Ask HN: What has been your best purchase in the best year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What has been your best purchase in the best year?

Since I became stoic and don't need to buy anything. Good company, food, comfy flat and of course internet to learn new things.

In the time of covid, how did you find good company?

I'm finding our phones are our "main" computing device. Why don't we use it as such? Albeit too small to use as an input although via voice, it can be just as productive but display doesn't match the amount of data that needs to be visible to be productive (I being a dev, although same would go for any discipline I suspect it) I just started using this over a chromebook:

Portable Monitor w/ Keyboard

https://www.ebay.com/itm/313275076315?

Kool thing about this unit is 1. builtin battery to power it and phone

2. the screen is touch screen! so basically it's a 13" interface for your phone! make ur car a tesla! ;-)

3. can be used as an extended monitor to your chromebook/laptop.

You of course need a phone that has a USB 3.1 and desktop although there are apps that can mimic and give you that FULL desktop experiences such as Userland and Leena Launcher.

And finally some apps can't expand to full or resized windows.

nevertheless, $300, very very fun to have with you everywhere.

Why better than chromebook? ..honestly don't know. I suspect I could have worked on making it happen but doing it on/from your phone so far seems fun! and of course it's always connect to the web vs chromebook needs to be tethered.

AirPods Max.

Never had a "nice" set of headphones before and these really have been amazing. Wasn't really even particularly interested in headphones until Apple released these. Figured Apple's been right about other products I've loved in the past so I'd give them a try.

Makes remote work in a tiny noisy apartment a lot more bearable. Spatial Audio is incredible, too.

Kinda related, this is the first "bionic" tech that I'm interested in--basically embedded AirPods Max. I think it's interesting because it's not really out of reach. It's just a matter of putting current tech into bodies.

Do you listen to anything while working or just use it as noise cancelling?

Grateful Dead is my go-to recently. But really once I get in the zone, any music plus the noise-cancelling does wonders for letting me focus.

Is this the best year?

One that stands out for me is my Surface Pro Tablet. I really like having a full-pc OS in a really portable format, and I've been using it to draw.

I'm using it to substitute for an 18-inch laptop that I used to carry around, to fight fires if something came up on a road trip or something. I can even carry this thing motorcycling, which is what I was after.

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