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

Drain Todger said:
Touchpad clickers are shit, except for the haptic ones on the newer MacBooks; those are pretty nice and have decent tactility and response.

Indeed, Unicomp bought Lexmark’s tooling and stuff to make their boards. The Unicomps lack the steel backplate, and the keycaps are a little funky and rotated, and their company logo sticker over the light cluster has shitty adhesive and wants to fall off. Having used both a Model M and a Customizer 104, I can say that the Model M just feels better to type on. Something about the Unicomp feels a little weird by comparison. I mean, they’re okay, but the springs rattle ever-so-slightly. The original Model Ms had more damping of the resonation from each key press, probably because of the mass of the steel in there. I recently picked up one of their integrated-trackball units for my little project. A nice all-in-one typing and pointing solution for the Pi, hopefully. I asked them if the Raspberry Pi recognized the trackball and they said yes. Right after they shipped out mine, they stopped selling them and won’t resume selling them until the end of the year. I think they’re low on supply with the trackball component itself.

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I think every single Zip disk I have ever had has failed after a few months.

Anyone remember that weird Netbook fad in the late 00s/early 10s? For a brief time, we had Intel Atom-powered poverty laptops, like the Acer Aspire One. They were dog shit and could only run like a dozen browser tabs at once. And then, they all vanished. They were caught between tablets and laptops, and people eventually ended up leaning towards those options. They picked up a bad reputation because of cramped keyboards, weak CPUs, low RAM, and small screens. People wanted bigger screens to watch Netflix bullshit in HD.

Today’s tablets are easily powerful enough to be laptop replacements. How long before laptops themselves are basically eradicated by the rise of the tablet? It seems like a lot of newer electronic devices are designed around content consumption rather than content creation. If there’s one tech trend I hate the most, it’s that.
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Netbooks were one of those products that came before their time to shine. In the late 00s (like 06-09) there was some movement to an idea of a "webOS" type thing where the client was just a web browser and you interacted with the OS on it (not like ChromeOS, but all elements including UI was web based). This died down for about a decade and now with xAAS we are seeing it again, and I hate it, netbooks would have been more successful if xAAS was a thing when they were around.

the only "tablet" i like is the MS Surface and that is because its fully functioning computer and OS, so its not limited by the stupidity of a touch interface.
Ginger Piglet said:
Well quite. How can you do anything on a tablet other than tweet and shitpost and like and subscribe.

Can you write a novel on a tablet? Do a spreadsheet? Write a program? Compose a song? Record the parts for said song? Mix them appropriate?
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When I was in university I was talking to some other student (this was like early to mid 10s) and they claimed they could program on their tablet (aka iPad as only the 1st and 2nd gen ipads were out at the time, and I don't think bluetooth keyboards were a thing yet).
I was unimpressed and wonder if they actually ever got anywhere in the CS program (then again the university CS program was being ran by hack frauds at the time).
 
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I used to have a netbook, had a very lightweight gentoo on it, basically only terminal. Worked pretty well and was pretty cool for what it was and the battery lasted forever. IMO the problem is not so much that the hardware sucks but most software does by being not able to run on such hardware satisfactory. If you pick and choose carefully you can often find a way. If you just take a bunch of default newbie distro software packages though, you really cannot complain.

I always thought the Netbook form factor and ARM SoCs were a no-brainer and I guess those exist as "Chromebooks". Sadly ARMs are so buried by IP and patent bullshit that you never get proper support if you aren't satisfied with running some horribly outdated custom kernel/android version or an older SoC. A dream machine for me in that form factor would have a SoC fully passively cooled, consuming about 3W on average and with an eink screen and mechanical keyboard, all supported properly by linux mainline. The technology is there but short of building it yourself it'll never happen. I always thought it should be possible to take some old netbook, design a "carrier" PCB fitting into whatever form factor you need and then plug some small ARM-SBC/SoM (like from olimex) into it. PCB manufacturing of that size is not excessively expensive for a prototype if you stay low on the layers and depending on how it exactly looks, if you have it made in china I think you could easily stay in the low $$$ range. Biggest problem would be the screen and the connectors. I think you could actually make it hobby-budget cheap-ish to mid-range though if you pick all the right parts. Kinda surprised nobody tried yet.
 
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Ginger Piglet said:
Well quite. How can you do anything on a tablet other than tweet and shitpost and like and subscribe.
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If the only thing a device is good for is shitposting, absolutely fuck it if I can't have 50+ tabs open at the same time. I can't even shitpost on 4chan with less than 50.
 
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Oh god, I remember netbooks. What a weird concept. For anyone who doesn't remember, it was basically a normal PC laptop that was the size of a tablet, and for a fraction of the price of an iPad. They were big in the late 2000's/early 2010's, since they could easily fit in backpacks and purses unlike regular laptops. One of my roommates had one in college, and some of the Boomers I knew had them right around the time tablets became a thing. Nowadays tablets or even large smartphones have eclipsed any need for a netbook.
 
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Not that old, but iPod Nanos (the little square ones and the slim ones). I still have mine since high school and it works like a charm. Underground wifi only recently became a thing in certain city underground subways. Taking a train meant completely losing any contact with the outside world for however long. Having an iPod on hand was a lifesaver.

Now that Iphones have come around, they have since become obsolete. The only situation that I can see them reigning supreme in is if you were to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no internet. Anyways, love em.

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Michael Jacks0n said:
I had one of those little square ones! 8GB to be precise. Great for clipping to my arm at the gym and worked like a charm. Damn, I miss that thing.
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You know, I think there needs to be a media player a bit like the original iPod but I. with better sound quality, and II. with a removable battery of a standard size, and III. easily opened to fix or similar, and IV. a slot for an SD card that is removable. No on-board storage. Oh, and V. No proprietary bollox.

This would basically be the Walkman of the 2020s. Well built, robust, sounds good, you can load the SD card up with either FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, or WAV, and it'll play it. There are physical buttons on the surface for play/pause, next/prev, volume up/down (maybe even a good ol' slider or wheel), and a dot matrix display that shows the current track name and artist and time. The idea is to make a portable media player that is physically robust, reliable, doesn't get bricked by bloat or updates, and will still be working in 2060 the same way that original 1979 Walkmans are still working today.

I honestly think there'd be a market for it. As long as the sound quality is better than your average smartphone's I think it might be worthwhile.

Or better still, market that and then make a sort of powered speaker dock which turns it into a boombox.
 
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Ginger Piglet said:
You know, I think there needs to be a media player a bit like the original iPod but I. with better sound quality, and II. with a removable battery of a standard size, and III. easily opened to fix or similar, and IV. a slot for an SD card that is removable. No on-board storage. Oh, and V. No proprietary bollox.
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My first MP3 player in the early 2000s was like that. A Frontier Labs Nex II: took standard AA batteries, removable flash storage through a CF card (you could even use tiny hard disks in CF format called MicroDrives but I never owned one of those), and no need for any special software.
 
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Phones replacing portable music players for most consumers sucks. I wish the equivalent of Walkmans/mp3 players made a comeback.

I still have a Walkman NWZ A728 which I bought about 12 years ago and it still runs like a champ. Even the battery has held out somehow. I listen to stuff on bike rides to and from work and it easily holds enough of a charge for 10+ hours of playback. Pretty impressive considering its a 12 year old battery. It has a nice colour screen and physical buttons for navigation and volume. When this bastard eventually dies I'll try to find the same model as a replacement.

One thing I don't miss is proprietary bullshit. The NWZ is a simple drag and drop in windows to add media, the stick mp3 player I had before that from about 2005 needed sony's software just to get songs on it. Don't miss that shit at all.
 
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Stasi said:
Phones replacing portable music players for most consumers sucks. I wish the equivalent of Walkmans/mp3 players made a comeback.

I still have a Walkman NWZ A728 which I bought about 12 years ago and it still runs like a champ. Even the battery has held out somehow. I listen to stuff on bike rides to and from work and it easily holds enough of a charge for 10+ hours of playback. Pretty impressive considering its a 12 year old battery. It has a nice colour screen and physical buttons for navigation and volume. When this bastard eventually dies I'll try to find the same model as a replacement.

One thing I don't miss is proprietary bullshit. The NWZ is a simple drag and drop in windows to add media, the stick mp3 player I had before that from about 2005 needed sony's software just to get songs on it. Don't miss that shit at all.
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That's probably because Sony were in their "paranoia about piracy" phase which led them to distribute malware on music CDs.

I honestly think an SD card based player that is robust and inexpensive and has a replaceable battery would be worth having. My phone (an LG V40) has pretty good music playback as it has a quad DAC. But most other phone playback is awful, especially when paired wtih 128kbps MP3. Also, FLAC takes up a hell of a lot of storage space comparatively.

I'm thinking if we can get that sort of audio circuitry to talk to a Raspberry Pi Pico, a lil' DMD, and a custom written OS on a small amount of on-board storage, with a standard sized replaceable battery, a barrel plug charger, and a headphone socket, which comes with a (battery or mains) powered speaker dock to turn it from a walkman to a boombox, that would be a pretty damn nice piece of gear. Emphasis on physical robustness and serviceability (maybe even have a specific service hatch for the power supply on the speaker dock so in 30 years time it can just be slid out and recapped?).

Hmmm. Maybe it's time to get the ol' pencils and rulers out and design it.
 
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Ginger Piglet said:
You know, I think there needs to be a media player a bit like the original iPod but I. with better sound quality, and II. with a removable battery of a standard size, and III. easily opened to fix or similar, and IV. a slot for an SD card that is removable. No on-board storage. Oh, and V. No proprietary bollox.

This would basically be the Walkman of the 2020s. Well built, robust, sounds good, you can load the SD card up with either FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, or WAV, and it'll play it. There are physical buttons on the surface for play/pause, next/prev, volume up/down (maybe even a good ol' slider or wheel), and a dot matrix display that shows the current track name and artist and time. The idea is to make a portable media player that is physically robust, reliable, doesn't get bricked by bloat or updates, and will still be working in 2060 the same way that original 1979 Walkmans are still working today.

I honestly think there'd be a market for it. As long as the sound quality is better than your average smartphone's I think it might be worthwhile.

Or better still, market that and then make a sort of powered speaker dock which turns it into a boombox.
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On the fancy end of MP3 players with removable SD Card storage, there’s the Astell&Kern KANN.


Way off on the other end, price-wise? I’d say a Pi Zero W with a small screen. It could be almost thumb drive sized and offer decent enough audio quality. The Pi Zero W has 802.11 and Bluetooth support, so it could easily be used with some bluetooth headphones and worn basically anywhere on the body. Or, hell, waterproofed and stitched into a bag. Or tossed into a 3D printed enclosure. Anything is possible.
 
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You know, the old Creative Zen audio players were pretty much what you're looking for, minus the SD card storage. Small, no software needed on your computer, nice UI.
Only drawbacks are that it maxes out at 16GB and some of the newer codecs aren't supported.
You all are making me want to dig mine out now.
 
The Real SVP said:
I loved the netbook form factor, just between fullsize and sub notebook, but I never got one because the actual hardware was shit. I am considering getting one for nostalgic reasons. I have seen good condition ones sell for ~20€, and the batteries should not be too expensive either.
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Fujitsu-Siemens made netbook sized laptops before and during that time, top tier hardware, expensive as hell. Really good and absolutely tiny. They were sold for MacBook Pro prices IIRC.

I bought a netbook for a friend as a birthday present, an Acer I think, the cheaper one with Linux. Then I took out the DVD drive from my stationary, hooked it up through a USB-SATA interface that I busted out of an external HDD, I don't know why it didn't want to install from USB directly, and put windows on it along with MPC.
The netbook had great battery life and he was often far away from even common cell signals, so a netbook with good battery life and an USB stick full of (SD) movies and shows went a long way.
 
I had a blue HP mini laptop back around 2015, not sure if it was officially classed as a netbook or not (weren't there slightly larger ones with a different name?)

Anyway, I thought it was ace. Something like a 13" screen, slim, lightweight, and compact. I bought it mainly for working on my writing, reading archival stuff online, and doing other very basic shit. Worked like a charm.

That came to an end when I spilled a full glass of wine on it one night. Managed to back up everything, then turned it upside-down to potentially avoid any residual liquid damage. Unsuccessfully, it was fucked.
 
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I really do not like the gimmicky pop-up front cameras and more than two rear cameras on a phone. Even though I'm a photographer, they just look really weird and it's mostly pointless because most camera UI's on phones aren't that good and the sensors are far too small to compete with a full-sized camera.
 
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Legoshi said:
I really do not like the gimmicky pop-up front cameras and more than two rear cameras on a phone. Even though I'm a photographer, they just look really weird and it's mostly pointless because most camera UI's on phones aren't that good.
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I love the pop-up front camera on my phone. Mostly because it means I don't have to ever deal with my phone having a front camera.
 
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