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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#702Pebble - they created a series of smart watches that had: - long battery life (2-7 days depending on model) - e-ink colour screens, that were always on - an extensive app/watchface ecosystem - actual attractive watches I had a series of them and was all-in on the new models announced via kickstarter, when they suddenly disappeared and were bought by Fitbit. All forthcoming products were killed off. They've been prett…
Try FitBit Versa, apart from the always-on screen, it has everything you're looking for. The battery life averages 4-5 days depending on usage. I personally own it and it's the best purchase I have made. Drastically improved my life.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#703Wunderground. Whatever they've done to the site in the past few years is just terrible.
I could not agree more.
The app is also terrible now... Wundermap -> Storm -> now whatever it’s called... worthless app now.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#704The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…
WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction. It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges. I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't mi…
I moved my development side to WSL on the PC after giving up hope that Apple is ever going to replace my 2008 MacPro tower. The experience has essentially been flawless, and I'd consider it basically magic on how well it works. Best of both worlds. Any future Apple is just going to be whatever is cheapest as a daily driver, while the PC is going to handle heavy lifting from now on (Gaming, Development, Editing).
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#705I miss variety in smartphone design. Everything looks the same these days. Samsung and Apple endlessly copy each other and virtually every smartphone has the same phablet aesthetic now. I miss the variety in shapes, sizes, physical keyboards, gaming features, operating systems, etc.
I'm cheering for the Razer Phone 2.
It has no notch, it isn't obsessed with a high screen-to-body ratio. It isn't that thin or particularly light.
But it does have a 120hz screen that nobody else has, and once you see it with your own eyes you'll be wondering why other manufacturers aren't pushing for it too. It does have unashamedly large stereo speakers for market-leading volume and clarity. It does have a unique glowing logo on the back, just like the old Macbooks. And it also has a 4000mah battery that'll last the whole day easily.
If you want a phone that's trying to break the meta, this is it.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#706The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…
> I can't seem to figure out how to install PHP 7.2 correctly to work on Laravel
Overall probably a net benefit for society honestly, if it means less PHP in production. (I kid)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#707Browsers that did not have to reload the page when you hit the back button. Webpages designed to use the least bandwidth, load fast and be accessible. Companies that had older staff who had enough experience to not make the same mistakes over and over again.
The behavior of the browser upon back-button depends on the cache policy of the server when it first delivered the page.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#708Altavista. I miss it every single day. Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language. This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords. This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and "quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time. Man I…
I was just asking about this Google "feature" on Twitter [1]. I can't imagine why anyone would want "must include" to mean anything but, and if it doesn't mean exactly that to Google, then they shouldn't say it.
> does anyone know why Google does this with search their results? what does the word “must” mean here, practically?
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#709Zite. Nothing has come close ever since for dropping random articles in front of me that were perfectly relevant. Flipboard was no good and nothing ever worked. The amount of times I tweeted an article and somebody asked me "how did you even find that?" was a clear indication it worked well.
https://readwrite.com/2014/03/05/why-zite-flipboard-acquisit...
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#710I miss variety in smartphone design. Everything looks the same these days. Samsung and Apple endlessly copy each other and virtually every smartphone has the same phablet aesthetic now. I miss the variety in shapes, sizes, physical keyboards, gaming features, operating systems, etc.
This ++, I massively miss my Nokia E71, there's been no decent replacement for it. Ok maybe the n900. But since then they're all the largely the same.
The Nokia E71 was almost the perfect phone. Sturdy, offline GPS capability, dual SIM variant, comfortable hardware keyboard. The only thing holding it back was the OS and app ecosystem.