaled and the upscaling quality is really terrible
- plus it had the usual amount of crapware preinstalled (including completely useless custom driver update and customer support tools)
My current Asus Zenbook is slightly better, but still has a crappy 3rd party touchpad driver.
With this situation, it is no wonder that people are moving away from laptops and Windows.
Part of it is that the smartphone can do everything they need from a computer. Browsing the internet, messaging and email, etc. But that answer alone isn't very satisfying, because even when doing nontechnical stuff on a smartphone, like browsing reddit or watching youtube, I find it very inconvenient compared to a desktop.
I think the real reason is, when she needed to use her computer for something, it took 15 minutes to start up. That's super inconvenient. People talk about how small 15 second delays can discourage behavior and cause frustration. 15 minutes is just ridiculous, and really discourages using the thing unless you really need to.
I installed a pure copy of windows 7 on an old computer recently. Nothing installed on it at all, no connection to the internet, nothing put on it by the manufacturer. And the specs weren't that good. Yet it took 30 seconds to boot up. I was amazed, I didn't think that was possible for a modern PC. Even my phone takes longer to boot up.
However, I find browsing reddit on my phone a more pleasant experience than on a desktop computer. Swipe gesture to collapse comment threads and the improved UI that some of the reddit apps have make it easier to consume comment threads than when I'm on a PC.
And I want an even bigger screen! I'd like one the size of my desk, with retina pixel density.
Writing the occasional email is clunky on a phone but the experience of using a phone still beats worrying about your backup, the location of your photo files, the OS license or Antivirus on the PC.
"People in general" simply don't write large documents, programs, create music etc. They email a friend, browse instagram and take photos. The smartphone form factor happens to be the perfect match for this usage pattern. So much so that if there was a fraction of the use cases they can't do on their phones - people much rather just skip doing those activities entirely and stay on the smartphone.