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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#221

Post by Spooky23 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #110
Spooky23 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream. Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.

Even a low-end modern system only takes you so far back in time. Keep in mind that hardware improves roughly on line with Moore's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might only be a few years of development. The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse than a current low-end buy.

Try it first.

Moore’s law hasn’t been kind to x86 laptops, and the tricks used to speed things up are missing from low end celeron processors and binned SSDs. The cheap hardware and poor touchpads add to the charm.

I would bet that the 10 year old Lenovo would be surprisingly better than the shitty 2021 device.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#222

Post by meheleventyone »

mike50 wrote: post #197
meheleventyone wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.

There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.

The difference is that Minecraft and Roblox were phenomenally successful and demonstrate the addressable market exists. Making games for a low-spec is one thing. Making games that people with low-spec computers want to play is another.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#223

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

There is this maxim in that testing something is a great way to make your superiors care about it.

Even filming your site loading on a normal-powered device or a mobile connection and showing them the video may be enough to change their opinions. But yeah, some people won't change, no matter what.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#224

Post by newsclues »

vkk8 wrote: post #203
nirui wrote: post #91

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 ga…

> 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game. I wonder if they had any kind of proof of this. I would think that there are plenty of kids who could get their parents to pay five bucks for the game, but not 500 bucks to buy a fancy new computer.

If you look at the flip side people who can afford an expensive gaming pc can probably also afford a game which isn’t nearly as expensive

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#225

Post by einpoklum »

rtpg wrote: post #138
einpoklum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…

> Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search).

I would actually make the opposite statement, i.e. generally, webmail clients are significantly inferior to desktop clients in most respects: Feature set, responsiveness, flexibility etc. And of course, being potentially somewhat secure, as opposed to guaranteed no-security with webmail.

As for search functionality - I'm not sure you're right, but I'll grant you that some webmail providers, like Google, provide speedy search.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#227

Post by errcorrectcode »

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…

Unpopular opinion: Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free. OTOH, obsessing about performance to the exclusion of usability is equally insane. Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#228

Post by Aperocky »

animal_spirits wrote: post #85

> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…

> That is until a "statistician" realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.

This is highly likely to be grade A BS because it would be quite obvious to literally everyone flying an aircraft. It only make sense because the reader are not given a full minute to think about this.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#229

Post by Ekaros »

everyone wrote: post #40

HN is so full of rich silicon valley assholes, they've never even had to make do with a cheap laptop. They need an article like this to remind them how the proles live.

Now if only they had decent desktop screens...

I have gigabit internet and powerful desktop, with enough ram... But still they don't develop for my 1440p screen, but some crappy tablets...

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