271–280 of 288 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).
Is your eyesight really that good? I've worked on a 13" screen all day long and have terrible eyesight and usually eye discomfort is that last thing I feel.
The bizarre thing is that laptops have gotten cheap enough and the monthly credit buying options are a few cups of coffee (at a restaurant) for a brandnew laptop, that people keep giving me their old (2-3 years) laptops. My daily driver is a x220 from 2011 I did buy for next to nothing second hand. But after that I cannot see me needing a new one as I have stacks of nice laptops lying around. Where I can see it going…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting you had such a bad experience with your T430. Mine served me faithfully for almost 8 years without a single issue. Even took quite a few hits that would have destroyed most other laptops. Upgraded to a t490 and also have had 0 issues with that, though it does seem to be a bit more fragile
I picked up a T430 from eBay for less than $300 about 4-5 years ago. It worked great for me for a couple of years until it developed a weird issue that would freeze randomly under Windows. I never had the issue when using Linux. Since I needed Windows for a few applications, I handed it down to my son. He's been running Arch on it without issue to this day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your eyesight really that good? I've worked on a 13" screen all day long and have terrible eyesight and usually eye discomfort is that last thing I feel.
Not OP but I have great eyesight (I think...) and much rather use a big screen (my neck thanks me too).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*. Can't help coin a new word, but Ralph Caplan described this phenomenon really well. I'm a (software) designer, and I think about this all the time: > When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining…
In fashion, "newness" is a function.
For a low-tech solar powered website, it does require a lot of loading (>500Kb for the homepage, >350kb just for this article). You should optimize your images. This would probably drastically reduce your electricity use per unique visitor. Nice article by the way. I love the frugality.
The pages are considerably optimised, including dithering images: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html
In the late 90s (when websites looked exactly like that) 100kb would be considered excessive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He abandoned his first fully functional laptop to land-fill and bought a new one just because the adaptor died. Perhaps the laptop-side of the adaptor died?
His writing suggests it was the adaptor itself which died: >...the charger started malfunctioning. When informed of the price for a new charger, I was so disgusted with Apple’s sales practices... that I refused to buy it. Instead, I managed to keep the charger working for a few more years... When the charger eventually died entirely in 2005, I decided to look for a new laptop...
The malfunctioning charger was not the only problem. The Apple laptop had also gotten extremely slow. Because I was not aware of Linux (this is 15 years ago), I made the mistake of thinking that I needed a new laptop.
This is the whole problem: many people are not aware of Linux and its advantages, and thus keep falling in the trap that the hardware and software industries have set up for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is/was a trope that an average Apple user only uses Safari so there's no need for this or that feature (starting from when Jobs was against having an appstore for the first iPhone), that's the only way I can think of that this statement is correct. My laptops serve 2 purposes - first, the actual laptop that I use for travel with no monitor, and can use for work, photo processing, movie watching, gaming or whate…
I think you're missing a very common power-user workflow which is: browser + terminal. For many people, all serious work happens in a near-zero resource application (the terminal) and the MBA is, of course, just fine for that.
In any case, being about to use a browser and a terminal hardly qualifies as "solving" laptop form factor much more than just being able to use a browser IMHO.