Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Netbooks and bad journalism

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:36:35 GMT

The Verge has a navel-gazing article about netbooks, those tiny, cheap laptops that were incredibly popular for a few years in the late oughts and then vanished utterly by the early teens. And by navel-gazing I mean that the author interviewed a few of his journalist friends, none of whom knew any more about the reason netbooks were popular than he did, and then wrote an article displaying his profound ignorance.

It's very simple, for those who are not narcissistic tech journalists: Netbooks were two things that both had a significant market, at a time when there was no other way to take the internet with you other than carrying around a laptop. 1. They were tiny. At a time when a regular laptop weighed five pounds and a big screen laptop six pounds, netbooks were just one kilogram. A netbook would fit in any old shoulder bag with lots of room for other stuff; a notebook required its own dedicated bag. #2, Netbooks were cheap. At a time when the cheapest full size laptops cost $600, and a decent thinkpad cost $1000, a netbook could be had for less than $300.

Size of course was a huge selling point. At the time, the only viable way to access your email and read the latest doings of your friends on Myspace and Livejournal was with a laptop. A tiny laptop that didn't need its own bag and wouldn't take up the entire surface of your table at Starbucks was vastly preferable, even if it was molasses slow and had a keyboard made for hobbit-sized hands. And of course, tech journalists and other professionals who needed to travel a great deal were always looking for a notebook that was smaller and lighter, so they wouldn't need such a heavy carryon bag. Some of them were even willing to put up with a crappy undersized keyboard to get that lighter carryon. Ultralight laptops had existed for a long time, but they cost a lot more than a standard laptop, and were hard to justify on a journalist's salary.

Cost was also a huge selling point. A $300 laptop made owning any kind of computer possible for the first time for a huge number of low income people all over the world who would otherwise never have been able to afford one. People who might as well be utterly invisible as far as narcissistic tech pundits are concerned.

Then in 2010 Apple came out with Ipads, on the one hand, and with Mark II of the Macbook Air on the other. And within a few years the entire technology industry followed in their footsteps as usual. Full sized but thin and ultralight laptops came down in price to $1000 or less, and siphoned off from the netbook market all of the professionals and writers who were looking for affordable-to-them small and light writing machines. Tablets and smartphones siphoned off all the people looking for devices to provide internet access which you could carry with you. Meanwhile, laptop makers started making full size laptops lighter and lighter, and selling them for less and less money, until the netbooks were left with no one willing to buy them.

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How to get a durable laptop

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 13:25:47 GMT

I see so many people on Facebook buying awful laptops, or asking for help with choosing a new laptop.

Laptop makers produce two very different kinds of laptops. They have lines of laptops intended for consumers, which are made to look pretty and cost as little as possible. Consumer laptops are *not durable* - they're made to outlive a one year warranty, and no longer. They have tons of promotional crapware preloaded on them - software that the manufacturer is paid to put on the computer (not the other way round), which is poor quality and makes money for the developer through ads, popups demanding that you upgrade, or actual user tracking and spying. And they are *not* designed to be easy to repair or upgrade.

And then there are lines of laptops intended for businesses and corporations. Which are usually not loaded with crapware (or not as much), which are designed to outlive a three or four year corporate replacement schedule, and which are often quite durable. And they can be easily repaired, because the corporate buyer gets them with a multi-year maintenance contract on them. They cost more, often significantly more. But they are worth it - a good corporate-grade laptop will last until it becomes obsolete, and will be more likely to survive accidents.

Understandably, most people are reluctant to pay over a thousand dollars for a laptop when they can get one for less than five hundred. But the best part about corporate laptops is that the companies that buy them replace them long before they cease to be useful, so there are tons of "off lease" laptops available for about the same or only a little more than a new consumer laptop from Best Buy. And despite not having a manufactuerer's warranty, those used business class laptops are a far better value.

And now, because I had to hunt this information down: For the top five manufacturers, the lines of laptop that are business class instead of consumer class are:

Lenovo Thinkpad, especially the T (general) and X (ultralight) series.
HP Probook (general business) or Elitebook (high end workstations)
Dell Latitude (general) or Precision (high end)
Acer Travelmate
AsusPro.

I prefer Thinkpads, but Dell and HP also make good notebooks. I've no experience with Acer or Asus.

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My brief affair with Mac OS X

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 19:28:19 GMT

Back in 2012, Microsoft took a sharp turn into stupidsville with Windows 8. Around the same time, I grudgingly concluded that I was going to have to upgrade someday from Windows XP because more and more software was requiring something newer. This after nine years of reusing my copy of Windows 98 on various computers and another four reusing the Windows XP volume licence from morgan_dhu's work machine.

I surveyed the options: continue using XP and have more and more of the internet tell me my browser was too old; buying a legit copy of a newer version of Windows for close to $100, which would in turn cease to be supported after less than a decade, requiring me to buy yet another $100 licence; switching to Linux with all its chronic usability nightmares; or switching to the Mac.

We had by this point both gotten Ipads and I had replaced our DVD player with a computer running Itunes, so it didn't seem as huge a jump as it had in the past. I investigated hackintoshes and discovered that the creation, care and feeding of one would land me in the same user unfriendly realm as desktop Linux. I started shopping for a used Mac.

( Long and boringly nerdy )

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Migrating Eudora data from Windows to Mac

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 15:42:28 GMT

Putting this here because there is no longer a Eudora forum, the Eudora mailing list has no archive, and posting to usenet involves too much fuckery to be worth my while (given that I do not wish to submit my private organs to the Google ovipositor) ( nerd alert )

Of course Eudora no longer works on OS X 10.7 and later. But you can install 10.6 in VirtualBox, then install Eudora in that. Which is a bit of a kludge for daily use, but might come in handy for archival purposes, or if you discover that you need to run Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (another 10.6-only program) to migrate your data to a new email app without stupid errors.

Protip: Buying a 10.6 disk directly from Apple is usually cheaper than trying to score one on Ebay. I don't know why, except that all pricing of Mac items on Ebay is insane.

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