Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems.

When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.

I think I can pinpoint when this happened - It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed.

~~~

Above that, PCs aren't necessary for a lot of people, because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines. For the median person, if you bought a PC in 2006, then got an iPad (as a gift or for yourself) and started using it a lot, you might find that you stopped turning on your PC. How could you justify the price of a new one then?

Yet if there was a major cultural shift to just tablets (which are great devices in their own right), I would be very worried. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.

I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?"

I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?

Tablets are knocking the sales off of low-end PCs, but we as a society need the cheap PC to remain viable, if we want to turn as many children as possible into creators, engineers, tinkerers, and hackers.

View on HN

We would be better off steering into the skid. History has plenty of examples of people who've tried to hang onto the old ways 'because that's how I learned it'.

The way forward isn't to try and keep cheap PCs viable for creativity's sake, but to ensure that creative desires are being met on the newer devices. Would I have learned memory management and dual booting if I'd had a tablet instead of a 386? Probably not. But now that same money buys a high end tablet and a pile of hours for an EC2 micro instance.

Would I still be me? No, I would be even better. All those weeks wasted fighting with modem racks for my BBS I'd gladly trade for weeks spent on a Nexus 10 and a linode.

I do not disagree, just wanted to mention that nowadays it is still possible to learn multi-booting with Android tablets and custom ROMs

I fear the ergonomics of mobile computers do more damage than desktops. Source: own experience

As a kid, my parents were really anti-videogames (except for a few educational ones), anti-TV (we had one, but it was in its own room and rarely used), and would only let me use the home computer for homework.

As a result, I spent all of my childhood and teenage years reading (mostly fantasy and sci-fi; several books a week, at my peak) and programming. I taught myself programming in 7th grade because I really wanted to play Sim City, but having no gaming computers/consoles, I couldn't. However, I did have a programmable calculator for my math class.

I spent all of middle school and high school programming my own games on this underpowered (a few mhz of CPU and a few kb of memory), inconvenient (typing thousands of lines of code on this tiny keyboard is a feat) device (and yes, I did make a turn-by-turn Sim City for the TI-82). While I was doing this, a lot of my friends were playing Warcraft 3, The Sims, and watching dumb TV shows (early to mid 2000s, reality TV was just becoming big in France).

Similarly, my girlfriend's parents were very anti-TV etc. As a result, she spent her childhood and teenage years drawing, and eventually she went to a top art school (RISD) and now makes a living from her illustration and teaching art.

I'm not sure who I would be if I had grown up with an iPad and a playstation, or who my girlfriend would be if her parents had let her watch TV; no one can tell. However, I think our situations worked out really well for us; and when I have kids/teenagers (not for another decade or so), I will most definitely give them a life analog to what I experienced rather than a media-consumption heavy one. For instance, I haven't had TV ever since I moved out of my parent's house (I do have a projector for watching movies from the computer), and intend to keep it that way.

I obviously have a fairly tech heavy life right now, as a tech worker in SF, but I am trying to cut down. I am noticing that I whip out my phone every time I have a spare 30 seconds, I have several laptops and iPads laying around the house, etc. - and I like it less and less. I'm slowly selling away my excess devices, and am thinking of getting rid of my iPhone when my contract runs out (and just get a dumbphone as a replacement for emergencies). I bought a really cheap netbook, installed archlinux+xmonad on it, and am using it as my primary machine at home for web browsing + programming + LaTeX. It's harder to get distracted with this machine.

In 2011, Tom Preston-Werner said the only hardware he had at home were a waffle maker, a microwave and a bike[0]- I like that mentality.

19 year old me would have pre-ordered a Google Glass from day one and used it with religious fervor; now, I am absolutely not interested in such a device, as I know it is just the ad billboard of the 21st century manufactured by Google.

I still have a few guilty digital pleasures; for example, I buy a lot of used video games that I wanted to play in my childhood and never could (mostly Game Boy Advance/Game Cube- the upside is that you can get 20 of those games used on Amazon for the price of 3 new current-gen games).

My hope is that over the next few months and years, I will revert to reading as much as I used to, and spend less time on Facebook/Twitter/etc. (HN is not completely in that bucket, as it leads me to write introspective comments like this, which I think is good). I think a big part of it is removing the devices that will call for your attention. My Game Boy Advance or MP3 player will never call for my attention- it just waits for me to use it. However, my iPad or iPhone will call for my attention every few minutes, which is not liberating at all. Tech should be liberating.

YMMV :)

[0]: http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com

I am thinking of getting rid of my iPhone when my contract runs out (and just get a dumbphone as a replacement for emergencies

Iphones are great for tourtists. Unneccesary otherwise.

Except when you are in another country, and roaming charges are outrageous.

This is why I love my Kindle Paperwhite so much. I could read on my Ipad, but it's so easy to jump into something else with that. The Kindle's limitations let me get on with reading without being tempted by other things.

Beautifully worded :)

I've got a 4th gen iPad, a laptop, an external monitor + kb + mouse and a Lumia 920 right now. I still wonder at times if I should cut back a bit, but most of these devices have their uses for me.

Quite interesting thank you for sharing. The idea that constraints can guide creativity. It reminds me of pg's essay on distractions.

I've got something of a different view. I was never limited TV or game consumption. My parents had the mindset of 'you'll have to learn to self moderation at some point, better to do it when the stakes are small'. They wanted me to learn to recognize when something I enjoyed was having a negative impact. They would guide me subtly by asking me to think about time spent in various areas and what that meant. Now as an adult I've not struggled with moderation in any area. Never got pulled into MMO style games, diet isn't a challenge etc... My biggest worry is that I work too much and don't make enough time for fun.

I remember finding it odd when I'd visit a friends house and they were only allowed a certain number of sodas per day, and had regimented rules about computer time. Later on as adults, these friends almost universally struggled with various addictions real and digital (I've seen lives ruined by MMOs). To me it appeared that they weren't able to manage their own desires without outside inputs. Obviously it was a different experience for you.

Ultimately, all humans are pretty different, and there is likely no one size fits all.

My younger brother always had a really hard time with the constraints my parent set - he would watch TV and play video games in secret, and even sneakily used their credit cards to pay for the MMO he played (he was in his early teens, and my parents didn't give us any allowance- they'd just give us some money if we wanted to go out with friends, or if we wanted a book they'd buy it for us. That worked for me, but not him). At some point my parents did try to not set any limits on his TV watching habits etc., thinking he would learn to self-moderate, as you described; for those few years, he basically spent his life in front of the TV and video games, doing literally nothing else. He's in his early 20s now, and still having a hard time with such matters.

What worked for you may or may not have worked for me, and definitely didn't work on my brother; what worked for me would have probably not worked for you, and definitely did not work for my brother.

Humans are interesting creatures, aren't they :)

I had one or two good friends whose parents were more like yours, and I loved going to their house because we would play video games until 4am and eat pizza and drink unlimited Coca Cola. Doing this once or twice a month was like heaven for me, and my parents were aware of it but were fine with it happening- I guess they thought "as long as it's not in my house and not too often, it's fine". However, one of those friends did not do immensely well later in college/life, to which my parents respond "I'm not surprised".

How I wish those questions had clear cut black/white answers :P

You sound like I imagine my son in 10 years ...

The reason I occasionally let him stay with friends for the junk food/games/TV binge with friends is so that he learns all types of experiences. I don't believe in banning anything, just regulating. How else can we understand our world if we don't experience it for ourselves?

If I were to host the junk food/TV/games binges, I'd have to buy the console and games and stock the junk food ... Things that I just don't want to do .. So it's easier to let someone else do it.

In return, I take others kids on bush walks, to BBQs, roller skating, etc - so their kids get to do something different too.

There may be some "it doesn't happen in my house" as you suggest, but it's not my primary or secondary motivator.

Oh man, if there's one thing I could change in my childhood, it'd be trading half of my gaming time with programming time. I was unfortunately growing up in the golden age of web programming and games and 'chose' the latter. Unfortunately, you can't do much with just 20 years of gaming experience. My parents mostly let me do whatever because I already had a skill then (basic tech support) which we thought would guarantee a self-supporting job after college...

Nope.

It's becoming increasingly important to get college right the first time through if only because of insane, rising costs. If it were cheap, I could probably find a class on self-moderation.

On the bright side, I find most of today's games boring, so it's rather easy to get productive.

Consider community or tech college. It's still not cheap, but it's way more affordable than a university or state college. They also tend to be more flexible and understanding since most of their students are part-time. Employers care most about your skills, and a year or two at a community college can give you more non-academic skills than any Computer Science bachelor degree.

Your observations are interesting. I'm in the early days of this process with my kids, but I do limit their tv and game time. I've found (like the grandparent poster) that an absence of TV and games leads to other pursuits: sports, reading, programming, writing books, etc. To give you an example: I just got the national school results. My son kicked ass in a school that underperformed. One of the key differences I've observed is ... TV and games. Other parents buy the books and encourage kids to do homework, but TV and games are too tempting for developing / young minds. The other thing I notice is that after a while, routine kicks in and study has become fun for my kids. The other obvious issue I notice is the mental fatigue that my kids have suffered when staying with friends for lengthy gaming sessions. We talked about his they felt, why they felt that way and side effects (short attention, lethargy, etc). But, they had no regrets and wanted to do it again. Reminds me of smokers... They know it's bad, but don't care. When my kids are old enough, they can be responsible for themselves. Until then, they'll have to live with my constraints, healthy minds and bodies. I'll just have to accept your possible scenario that it will all collapse into a screaming heap in their early adulthood. Let's say, I'm dubious about your claim, particularly as most levels of freedom and responsibility are gradual with most kids ... But I have seen stranger things.

Having thought more about this. I'm leaning more towards the pro-limitations side of the argument. Clearly games are more addictive now. I doubt many lives were ruined over pac-man and missile command. If young me had grown up around WoW perhaps I'd be different?

You mention the gaming binges at friend's houses. If you have the opportunity, ask the parents if those marathon sessions happen on a normal night. There are a few instances in my youth were I recall overindulgence, and most were at the urging of friends. Friends who were manic in their desire to get as much time in as possible before their parents returned. The idea of 'limits against overuse don't apply the second you leave my house' is precisely what got many of my friends in trouble later in life. Merely trying to assist with perspective. Please don't take this as a critique of your view (as I'm in agreement) or parenting ability (congrats on the high test scores).

>I'm dubious about your claim, particularly as most levels of freedom and responsibility are gradual with most kids ... But I have seen stranger things.

I'd like to point out that the scenario I describe wasn't a free for all. Falling short of expectations was met with discipline and restrictions as any child could expect. Simply that regulation of tv/game time was a personal choice provided that expectations were met.

The important part is the guidance. Finding the best way to show the kiddos how to recognize a bad habit. I'm thinking a good middle ground would be a discussion where the time limits are decided, but then applied universally. Something doesn't stop being a bad habit just because you're at a friends house.

I think you may be my doppelganger, but I started off on a TI-83+. ;)

There is some special about introducing yourself to programming on limited hardware like that. It's the sort of device that you can grow into, and which challenges you to get innovative when you start to reach its limitations. I don't believe that sort of environment is the only environment that somebody with a hacker mentality and approach can be created, but it does seem to be a good way to do it.

If you want to read more, trash the ipads and push Michelet Histoire de France (19 vols) from project Gutenberg to your kindle.

Same here by the way, no tv, my laptops are my wife second hand ones, never owned an Apple device.

I am unsure if you can attribute your abilities to your anti-TV upbringing. I grew up with parents who had a relaxed attitude about video games and TV, and thus consumed a lot of both.

But I also spent so much of my time drawing, painting, and programming because I love creating things. I am unsure if TV had any negative effects. The ownership and pleasure you get from your own creations is unlike anything that TV or games can provide, and it is utterly addictive.

Why did your parents, who only let you use the regular computer for homework, let you use your calculator for programming? Is it possible that your identity-building time spent creating SimCity for the TI-82 was not something deliberately enabled by your parents' somewhat closed-minded attitude toward technology, and was, instead, a "waste of time" that they simply failed to realize was happening?

Because they had no clue that a calculator could be used for other things than calculating :)

"However, my iPad or iPhone will call for my attention every few minutes, which is not liberating at all."

This feeling has been creeping on me ever since I succumbed to a smartphone for work a few years ago.

Instead of releasing me from some of the lower-level tasks I deal with day to day, this phone, these devices, nag me to pay attention to all of my friends back home, all of my old classmates, former colleagues, and all of the things they're producing / forwarding / commenting on.

I moved out of the US this summer and it took me a while to get a SIM here. I had roaming data on my work phone but couldn't use it much for the obvious cost.

It's been liberating to just live inside my head and in my immediate environment these past months. When I finally got a local number, I put the SIM in a 20EUR Samsung flip phone. I find few issues with eventually just living with that phone.

You can turn all that nagging off, so the only notifications you'll get, will be calls and texts. I really think some people blame the smartphone for being a distracting element, and it's not wrong that it can be distracting, but it's because the user allow it to. You can turn off all notifications, so you decide when to see if there is something of interest. For instance, my phone does not tell me when a mail arrives - the little badge will show how many new mails if I choose to flip to the screen with the mail app. Facebook never notifies, not even with a badge - I decide when I want to see Facebook (which rarely is on the phone, that app is horribly slow). The same goes for most of my apps. Only when people try to contact me directly by call or text will it go off, and if I'm particularly busy I will set it to "do not disturb" and rarely be bothered by it.

"You can turn all that nagging off, so the only notifications you'll get, will be calls and texts."

Very true.

I think what I've feeling, and trying to describe, is a rejection of expanding my consciousness into the Internet. A large portion of my social groups use those social networks as extensions of themselves, for communication and interaction.

With immediate access to those channels it's difficult to ignore the draw of that technology. And not using those services regularly ends up being the same as not using them at all.

I know it all too well. At some point I felt so annoyed by the smartphones intrusion in my life, that I began to ignore the notifications. It was great for a while, but I still felt a slight nagging. So I did the logical thing, and turned it off entirely. Haven't missed anything of significance, and I'm still in touch with the people that I want to be in touch with over the social networks.

Long form writing seems close to impossible on a tablet. A long hacker news comment is possible, but once you are looking at even a modest book report, I can't see it.

Maybe with some sort of accessory keyboard, but then you are looking at more of an ad hoc laptop than a pure tablet.

You'd expect long-form writing to be unthinkable on today's mobiles, but plenty of people wrote whole novels on Palm PDAs with only the on-screen keyboard/Graffiti. I also performed extensive text entry on Palm PDAs for my middle/high school notes and assignments, and didn't consider it a bad experience. And these examples, and the above commenter with his Sim City clone for the TI-82, demonstrate, when you make up your mind that you're going to do something on a limited device, it's often surprisingly possible.

I'm not sure if you mean that the comfort of working on a tablet connected to remote virtual servers is higher than that of a single local laptop or desktop.

But if that is your final point, I very much disagree. Besides the fact that a computer keyboard and mouse are often vastly superior to the cramped peripherals you typically see connected to a tablet, large screens and user interfaces designed for large screens often have a huge ergonomic and productivity advantage over the tiny, touch centric interfaces for tablets.

Note: the previous paragraph only applies to the current state of apps for creative and engineering activities. It could be that five years from now, tablets and their software for creating content have evolved to a point where they rival or surpass desktop software. Or they might not. Either way, my point is that we're not there now, and creating software etc on tablets is a sub optimal experience today.

I'm starting to see a trend of tablets-as-laptops where people have a case that integrates a keyboard and they type their papers or whatever else on their iPads or other types of tablets.

Having a 1.5 or 2 pound laptop, with a 12 hour battery life that you can detach the keyboard from for $300 is a much better form factor than the current typical laptop. Many of these tablets also come with wacom pen digitizers or touch, allowing a creative input that is missing in many laptop form factors.

Also you can still create web-apps and other such things with things like node.js and so on android tablets today. Javascript really is the BASIC of this generation.

I won't be surprised to see full IDEs that could be viable in creating general purpose apps in near future. I really think Android & iOS will eventually become the next 'desktop' OS with a full suite of apps as powerful as the current desktop set of applications. Concerns about tablets as consumption only devices will go away probably within the next decade as the world transitions to these 'mobile' OSes.

I am following you, but cannot make myself comfortable with non-elastic screen size. I like my tablet to be 8", while anything less than 12 is not good for a laptop (I tried with UMPCs and Netbooks). However, I certainly can imagine myself plugging 8" inch tablet into 27" monitor and keyboard/mouse combo for comfortable work at office.

Android-based IDEs already exist. I should know. I was looking for one the moment I bought my ASUS Transformer a couple years ago. I found the only thing I couldn't do with the device was write and compile programs. I would bring it to hacking sessions, but I couldn't test code on it. At the time, the only option was a text editor that could style and check code syntax.

The main downsides of these devices for programming is screen real estate, CPU speed, and support from major IDE/compiler vendors.

Example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui

>because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines

Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something like 70% youtube/facebook and 30% using some word processor.

My point is that the consumer's decision to buy or abandon a product isn't solely driven by how good the product is, the value of the new item as a "status icon" also has to be taken into account. All you need to get the customer to justify that $2000 price tag is a culture of rabid consumerism and the garauntee that they will be cooler than their friends if they buy this extremely expensive laptop that does all sorts of things they will never ever use.

In your example involving the 2006 PC and the new iPad, I would argue that a huge contributor to the consumer's abandoning of the PC is because it's nowhere near the potency of a status icon as an iPad is.

People who believe in being able to buy social status are the ones perfectly fooled by advertisements! Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments. What makes one an attractor of popularity is demonstrating power, will and the ability to achieve what you want.

Who would be more popular?

A) A rich guy who thinks he can buy friends, by inviting everybody to an expensive cocktail to an exclusive restaurant?

B) A guy who own lots of expensive high-tech and luxury car + his own house?

C) A guy with charme and charisma, who can make anyone feel special, or have a fun time, even in the dirtiest place?

Choose yourself. I believe you all experienced A,B and C already. But I would rely on the scientific evidence that C) has a higher long term chance of staying an attractor of popularity. (I'm sorry, I couldn't put the references together, but hope you understand)

Side story: A weird guy in my old class possessed a bluetooth wireless headphones with integrated mp3 player in 2006, a 3000EUR laptop and all sorts of other very expensive gimmickry. That didn't make him cooler at all. People still didn't like him and it just made him more vulnerable to attacks of the some of the more primitive pupils.

He said that a product being a status icon justifies a high price, not that a high price makes something a status icon.

edit: parent comment has completely changed since I replied

If you can't achieve C, you sure can use your money to achieve A or B.

Also if you're lucky enough to be able to carry off C, you're more likely to have options A and B at your disposal.

> People who believe in being able to buy social status

Trust me, you can buy social status. If you pay enough, you have the status.

> Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments.

Most social environments he exposes himself to, yes. Most social environments, no.

Yea, guys can buy people out of their league, but their wives are usually misserable, and cheat. Women have a hard time doing the same. Actually, the whole success thing works in reverse for women. They become less attractive with money, unless they earned that money with their mind. Even then the men these women want still don't want want them. I was trying to soften the blows I will get for this thread.

In Marin, I see so many attractive women who settled for some fugly dude just because he has money. Maybe, that's what keeps guy's striving for the next Facebook?

I could go on and on about this subject, but I'll get clobbered.

I'd say laptops have been improving quite a bit in non-computational ways. Weight, battery life, and screen quality particularly.

A MBP can be brought around to show how cool you are, a Dell Workstation not so much. Maybe if somene builds a handle for the Mac Pro borg cylinder. ;)

When you start collage, you normally get a new computer. But otherwise I agree with your premise. A high powered desktop PC is no longer a status symbol for anyone compared with laptops, tablets, or phones.

Because MacBook Pros have HDMI output, more pixels, larger hard-drives, and run Starcraft.

Because people like new things.

My grandma taught me the saying "More money than sense." . It's proven incredibly wise

The MBP is one of the most functional devices available. The wanky, hipster appeal is way overplayed. Plenty of people use them inspite of their image.

Phones satisfy the mobile convergence thing between organisers, phones, cameras and handheld games. Tablets satisfy the "computer as a bicycle" vision of Jobs and bring portable computing to the masses. But neither are really full featured enough for a developer or a college student.

When it comes to a full featured, keyboard equipped, programmable device there is bugger all that is light, powerful, has a long battery life and ships with a decent environment (posix, term, ssh) out of the box. Dell's XPS 13 DE delivers a bit of the picture but it doesn't have the quality bundled iWork apps that would appeal to a student and has worse battery life. They are getting there though.

The rest of the laptop market is hindered by shipping with Windows only and the difficulty of getting pre and post-sales driver support for the developers and students who require an environment like Linux. The industry has really fucked themselves trying to keep to the model of the glory days.

Hopefully Steam will help set things straight by creating a large mainstream market that more niche users like developers, students and scientists can benefit from.

Manufacturers are going to have to stop the race to the bottom and start building less models, higher quality and in bigger volume if they are to compete with Apple in price, quality and profitability. And they are going to have to explore well integrated Chrome OS and Linux packages and work on developing drivers with better performance and power efficiency.

> The rest of the laptop market is hindered by shipping with Windows only and the difficulty of getting pre and post-sales driver support for the developers and students who require an environment like Linux. The industry has really fucked themselves trying to keep to the model of the glory days.

Quite good for those of us that work across multiple OSs.

Just install GNU/Linux on VMWare with CPU virtualization enabled and get two OS in a laptop with the minimum of fuss.

Just install GNU/Linux on VMWare with CPU virtualization enabled and get two OS in a laptop with the minimum of fuss.

And far less battery life.

I often run Ubuntu or Windows on my MBA with VMWare to compile some software. It's one of the best methods to soak your battery empty quickly.

Well, I do have a laptop with Windows 7 and a netbook from Asus that was sold with a Linux distribution.

I use GNU/Linux since 1995 and on a laptop still looks like 1995 to me, in terms of graphics card, battery, hibernation and wireless support.

My Asus, which was sold with a supported Linux hardware, does not hibernate.

In terms of battery life I am yet to find a laptop where GNU/Linux lasts longer than Windows.

> The MBP is one of the most functional devices available. The wanky, hipster appeal is way overplayed. Plenty of people use them inspite of their image.

They are fine machines, but if you don't care about subjective things, like how a laptop looks, how much it weighs (an extra pound or 2 never really genuinely matters to a use case), and you only care about getting exactly what you need (not want) for the lowest price, then there is no way you would ever buy a MBP. They are a product that we convince ourselves that we need or deserve because we lust after it, even when a cheaper alternative would do just fine.

I have bought macs for a while, but if I have to be really honest with myself there was always a cheaper alternative that was 'good enough', it's just that I subjectively want apple's products because they are 'nicer'.

While many people but them for the technical side as pointed out in other replies, there is no denying that other buy them as a status symbol, in the same way they will buy a BMW for a car.

When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.

That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.

I also enjoy quite old laptop (HP2530p, 2009, 12", Core2 Duo 1.9GHz, sturdy, lightweight). I upgraded to 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. Plenty enough for the next couple of years, me thinks :) Perfectly runs W8.1/LinuxMint/Android-x86ICS

Completely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion at hand, but if you are going run Android as a Netbook OS on stock PC hardware with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, I've found that everything from Jellybean and up is incredibly much better to work with than Android 4.0.

They've done some deep level fixes which just makes everything flow and stick together as one "netbook" user-experience in a much better way.

My experience is mostly from Asus Tarnsformer type devices and not regular X86 laptop hardware, but I suspect the same improvements should be valid in X86 country. You certainly have nothing to lose by trying it [1].

My 2 cents.

[1] http://www.android-x86.org/releases/build-20130725

Agree, and to wander further afield: how's your luck running apps? The Google apps work great, I use Opera and some hack to get Flash games to work, but the vast majority of apps just fail to load.
In spite of the problems, it's amazingly fast and usable, esp. compared to Windows/Ubuntu.

running the stable android-x86 on a Samsung NB505

I have the same laptop running debian. Even runs small VMs ok and has survived multiple liquid accidents and dropping

I've upgraded it with a T61 motherboard, 8gb RAM, a tweaked BIOS and an SSD. It runs not-so-small VMs now. I try not to drop it or spill things in it, but the spill-resistant keyboard is good peace of mind.

Better than newer T series? I've been looking into Lenovos because the keyboard is the main differentiator I care about on a laptop.

I've typed on a T530. It was pretty good, but the removal of several keys I actually use and the relocation of others bothers me. I don't think the feel is quite as good on the T530 as on the T60, but it's still one of the best laptop keyboards.

Yes! I have an X1C and they have messed the home, del, pgup, pgdn island, and placed print screen between the right alt and ctrl. I'm tripping over the keys all the time.

How hard can it be to design keyboards with all keys in the correct place? Thinkpads used to be the only ones which got this design issue right.

I think Lenovo wanted increasingly large trackpads with increasingly short screens. They've mentioned in their design blog that some of the changes are driven by "consumerization".

The problem with that is Thinkpads were never meant for mainstream consumers, Lenovo isn't going to out-Apple Apple, and if it wanted to try, it would do better using a model line that doesn't have a business-oriented reputation going back decades.

That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.

While a very fine machine in it's day, the screen, battery life, processing power, disk speed, size, and lack of heat on a modern machine like the 13" Retina MacBook Pro are on another level. You're talking about 7 years of evolution.

Well, I have T61 guts and an SSD in mine. It isn't so far behind as you might expect.

I've used a 15" Retina Macbook Pro. The screen is not better. Sure, it's higher density and brighter, but the viewing angles are not better. Subjectively, I'd say the color reproduction is worse (I used them next to each other). Reflections, glare and fingerprints are significantly worse on the MBP.

Yea, I have a ten year old Toshiba P26-S2607 I still use on a daily basis.

I have a one year old MBP that I haven't used much; I'm not sure why, but the screens seem the same?

I do know one thing about most old laptops; they were made to last longer than 2 years.

That said--HP--as made crappy laptops for quite some time. I bought one a few years ago and it was horrid on an engineering basis, but it looked Slick.

I had an HP laptop that I bought around 2009. It lasted a year before the insane heat issues started; I agree with you completely regarding the engineering issues. In the end, I ended up buying a Lenovo about two years ago, and it's been perfect for me.

Getting back to the original story, I don't think I've bought a desktop since 2003. I prefer using them, but laptops are just so convenient.

Are you sure it was simple heat issues and not a defective Nvidia GPU? A bunch of them in that time period were prone to premature failure. Many HPs used them, as did a few Thinkpads.

I'm hoping and waiting for some third party like infocomp to supply proper aftermarket thinkpad keypads for the new lenovo machines, with the buttons restored to proper order. Otherwise I will not be "upgrading", ever.

Don't get me started on the single audio socket for both recording and playback.

This is a common generational worry, right? We learned X a certain way, that pedagogy was necessarily linked to the technology at the time, we worry in retrospect that that specific technology was a necessary condition for ever learning X.

I'm only 28, and I do it, too-- e.g., how will kids expand their imagination and learn about the world without only having paper books to immerse themselves in for hours at a time? How will anyone learn the basics of programming without finding QuickBASIC on an old Packard-Bell 386, playing around with Gorillas or Snakes, or entering their own code from books in the library?

I think there will be a sufficient number of hacker types around for the cynical and simple reason that corporations need to inspire kids to learn how to code so that they can hire folks in two decades. This ought to inspire a token amount of educational support and tool building so that entry-level development will always be accessible to kids.

These days, everyone has access to an excellent cross platform learning platform for programming: the browser. So yeah, I think if anything programming is more accessible then ever.

Not that I disagree with what you've said, but browsers aren't a platform for learning to program on a tablet.

The worry isn't unfounded though and in the case of programming it has actually been measured, the decline in quality of CS students is what inspired the Raspberry Pi project:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines

I dunno, Facebook and GMail seem to get slower each month. They're unusably slow, even in Chrome on Windows, on both my and my wife's circa-2008 machines.

HTML5 combined with crazy CSS can make a C2D crawl these days. It's not just Flash anymore that's sucking CPU power down.

I still use Facebook on old iPad 2. And it goes faster as the same day I've bought it.

That's generally the solution to the problem of accessing the Web on old PCs: request the mobile version of the website. Heck, with enough trickery you can even get Opera Mini to run.

I would pay for a silent PC. I paid a lot for a quiet Apple PowerPC Mac pro back in the day and built a quiet PC but they are not silent and I have moved to a quieter place and I can hear them (yes the Mac runs Fedora now). I have some silent ARM machines but they don't quite cut it yet though maybe the new quad core one will.

There are passive coolers for i7s out there. You can even find passively cooled GPUs and PSUs. It's pretty cheap to build a silent pc.

Those passive coolers generally still rely on some airflow. With no case fans at all, I'm told they won't be able to hold up under any decent load.

It's tricky getting a passive GPU to actually work, mine has a tendency to overheat and halt the system rather than throttle down under load. It required a fair bit of tweaking to case fans and driver underclock settings to get it stable.

https://store.tinygreenpc.com/tiny-green-pcs/intense-pc.html Very silent fanless pc. I have one and I am glad.

Mac mini has fans but is basically silent.

things with fans are not silent enough - the mac pro seemed ok but now it seems too noisy

I guess that's what I get for living in the city...

my silent PC solution from 2008. Still the best value for money if architecture of your house supports it :) http://solnyshok.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-silent-pc-solution....

I have seen full size ATX cases from Silverstone with passive cooling, where the entire case is machine out of aluminum and acts like an enormous heat sync. Have yet to find a good fanless power supply. The new Mac Pro supposed to be only 12DB. It's hard to beat that, most rooms have ambient noise of at least 18db.

> The new Mac Pro supposed to be only 12DB.

Until the dust hits it...

Solution: clean it once in a while :)

>Solution: clean it once in a while :)

Teach me oh great one. Honestly I've never managed to clean a fan. You can brush off the obvious dust but the noise comes from dust getting into the fan itself.

Spray it with compressed air inside and out. You can get into the slit between the fan housing and the motor and blow it out there as well. Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust. I have a small home server with 4 fans. After almost 10 years now 3 out of the 4 fans are as quite as they were on day one, the 4th has developed a bearing issue and needs to be swapped out eventually. I am assuming that Apple will use hire quality fans then the $3 crap fans I am using.

>Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust.

That exactly is the issue. They don't just mysteriously develop bearing failure / wobble...they do so because dust gets into the bearings. And that exactly is my point...no amount of compressed air can fix dust in the ball bearing grease. I just end up replacing all the fans after a few years...

Seasonic seems to have a pretty good fanless power supply.

There's some complete 'mini' systems that achieve this, presumably by pushing the the transformer out of the computer and into a wall-wart or similar: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/533MHz_... http://www.amazon.com/Intel-D2500-Fanless-Mini-ITX-D2500CCE/...

Buying these as stand-alone components seems to be more of a challenge.

Silent PC Review ( http://www.silentpcreview.com ) occasionally reviews complete systems. Last year they measured an i7 machine from Puget Systems at 11dB in their anechoic room ( http://www.silentpcreview.com/Puget_Serenity_Pro ) which is the best I've seen for an off-the-shelf PC.

I haven't used a Puget machine myself, but I've relied on Silent PC Review's component recommendations for nearly a decade, and never been disappointed.

I have one, from http://www.quietpc.com/

It's completely silent, you can only tell that it's on by looking at LEDs.

My MacBook Air (2012) is completely silent most of time (except viewing videos in Flash or Silverlight). Given is silent, I can actually hear the power supply of my monitor buzzing! (actually it's very quiet buzzing) - be careful what you wish for I guess.

but the video is so loud!

Yeah I know it's awful, if my Celeron 450Mhz could play DVDs at no effort, I don't know why this can't play videos on 5-10% CPU and not spin up the fan.

The older Mac laptops had (SMCUtil?) a utility to change the threshold for the fan - I know lots of Wintel systems have this in BIOS/EFI.

Most video encoding is mp4-type now (rather than the mp2-type used by dvds). Mp4 is typically a lot more processor intensive.

Any even vaguely modern laptop offloads mpeg 4 part 10 decoding onto a decoder chip or the GPU.

In the Netherlands there is https://ikbenstilcomputers.nl selling high-end fanless computers.

If an i3 is fast enough for you, and you don't need high end graphics, you might want to consider an Intel "Next unit of computing" system... You'll need to get laptop components for it though. I've considered it, but not that into quiet, and want a bit more power.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102...

Intel NUCs [1] are well engineered and extremely quiet.

[1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-d54250wyk...

I believe there will be a major cultural shift to tablets/phones/handheld.

The social implications worry me -- mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_, you can't actually install whatever software you want on it.

I don't know if the actual experience of using Android, for non-techies, might end up seeming similar?

The social implications of this worry me. We spend increasing amounts of time on our computers, and have decreasing power and freedom over what software they run how.

I think your concern about it being harder to create on tablets, and the social implications therein -- is also legit, but it worries me less than the loss of control over our devices. People will find a way to create, although the nature of what they create will be affected by the affordances of the device, for sure. (there will be a lot more 140 char poetry, heheh)

Not disagreeing with your overall concern about locked down platforms...

mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_

With a 80% market-share[1] I think it's safe to safe Android is by far the most popular handheld platform, with iOS being for the niche market.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-sha...

Most game makers are targeting consoles, which just went through a longer than usual shelf life. With the new ones coming online, we will see more PC upgrades from gamers.

Also resolution stopped at 1080p for a decade. Now that 4k is happening, there is an easy path to performance for gpu manufacturers.

Resolution dropped

High-end for 4:3 was 2048x1536 (3 megapixels)

High-end for 16:10 was 1920x1200 (2.2 megapixels)

High-end for 16:9 was until very recently 1920x1080 (2 megapixels)

Just to clarify, high end for last two ratios are 2560x1600 and 2560x1440. Both were available at least two years ago when I built my current machine, although after some quick research the 16:9 format had some available as early as 2007.

My laptop bias is showing. Those were the highest resolutions available on laptops. They were also the highest commonly-available resolutions for desktop screens, though none of those was the highest that existed.

It's really _only_ code that is harder to create on tablets though, and it strikes me as extremely narrow-minded to write off the music, art, text, huge Minecraft sculptures, photos and videos of singing, dancing, playing, that have been gleefully created by people young and old on these devices.

It's the exact sort of snobbery that has almost completely killed art, dance, drama and music in many schools, as if the only valuable acts of creation left to humanity are engineering and science (which, incidentally, are both wonderfully served by the innumerable education apps on these locked-down, post-apocalyptic devices).

Code is harder because editing text is harder. Text input and manipulation is just not very good on tablets. Even if you plug a keyboard into iOS editing is still worse than WordPerfect circa 1988.

You might type stuff in OK, but manipulating text is awful.

Yeah, I have no idea how Shakespeare got anything done.

Sure. 884,421 words[1]. And with that workload, I bet he used the most efficient technology available at the time to do it.

[1] http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/

I agree, I brought a high-end Dell 2.5 years ago and it was starting to feel like upgrade time (sluggish performance etc) a few months ago. I then stuck in a 240gb SSD and its faster than it ever was, even when I first got it.

I agree with the general consensus here regarding how computers in general have been aging better now. Especially with different computing devices available today, it's hard for the average person to justify buying a new computer within 3-4 years of theirs.

At the same time, I think even the "average" person would want more than a 128gb ssd, and therefore today's entry-level harddrives equipped with these small ssd's won't age that well. I know, I know, ssd's come in larger sizes --- but they become significantly more expensive, and most entry-level notebooks (with ssd's) come with 128gb. As a comparison, it's almost weird that years ago you could get a 500gb harddrive without giving it a second financial thought. As such, I think that if there is anything that a normal person might want, it's more harddrive space as they fill up their small-ish SSDs --- so that they don't need to worry about deleting things when they have too many pictures, games, etc. The average person won't want chrome to take half the number of milliseconds to open a new tab, or their games to go from 40 fps to 60fps. But, to me it seems easy to fill up these smaller harddrives, and many people might be looking for a new computer to deal with that.

Before someone mentions it: YES, cloud solutions and external solutions exist. But is it part of mainstream usage to store your stuff on an external hdd? Also, wouldn't people anyway want a future computer where they didn't need to do that? I'm not claiming they have terabytes of data, but I think over the course of 3-4 years, people could pretty easily accumulate > 256gb of data. Otherwise, is there a free and easy cloud solution that gives > 50gb of space that people use a lot today? (Not to my knowledge)

everyone I know has a 64-128GB SSD and a 1TB internal HDD, and a 1TB external HDD for backups.

Flickr gives you a terabyte free.

surely no one wants to rely on a third party service that is only available online and at the service's whim for their photos.

Quick solution: USB3 (or e-sata or thunderbolt) external hard drive. Alternatively, NAS (that you can cloud-ify).

I've never needed a hugh hard drive. External HD's work fine for me.

Same here. I feel like we've reached the end of the relevancy of Moore's Law. My PC at home is from early 2008, and it's still an excellent machine. It played all my games wonderfully, even new ones, even 3D ones. I can't imagine a game looking better than The Witcher 2.

Actually, this isn't entirely true; a few months ago, my WinXP install started to play up, to I bought an SSD and installed Win7 on it. Now it runs better than ever. A recent OS helps a lot, as does a SSD.

I can see one reason why I might still want to upgrade, though: The Witcher 3. I doubt it's going to run well on my by then 6 year old machine. But maybe a new graphics card is all I'll need. Or maybe it'll even just work.

My Macbook Pro is a lot more recent, but it also feels like it might last forever. It can handle everything I throw at it. Why would I ever need something more powerful than this?

If I want anything new from my computers now, it's stuff like smaller size, less noise, less power use, etc. They're powerful enough.

For high performance gaming, I wonder if console gaming has something to do with it. With publishers now focusing on consoles instead of PCs, graphics may be held back to a degree due to that.

But another thing to consider is that the console release cycle has also slowed down, because there's less of a need to upgrade there as well. So you see the lack of desire to upgrade trend emerging for consoles as well as PCs.

I do think that nearly everyone who wants a PC has one at this point. That plus no desire to upgrade means slower sales. If people were actually ditching their PCs entirely, that would be a different story.

I use my 2009 iMac for local heavy lifting and watching TV. (Heavier lifting I use the cloud.) I will upgrade my desktop once the LCD goes retina.

I will continue to upgrade my laptop frequently. Lighter, smaller, faster, longer lived, more durable. Every new laptop has increased my productivity, flexibility.

I just bought a 2013 MBA 13". Most amazing machine I've ever had. Now that I'm accustomed to 13" (vs 15"), I will likely buy a 2013 MBP 13" retina. I'm certain that I'll be very happy.

I agree. Much of this is just because the processing is moving off of the machine too. When you were doing all of your own computations, any incremental thing you did required a stronger PC. Now that computation is happening on the server.

There are programmers, mathematical and financial users who are still stretching their desktops, but for most of the rest of us the need to upgrade is going away. It's almost like it's time to upgrade when there's just too much clutter on the old machine.

I agree with the point about keyboard and screen.

I wanted a gaming laptop, but once I got into that category, I'll be honest--the deciding factor for me was keyboard layout. I'm a developer so it's really important to me to have special keys in the right place, and to have them easily distinguishable by touch.

Nothing is worse than arrow keys with no gap separating them, or an F5 that blends in, or page up/down in some unusable position.

Got some Asus model, and it's great.

> because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines

I agree with your post but just wanted to point out a Facebook/Email PC does not cost 2000 dollars anymore (and has never cost that much for a long time) :) You can get around with a 300 dollars laptop just fine of that kind of usage.

you can use a wireless/usb mouse and keyboard with a laptop or [windows] tablet and its pretty close to a PC... you can also use an external monitor on many of them. PCs need to become the size of a raspberry pi, that's all.

You're just not playing the latest games or doing any intensive computations, or just don't care that you could finish your task 3 times faster than on your 2008 CPU.

What's your framerate in Battlefield 3 on a 64 player map at 1920x1080, high settings? Or Crysis 3?

You just picked the most expensive calculation you could, more or less, and asked how a general-purpose PC handles it.

A brand new general-purpose PC handles that situation equally well--unplayable.

No, the most expensive would be a 3-monitor setup at 2560x1440 on ultra settings.

That's the thing...most games are still not multi-threaded well, and single threaded performance hasn't gone up more than maybe 20-30%, they just tacked on more cores.

That's actually not true. Modern high end CPUs are multiple times faster than the CPUs from 2008. The architecture changed too, not just the frequency.

I have an i7 920, purchased in December 2008. Please point out which consumer processors (No $3000 xeons) have "multiple times" greater single threaded performance.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

You can have double speed.

i7-4770

Reply on news.ycombinator.com