Designing the perfect laptop | Hacker News Reader

Designing the perfect laptop

infoworld.com

6 pointssnydeq15 comments

I mostly want less stuff in a laptop. A well-built 12" tablet, except:

   - entirely solid state: no fans, mechanical hard disks, optical drives, or other moving parts barring the LCD,
   - no touchpad, only trackpoint,
   - no camera,
   - no fingerprint reader,
   - no "trusted computing" hardware,
   - no Windows bundled,
   - a serious warranty on the LCD: no dead pixels, free replacements if vertical dead lines in X years,
   - good battery autonomy,
   - decent linux drivers for all hardware available.

Still waiting..

The "perfect laptop" described here sounds more like The Homer. It's like they asked 10-year-olds to design it.

Exactly. I could do much better -- "It would have negative weight, so it would actually float. It would have 128 dual-core CPUs and 42 GPUs. It would ship with a new operating system that would do all my work without me even asking."

This is equally unrealistic, but a much better fantasy.

And a cupholder on both sides.

Yup. A big part of good design is making tradeoffs, which isn't really addressed hear.

Thank you for introducing me to "The Homer". That's good stuff right there.

I had to make at least three conscious attempts to continue reading the article, each time my soul having been crushed by the fact that people thought having a three rotating folding screen with integrated smartphone, external wireless subdisplay and midi jacks and 500g flash drive was a good idea.

Light and with a DVI port. Why do most laptops (Apple is the only brand with DVI without a docking station, I think) only have VGA ports? DVI->VGA is trivial through a simple adaptor, if the graphics adaptor supports it (and it does), but the other way around is impossible.

Definately not what I would call a "perfect laptop".

"A detachable, integrated smartphone" Really?

fail.

i thought at one point the laptop would also make coffee, since they added in the design pretty much everything that came through their mind

What do you expect? Ask people for "perfect" and they'll give you "impossible." If you want something that's realistically perfect, chances are one of the leading laptops today nearly matches what you want.

I'd settle for a laptop that tells my coffeepot to make coffee.

/me smells a good idea for a network-enabled coffee maker, with web-based configuration of scheduled brewing, plus REST API for controlling the coffee maker via other applications....

grin

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Coffee.html

I guess all you need is an X10 controller or somethingorother. Too bad I couldn't get it to actually change the filter and stuff.

The perfect laptop is a 10" MacBook Air

For only $999

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