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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#91

Post by nirui »

However, there maybe another darkside of the story.

Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.

I think it's also somewhat fitting in this case: the industry only focuses on making money out of the people who can or potentially can afford the service, and left out those who can't. The user-end requirement is just an implicit barrier that allows companies to generate rainbow farts.

No, I'm not criticizing those companies that actually employed such dark patterns. After all, everyone wants money. However, these kind of practice can be costly as well in the form of 1) bad UX for paying users, and 2) higher cost of bandwidth (for both the user and the company).

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#92

Post by [deleted] »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #84
l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

progressive enhancement, but as you said the reality doesn't always allow or account for that approach. unless faang companies suddenly make it trendy again to care about low fidelity experience.

[deleted]

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#93

Post by watersb »

Oh God yes.

Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud.

We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers.

When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it: dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to work the next day.

I was the only person on the team to actually do this.

I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as soon as we got home.

A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines. Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then stuffed into a web browser.

They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#94

Post by avereveard »

grishka wrote: post #82
avereveard wrote: post #65

Or, do not endorse people's bad buying patterns. I do care about crappy network and load times. But there's some laptop that have worse performances than three years old tablets, and there seems to be no end to what scummy companies sell at low end. At some point down the crappy pit, there's a line where it's no longer my problem.

It's not that hard to write optimized software if you know what you're doing. Problem is, developers these days routinely prioritize their own experience over their user's. They would add a huge library just to use one function from it. They would put multiple abstraction layers they don't understand on top of their platform just so their code is "beautiful". They would use their platform in a suboptimal way (for exa…

What condescending bullshit.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#95

Post by jmfldn »

icelancer wrote: post #20
eatonphil wrote: post #3

Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.

Yeah a T-series Thinkpad. We use them at work for dumb terminals for forms, COVID compliance nonsense, and random data entry points. They are surprisingly durable and still pretty solid.

Not just for that. I use a T460 with an old i5 as my daily driver. Runs like a charm. Helps that it runs Linux but it was OK with Windows 10 too.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#96

Post by onion2k »

kingcharles wrote: post #57

Please. I beg you to buy a 2GB of transfer cell plan from a cheap carrier and try your sites via tethering. If you can only load your SPA a couple of times before your line gets disconnected, you've fucked up your design. I had plans with 35GB of transfer and the modern web meant I was having to restart my plan every single week. Some of us live in Internet deserts where there is no hope of getting a wired connection…

I don't think I've ever seen a site that would use up 2GB of data being loaded "a couple of times". What sort of site would do that?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#97

Post by grishka »

avereveard wrote: post #94
grishka wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to write optimized software if you know what you're doing. Problem is, developers these days routinely prioritize their own experience over their user's. They would add a huge library just to use one function from it. They would put multiple abstraction layers they don't understand on top of their platform just so their code is "beautiful". They would use their platform in a suboptimal way (for exa…

What condescending bullshit.

What do you even mean? A website has no business to have minimum system requirements. It's a hypertext document with some optional macros here and there.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#98

Post by beebeepka »

I my experience, those who don't care about performance almost always happen to be bad developers. Interviewed with plenty of those.

I've worked with machines so underpowered you can notice execution time difference between minified and non-minified code. And where CSS animations are considerably slower than GIFs. Oh yeah.

Right now I am with people who are pretty good at architecture but kind of suck at the pieces that power their designs. It's an ego problem. Big one at that

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#99

Post by kingcharles »

simonw wrote: post #34

It's not just performance here: colour grading is really important too. Many years ago I had a fascinating incident with a client. We were building a custom skin for our product for them, and they had quite a striking brand identity that we tried to match. When we showed them what we had built they complained that it was illegible. Eventually, after visiting their office, we found that they were all working on cheap…

Indeed. Buy a crappy 15 year old LCD TV with HDMI and hook it up. Most of the really cheap Chinese models have terrible gamma that means half the colors look the same.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#100

Post by watersb »

There are lots of good options for sub-$200 laptops at Wal Mart right now. ChromeBooks or little Windows machines.

Every web dev should use one.

I am fascinated by the low end options, you learn a lot about a system when it's pushed to its limits. Or maybe you learn even more about your pain threshold...

I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. I don't recall the source, via Horace Dedieu maybe.

My first job out of college was at a spaceship company. One of the most senior engineers told me of the footrest he had designed for early 747 airliners. First Class. He considered it his greatest work.

That foot stool was quite literally more difficult than rocket science.

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