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I love my GPD Micro PC

blog.danieljanus.pl

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Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#71

Post by haolez »

avg_dev wrote: post #64

Interesting article. I never thought I’d see a moving line of poetry on a HN article, least of all one about PC hardware, and yet here I am. > I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes I’ve discovered the pleasure of walking around my city since the pandemic started and when the weather is nice it’s a really wonderful thing to do. Even this morning it was lightly misting and still I enjoyed my walk. > It dual-boots Wi…

Until Microsoft start putting ads and Telemetry in your shiny new WSL environment :)

I'm seriously considering not upgrading to Windows 11 and just move back to Linux.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#72

Post by 800xl »

This reminds me of why I like cheap little Chromebooks. The cost to utility ratio is amazing for a little over 100 bucks, I don't worry much about the laptop getting damaged or lost, more ports than a MacBook, and a Linux VM is built in.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#73

Post by VectorLock »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #4

reminds me of the oqo, which I was really excited about back in the mid-2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO wonder how this form factor w/ some arm iron in it would perform... I tend to use my lappy plugged in to a real keyboard/monitor to get anything done, so the small size is very attractive.

OQO was proto Kickstarter disappointment.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#74

Post by rr808 »

I really thought $200 (non-Microsoft) Windows tablets with bluetooth keyboards were going to succeed. Small, cheap, powerful enough to run terminals, use a browser and read books online. I guess all laptops are cheap enough these days.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#75

Post by justusthane »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #30

Tangential, but: > I’m very vigilant and still a bit freaked out when I carry the Macbook around. Careful in tight spaces! Better not hop on a city bike with it in my backpack, ’cause what if I fall? I've actually found MacBooks to be impressively sturdy. Perhaps I've been lucky. I've dropped my 2016 Intel MBP once while coming out of my car, it hit the pavement on its corner. There was a little dent in the corner, a…

When my 2014 MBP was just a couple years old I drove away with it on the roof of my car (granted, in a soft plastic case). It fell off on the highway where it laid between lanes until someone stopped and picked it up and contacted me.

Small dent in one of the corners from hitting the pavement, but it’s still going strong today. Battle scars.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#76

Post by dTal »

stakkur wrote: post #46

When I see expensive ($600+), small niche toys like this, I always think "what is that, a keyboard for ants?" I appreciate clever ideas, but it has to be practical--and my hands (and neck and shoulders) need a usable keyboard. Otherwise, it's a toy.

It's actually surprisingly practical. It's designed for thumb typing, rather than touch typing. The keys are clicky and easy to hit. I can do about 60WPM on it.

(this comment typed on a GPD Micro PC :)

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#77

Post by tomcam »

metadat wrote: post #66
tomcam wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have found the MacBook Air family to be hardy. Have owned probably 20 of them since they came out. Rock solid hardware, modulo a certain butterfly keyboard incident or three.

They've been around for approximately thirteen years, do you really churn through one every 7-9 months?

I owned businesses. I didn't use all of them myself. I do tend to buy The Latest Thing every year or two. And my purchase history of computers is of interest to you because...?

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#78

Post by jabbany »

bragr wrote: post #65

My experience with GPD was pretty bad in the past. I had the first generation Pocket, and while on paper it was exactly what I wanted, in practice what I received felt more like a development unit in terms of build quality and the software. It would only run their custom remix of ubuntu and not even that well, and that required a different BIOS flashed than the one for Windows. I tried to live with it for a bit, but…

Yeah, the Gen 1 pocket was quite questionable (I had one too), mostly because the hardware back then was hacked together. Support came mostly from the community rather than GPD as they were already working on the next gen Win and Pocket (which makes sense, their goal was never to make a LTS device).

I remember the Gen 1 pocket as having these problems:

- The display was actually taken from a tablet display so it was oriented as portrait in hardware and flipped to landscape in software. So you often got cases where Windows updates, entering the bios, or installing Linux would start off with the wrong UI orientation.

- The screen hinge cover was plastic and the fitment of it against the aluminum unibody shell was not perfect. It would kind of obscure the vent and sometimes squeaked.

- The PD charging was ... poorly implemented. It would only try to negotiate 12V PD, which most chargers and power banks did not support. There were also issues with passthrough charging via docks and just UBS-C dock compatibility issues everywhere (though USB-C docks are not perfect with even proper computers from mainstream OEMs even today).

- The cooling design was very beta and you often had throttling issues and the CPU not boosting up (0.9 GHz is not a fun place to be at). Again community fixes existed but definitely an experimental device.

This space has gotten considerably more mature over the years. By the time I moved to the OneMix 2S Yoga, I essentially didn't have any negative experiences with the device at all (my only gripe is that the active pen tech requires AAAA batteries and unless you take them out they'll just run out every month with or without use). In fact the new GPD Win Max 2 seems exceedingly attractive since they apparently still listen to enthusiast community feedback unlike regular laptop OEMs... Ryzen 6800U, 16:10 display, 16-32G RAM, dual M.2 slots for 2 NVME ssds, 4G LTE modem, thunderbolt support... the list goes on.

If I had to say, the slightly rough part with enthusiast UMPCs is that they end up being a "committee designed" device that crams in a bunch of features to maximize the audience they appeal to , so they don't have any consistent design language. Things will change drastically across each generation, unlike traditional OEMs.

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#79

Post by jabbany »

gsibble wrote: post #25

At a previous job, I was the engineering manager for a new neo-bank and was on call 24/7 for it. I have a beefy Lenovo P52 that I hated carrying around and leaving in my car lest it get stolen. So I got a GPD Pocket. It fit very well into my back pocket. Not only did it work great for emergency situations (I ran Ubuntu MATE as well) when I needed to SSH into machines, check stuff on Datadog, edit code to make a quick…

> It also got a lot of onlookers asking questions about it, leading to those ever so fun random conversations that can lead to night long friendships over wine and coffee.

Hah. So true!

It's always interesting to see that even today with all the fancy miniature devices we have, how many people still see these UMPCs as almost magic. My Zaurus in the early 2000s used to get this kind of attention which was understandable. But I'm surprised that random people will still strike up conversations whenever I use modern UMPCs in public...

Re: I love my GPD Micro PC

#80

Post by prmoustache »

gsibble wrote: post #25

At a previous job, I was the engineering manager for a new neo-bank and was on call 24/7 for it. I have a beefy Lenovo P52 that I hated carrying around and leaving in my car lest it get stolen. So I got a GPD Pocket. It fit very well into my back pocket. Not only did it work great for emergency situations (I ran Ubuntu MATE as well) when I needed to SSH into machines, check stuff on Datadog, edit code to make a quick…

I also bought a GPD pocket 2 to be able to do bicycle rides or socialize without having to carry a large backpack while on call.
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