Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

Maybe my brain is too zoomer, but the iPods (even the touch ones) were perfect if it wasn't for the apple kikery (thank God for jailbreaking). Just looking at the device, it was an offline device, just for music, could have a few movies and had some comfy games (w/ no micro transactions...). A device that just held your favorite shit locally, just doesn't exists today. Everything just has to be a phone that runs 5G 24/7 so the battery can die quicker and force updates so it bricks itself by design. I hate the anti Christ like you wouldn't even believe it.

One device for calls/message's and one for media, damn it was comfy...
Get an old mp3 player and do it now. I do it at work because there's no way a phone will have the battery for 12 hours of playback while the iPod most definitely does.
The 2024 Lincoln Nautilus has a full-length screen, with a touchscreen, and has a new infotainment system called Digital Experience, which again proves that car companies are going way too hard on tech trends with their car models:

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At this rate, you'd have to root for the basement-tier car companies, i.e. Nissan and Mitsubishi, if you want a car that isn't overbloated with tech. And those two companies carry their own sets of issues with their cars. *cough* CVT *cough*
Tactile displays for the radio were definitely underrated but this shit has to be cheaper to design at the factories.
 
4GB of memory? I just couldn't. I remember having 8GB in 2010 and it was good on XP 64-bit, okay on OS X 10.5, so-so for whatever Linux I was playing with, and barely enough for Win 7. I can't imagine doing anything in 4GB these days.
It's not too bad because it has an NVMe and DDR4 ram. It came with a 128gig no name drive, but I swapped it for a Kingston 1TB drive that was also on sale for Black Friday. It came with Windows 11S, but I have Manjaro with Mate on it. I've got Firefox and the Tor browser running on it right now and it's sitting at 75% of memory used. However, with that fast drive and ram, stuff loads into memory very quickly. I also made a six gig swap partition, so when I do go over, it chugs a little, but again, the drive is so fast, I wouldn't call it noticeable if you're doing stuff like browsing. It's pretty good for stuff like shitposting, writing documents, playing games like FTL or Stardew Valley etc, but not much else. I have several laptops with better specs because I tend to hoard hardware, but I find myself using this a lot because the battery lasts like 12 fucking hours. I took it on as a bit of a challenge to se if I could make a $150 Black Friday Windows S machine usable and it went pretty well. Biggest downside honestly is the screen resolution. It has one of those god damn 1024x768 dislays.
 
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In linux, you can use zram, it's basically using your system's ram as swap, but compressed. Since a lot of memory contents are very compressible and even low-end ram/cpus are relatively fast nowadays it's a good way to add some memory to such systems without increasing latency much. Then as a second layer you can add swapspace on a fast drive if the zram/zswap runs out. With a lightweight setup, even 4 GB are pretty usable, even for browsing and stuff. If you like opening tons of tabs in your browser, there's addons for both chrome and firefox that automatically unload tabs you've not looked at for a defined time and only keep a maximum number of tabs loaded. This reduces both CPU and RAM requirements of your browser by a lot because the web is shit. (I'd recommend these addons even with tons of RAM because what some websites do is beyond the pale)
 
Non-upgradable laptops are total bullshit.

I remember a time where you could freely upgrade memory, storage, processor and wifi card on almost any laptop. Not to mention all the things you could stick in the expansion slots (PC Card, Cardbus, ExpressCard) and hot-swappable drive bays.

Now you're lucky to be able to replace your one and only SSD. Fuck you if you need more than 16GB of memory. Fuck you if you wanted to cheaply upgrade your CPU after a few years to squeeze more time out of your laptop. Fuck you if you want a current gen wifi card for your 5 year old machine. Fuck you if you want a new battery, or an external battery. Fuck you if you wanted a good keyboard, a centered keyboard without a numpad, or a non-Lenovo brand with a TrackPoint. Fuck you if you were one of those people who actually liked ThinkPad-style convertable tablet PCs. Fuck you if you wanted a laptop that is properly supported by Linux without using the Ubuntu OEM kernel. Fuck you if you wanted a laptop that comes apart easily with normal tools.

In short, if you want to buy a laptop, fuck you.
If you want more memory, just buy the $1400 instead of $1200, which has 2 TB instead of 1 TB. Yes, you can buy a 4TB SSD for less than $200, but you should CONSOOM instead.

Also make sure to not uninstall our pointless hp/asus bloatware that will alert you they've server issue 2 years down the line when we decide to make them obsolete
 
If you want more memory, just buy the $1400 instead of $1200, which has 2 TB instead of 1 TB. Yes, you can buy a 4TB SSD for less than $200, but you should CONSOOM instead.

Also make sure to not uninstall our pointless hp/asus bloatware that will alert you they've server issue 2 years down the line when we decide to make them obsolete
HP and ASUS are both garbage.
 
I'm looking to buy a new laptop and I have the same issues. It's all shit.

The big brands are super expensive and literally shit, the small chinx brands break the moment you leave the store (at least asus/hp have the decency to break 1 month after the warranty expires).

"Gaming" laptops are 1/10th the power of computers at 100th the price, and they will overheat or chew through your battery.

Instead of aiming for battery life or better ai flow, they add battery draining OLED touch screen and fingerprint scanner.

Laptops are shit.
 
I'm looking to buy a new laptop and I have the same issues. It's all shit.

The big brands are super expensive and literally shit, the small chinx brands break the moment you leave the store (at least asus/hp have the decency to break 1 month after the warranty expires).

"Gaming" laptops are 1/10th the power of computers at 100th the price, and they will overheat or chew through your battery.

Instead of aiming for battery life or better ai flow, they add battery draining OLED touch screen and fingerprint scanner.

Laptops are shit.
Depends on your budget
I've been using Alienware laptops for over 10 years now and I've only had positive experiences with them
 
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If you want to do high-end stuff then why are you buying a laptop? If not, look into business-line machines from yesteryear, often companies get rid of them and then they're sold by "refurbishers" on eBay. They're not high end machines usually either but the build quality is completely different from the consumer crap. Mostly they usually come with appropriate amounts of RAM with good speed rating with the maximum amount of channels the system supports which is never mentioned anywhere but makes a huge difference in perceived performance, especially for iGPUs. (This is the real reason why cheap machines often are crappy - very slow, single channel RAM)

You actually usually also get a very nice screen and decent wlan/drive in mpcie slots, often with a third option slot that's usually intended for a 4G modem. (If there's no bios blacklist you can stick whatever in there) Stuff on them usually just works and they're well put together machines in general that are meant to be opened (as opposed to glued together) and the build quality is something you can feel. If you shop around a little and are patient you can get a decent used machine for the price of a new bottom-of-the-barrel craptop. If you're stingy and handy, you can look for machines with broken touchscreens (these business machines often have wacom stylus/touch screen combos that get angrily stabbed to death by fat-fingered business boomers) or case cracks and see on aliexpress if spare part sourcing is easy and then do the math if it'd be worth it to repair the machine yourself. Often it might be actually preferable to get a machine in known, broken condition and make it "new" again with spare parts as opposed to a machine where the seller insists all is fine but you don't really know what you'll be getting. The former are usually a lot cheaper and for the bussiness-lines you actually often can download service manuals where it's explained how to do the replacements.
 
If you want to do high-end stuff then why are you buying a laptop? If not, look into business-line machines from yesteryear, often companies get rid of them and then they're sold by "refurbishers" on eBay. They're not high end machines usually either but the build quality is completely different from the consumer crap. Mostly they usually come with appropriate amounts of RAM with good speed rating with the maximum amount of channels the system supports which is never mentioned anywhere but makes a huge difference in perceived performance, especially for iGPUs. (This is the real reason why cheap machines often are crappy - very slow, single channel RAM)

You actually usually also get a very nice screen and decent wlan/drive in mpcie slots, often with a third option slot that's usually intended for a 4G modem. (If there's no bios blacklist you can stick whatever in there) Stuff on them usually just works and they're well put together machines in general that are meant to be opened (as opposed to glued together) and the build quality is something you can feel. If you shop around a little and are patient you can get a decent used machine for the price of a new bottom-of-the-barrel craptop. If you're stingy and handy, you can look for machines with broken touchscreens (these business machines often have wacom stylus/touch screen combos that get angrily stabbed to death by fat-fingered business boomers) or case cracks and see on aliexpress if spare part sourcing is easy and then do the math if it'd be worth it to repair the machine yourself. Often it might be actually preferable to get a machine in known, broken condition and make it "new" again with spare parts as opposed to a machine where the seller insists all is fine but you don't really know what you'll be getting. The former are usually a lot cheaper and for the bussiness-lines you actually often can download service manuals where it's explained how to do the replacements.
I have a Threadripper Pro workstation system. It works great and it is nearly infinitely expandable. The problem is I need a capable computer that I can grab on the way out the door, because sometimes I am away from home.

I've been playing the off-lease business class laptop game since at least 2008. Most of my previous laptops have been used ThinkPads from eBay. I've had a few consumer laptops too. Dell used to make some really good ones in the Pentium M and Core 2 eras.

Business class laptops are trash these days for all the reasons I listed previously. I understand it's even worse in the consumer space. I actually bought a brand new, top of the line business class laptop in 2019 and it was so horrible I sent it back after a week. I bought one in 2023 and it lasted a little over a month and now it won't power on. Ivy Bridge performance isn't good enough for me anymore. I need something new.

Part of the problem is the race to the bottom in terms of cost, and another part of the problem is the "thin and shitty" trend that everybody is copying from Apple. Now Apple laptops have always been shit. Anyone who tells you otherwise never owned a TiBook or an AlBook or an aluminum MacBook Pro or a chicklet keyboard MacBook or any number of other shit designs Apple has put out. But up until the past few years, we had choice. We could go and buy a Dell or Lenovo or even a Toshiba in your choice of thin and shit or thick and capable. Nowadays your choices are, thin and shit, or a workstation that looks like a gaming laptop and has less expandability than the model from last year despite still being a brick.

Now about the wifi, modem, and M.2 slots. The reason wifi whitelists exist is because of FCC regulations. Newer laptops are certified in all combinations of laptop model to wifi card model offered from the factory. Those wifi card PCI IDs are whitelisted and everything else is disallowed. In the early days of whitelists, the system firmware (old BIOS, new EFI) could easily be hacked to remove the restriction. Newer machines, especially these off lease business class laptops you speak of, are increasingly more difficult to hack and many are impossible. The newest two generations of Intel laptops build half of the wifi chipset directly into the PCH and the other half is soldered to the moterboard, so this is moot going forward.

Sometimes the (cellular LTE) modem slot will support wifi cards, sometimes it won't. Sometimes it'll take an SSD, sometimes it won't. There were 2 or 3 generations of Intel laptops that would take an mSATA SSD in their Mini PCIe modem slot. In fact, I have the guts of a 2TB Samsung T5 Portable SSD stuck in the modem slot of my current laptop. Some of the newer ones with NGFF slots might take SATA M.2, but more likely you'd need an NVMe drive with the correct (nonstandard for an SSD) keying, of which I think there are only 1 or 2 shit tier cacheless SSDs currently on the market. All of that assuming there is no whitelist on the modem slot, because some actually do.

Then there is the main storage M.2 slot. On a sufficiently new laptop, you usually you get one or two of these. On some of these business class laptops, those are also whitelisted, but in a different way. They will refuse to boot if the capacity is detected above an arbritrary limit. A lot of Lenovo laptops won't take SSDs bigger than 2TB for example.

Almost all of the smaller laptops have had soldered RAM, or soldered RAM plus one SO-DIMM slot for years now. Long gone are the days where you can pick up a cheap used laptop with low specs and very conveniently quadruple the RAM. Since most new laptops are thin and shitty, this is rapidly spreading to laptops of nearly all sizes. On top of that, it's hard to find one that will take 64GB of RAM, and a lot won't even do 32GB. With the ever increasing resource consumtion of things like operating systems and literally every new program, that's a problem. Remember, your current laptop is worse than your old one, and your next laptop will be even worse than your current one. So it's important to go as big and best as you possibly can, now.
 
It's practically a crime to be toxic in game chat, yet cheating or quitting is okay.
This is the primary reason I just can't do competitive multi-player games anymore. Being outright toxic isn't permitted, but acting like a passive aggressive douche totally is. And don't tell those passive aggressive dickweeds to fuck off now, or we might just have to put you in the timeout corner. Oh and you're not allowed to leave either, think of your teammates bro! You'd be leaving them in a really bad spot dude, and we wouldn't want that. It reminds me of being in school where you would get the same(if not worse) punishment for fighting back against your bully.
 
or we might just have to put you in the timeout corner. Oh and you're not allowed to leave either, think of your teammates bro!
I'm actually okay for penalizing quitters from competitive playlists. The option to join back if an accidental disconnect happens is a welcome one. Key word: competitive. Also, if somebody leaves in a 1v1, it should grant you the win by default.

Thread tax: troubleshooting technology for old people can be hit or miss. They'll either talk your ear off, ask you question after question, or expect you to know everything about computers. Why do they even want a smartphone?
 
I'm actually okay for penalizing quitters from competitive playlists. The option to join back if an accidental disconnect happens is a welcome one. Key word: competitive. Also, if somebody leaves in a 1v1, it should grant you the win by default.

Thread tax: troubleshooting technology for old people can be hit or miss. They'll either talk your ear off, ask you question after question, or expect you to know everything about computers. Why do they even want a smartphone?
I'm cool with penalizing leaving on its own, just not when I'm forced to play nicey nice with people that are clearly trying to provoke me. If you're going to put me in a lobby I'm not allowed to leave from without getting penalized, then I should get at least one n-word pass for the privilege. What's worse is that all these companies are always blathering on about stamping out toxicity and creating a safe environment to play in, but they don't once consider the toxicity that's naturally going to occur by structuring lobbies like this.
 
reminds me of overwatch games where people would get mad at me for not choosing a character that supported their playstyle
I'm cool with penalizing leaving on its own, just not when I'm forced to play nicey nice with people that are clearly trying to provoke me. If you're going to put me in a lobby I'm not allowed to leave from without getting penalized, then I should get at least one n-word pass for the privilege. What's worse is that all these companies are always blathering on about stamping out toxicity and creating a safe environment to play in, but they don't once consider the toxicity that's naturally going to occur by structuring lobbies like this.
 
I am very disappointed the Raspberry Pi 4 has no real time clock of any kind. Doesn't have to have a battery backup - it just doesn't exist on the board.
This is what the network is for.
Most RTCs don't even get used after boot anyway Linux just uses the CPU for timing.
You can always pay the $7 if you want one that much.
 
This is what the network is for.
Most RTCs don't even get used after boot anyway Linux just uses the CPU for timing.
You can always pay the $7 if you want one that much.
Yeah I know it relies on the NTP servers but I was hoping to use some spare Rpi4 for an offline project that needs accurate time tracking. I got some of the 3231 RTC units.
 
Yeah I know it relies on the NTP servers but I was hoping to use some spare Rpi4 for an offline project that needs accurate time tracking. I got some of the 3231 RTC units.
You want accurate off-line time, just use a GPS like a normal person then. Looks like your RTC is only going to get you down to about 1 second per 10 days.

The GPS can also provide local NTP if you're networked. Also if you do use GPS I recommend ignoring the GPSD stuff and going straight PPS/ntpd. Maybe it's improved but when I first set it up with GPSD it was garbage.
 
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