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VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

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Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#51

Post by na85 »

nine_k wrote: post #44
jjoonathan wrote: post #27

What are the practical and functional use cases that benefit from a clit mouse vs, say, a trackpad? Genuine question, I've seen them on older laptops but I always assumed they were purely vestigial from a time when trackpads were no good. Also, mandatory: in Russia, clit mouse is blue .

A ton of upsides. * The hand does not leave the hone row. * It never by mistake registers your hands as a click or a movement. * Your skin can be extremely wet or dry without consequence. * You can continue a motion without being limited by the size of the trackpad, because you don't modulate the position directly, but its first derivative. This removes tension between being precise and having the range. * It separat…

Honestly, I disagree with your last point. There may be some "pros" who prefer the clitmouse but I consider myself a "pro user" in that I use my laptop(s) every day for work and for personal stuff, and I greatly greatly prefer a quality trackpad. Apple in particular ships laptops with excellent trackpads.

If all you've used is the garbage trackpads that get shipped with most Dell or Lenovo laptops, then sure I can see why a clitmouse would be preferrable, but having used them all I can say that after using my macbook's trackpad I have zero desire to go back to the pointer, and mine is the comically-large one on the touchbar macbook pro. It's enormous, but even so I've never had a spurious click or mouse-movement with this machine, and that's not hyperbole.

If I need reliable pointing for a particular workflow beyond what a trackpad can deliver, I have a bluetooth mouse. Or a desktop computer with a corded mouse. The trackpoint/clitmouse pales in comparison.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#52

Post by userbinator »

owenversteeg wrote: post #45
Ambroos wrote: post #9

It's pretty funny how this has basically the same ports (besides the USB C for charging) as my 2010 VAIO Z. VGA is the most surprising one to still see. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. I can't really see them targeting the corporate market.

VGA is incredible to have, yes, even in 2019. As a sibling comment says, it's "for the people who actually have to solve problems". Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI. So there's an adapter. But maybe the damned fragile thing is broken, or it's missing, or it doesn't adapt to what you have (mini display port? USB-C? Who even knows!) or it requires power, or God knows what.…

There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.

This is also the advantage that analog signals have over digital ones: HDMI is basically all-or-nothing (especially when HDCP DRM decides it's doesn't like something), but analog VGA degrades far more gracefully.

At one of the places I used to work, the HDMI-VGA adapters seemed to die surprisingly frequently, and also got very hot even when they worked.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#53

Post by teamski »

owenversteeg wrote: post #45
Ambroos wrote: post #9

It's pretty funny how this has basically the same ports (besides the USB C for charging) as my 2010 VAIO Z. VGA is the most surprising one to still see. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. I can't really see them targeting the corporate market.

VGA is incredible to have, yes, even in 2019. As a sibling comment says, it's "for the people who actually have to solve problems". Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI. So there's an adapter. But maybe the damned fragile thing is broken, or it's missing, or it doesn't adapt to what you have (mini display port? USB-C? Who even knows!) or it requires power, or God knows what.…

> all projectore, even new [...] do not have HDMI

BS

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#54

Post by SECProto »

miles wrote: post #2

Reminded me somewhat of "A small notebook for a system administrator": https://habr.com/en/post/437912/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052688

Funny, to me it just reminds me of a standard laptop from a few years ago. I have a consumer lenovo from a few years back, and it has all those ports except the USB-C.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#55

Post by teamski »

nextos wrote: post #19

The problem with some VAIO machines tends to be cooling. My experience is that the fan controller is quite badly designed, and the machine ends up being noisy. The fan RPMs oscillate a lot, even under no load. I hope it is not the case this time, and we end up with a nice laptop that can run Linux well. Options are limited, so an alternative with many ports from a quality manufacturer is more than welcome.

Are you taking about recent VAIO machines? If yes name then.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#56

Post by teamski »

Ports are good and what Apple does is ridiculous but it is also about which ports.

Nowadays, I tend to miss real Thunderbolt 3 ports on USB-C, better 2 than 1 and with 4 lanes. This is what they totally forgot. So I could connect to an ancient VGA projector but not to a common 2x 4k@60hz display setup? This doesn't make sense.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#57

Post by myself248 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #45
Ambroos wrote: post #9

It's pretty funny how this has basically the same ports (besides the USB C for charging) as my 2010 VAIO Z. VGA is the most surprising one to still see. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. I can't really see them targeting the corporate market.

VGA is incredible to have, yes, even in 2019. As a sibling comment says, it's "for the people who actually have to solve problems". Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI. So there's an adapter. But maybe the damned fragile thing is broken, or it's missing, or it doesn't adapt to what you have (mini display port? USB-C? Who even knows!) or it requires power, or God knows what.…

> it's a real hacker's port, dammit!

Oh yeah, the i2c interface disguised as DDC is my favorite part. With a few wires, you can interface any i2c eeprom with command-line tools.

But projectors, oh yeah, I hear ya. VGA came out in 1987 and rapidly became ubiquitous. I think the Intel Skylake in 2015 finally shipped without integrated VGA, that's as clear a mark as you'll find for the closing of a chapter.

And the coolest thing is, except for a few weird VGA-on-EGA-connector attempts in the very early years, VGA has always been one single standard connector for the entire 28 years of its existence. And it's not gone, not by a long shot. That decades-long legacy means it's the standard you're going to include if you want your shit to be compatible with as much as possible.

Until my very most recent Thinkpad, I've had VGA the whole time, and got quite accustomed to mocking the portless people (principally Mac folks) when they'd show up without their adapters. "If your machine doesn't have the ports it needs to survive in the world, it is incumbent upon YOU to carry the adapter dongles", I'd sneer at them. "Your vendor invents a new port every few months, I'm not going to stock all those adapters on your behalf."

Welp, the march of time is inexorable, and I'm now the schmuck toting around a Mini-DisplayPort-to-VGA dongle that just takes up space in my bag and I know someday I'm gonna leave it out because I haven't used it in forever. That will therefore be the day I'm faced with a room full of Director-level people I need to impress, and the wrong variant of HDMI-DVI-Thunderport-Nano-MHL-whatever. And I know that damn projector still has a VGA port, just in case.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#58

Post by myself248 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #17
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RS-232 would be more useful though. I like this departure from Apple’s custom of having as few ports available as possible.

...and if you press a button, a baggy drops out full of null modems, gender changers, level shifters, diagnostic LED blocks, a wrench + diagonal cutter for inappropriately placed nuts, and a male and female 0.1" header adapter. One can dream!

Tellya what, on my old Toughbook I had done a shit-ton of modding, and when I removed the 56k modem, I repurposed the RJ11 jack on the side to bring out an internal (TTL-level) serial port from the CDPD module connector. With some inline resistors to current-limit any stupidity I might get myself into.

Then in my bag, I carried an RJ11-to-female-headers cable, and a handful of jumper wires of various genders and a handful of minigrabber clips. And a butane-powered soldering iron, because you never know.

It was no Novena, for sure, but just having a TTL-level serial port made that a hell of a hacking machine. This was in the heyday of the WRT54G and similar, and I can't count the number of console ports I invaded with no more hardware than a wisp of wire.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#59

Post by myself248 »

nulbyte wrote: post #43
userbinator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of (very, very expensive) projectors still use it, and a good VGA cable will work well beyond 1080p resolutions, so why not. The connector is also more robust than the effete HDMI/DisplayPort/etc. ones that have tiny pins, purely by being bigger.

Lots of old equipment a system administrator might work with also uses VGA.

My kingdom for the VGA port having an input mode!

A friend of mine has built a little raspberry-pi-laptop with an internal HDMI switch and a USB device-sharing gizmo, so he can use it as a portable KVM for sysadmin tasks. I wish that was more common!

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#60

Post by nextos »

teamski wrote: post #55
nextos wrote: post #19

The problem with some VAIO machines tends to be cooling. My experience is that the fan controller is quite badly designed, and the machine ends up being noisy. The fan RPMs oscillate a lot, even under no load. I hope it is not the case this time, and we end up with a nice laptop that can run Linux well. Options are limited, so an alternative with many ports from a quality manufacturer is more than welcome.

Are you taking about recent VAIO machines? If yes name then.

For example, the very recent SX14:

"Unfortunately, Vaio commits a huge blunder when it comes to the fan control. Ideally, the fan should not run at all while the device is idling. The opposite is true for the Vaio SX14: The fan always runs with 32.5 dB(a), which is definitely audible. Under load, the fan becomes much louder with 43.9 dB(a), which is annoyingly loud."

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vaio-SX14-i5-8265U-FHD-Laptop-...

I really like some VAIO models, as I think quality is superior to Thinkpad. So I wish they took a bit more care with these issues. Their recent fanless convertible suffers from coil whine. Some online reviews discuss this too.

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