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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

#221

Post by chx »

lucb1e wrote: post #153
chx wrote: post #140

Misleading title. A 12.5" laptop is pretty normal these days. The One Mix Yoga 2S, the spiritual successor of the Vaio P, the first ever 7" laptop with a proper CPU (=Intel Core instead of Atom) and proper storage (= SSD instead of eMMC and then NVMe at that). I am in love with that thing.

It's still tiny for a laptop, even if a credit card sized laptop based on a rpi would exist. A normal size is 15.6, large is above that and small is below. You can't properly work on a screen smaller than 14" or so, and I'm sure there'll be lots of people that tell me they work on this in the train every day just fine (the logic being "when challenged, we can find many people on HN that are fine squinting at a 7 inch…

> A normal size is 15.6

Citation needed. A normal size is 14" from where I sit, that's what most ThinkPad T series laptops had been for a very very long time. Yes there is a T5x0 series but the T4x0 always had more variants and the Anniversary Edition 25 is also 14". Also, a 14" laptop is small enough to fit across a carry on, a 15" can't do that.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#222

Post by saltcured »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #90
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 .

Trackpoint/clit-mouse is awesome. It has a higher learning curve, but far more speed and control than a trackpad. Basically, I have not yet met a trackpad user who is not painful to watch as a trackpoint user. - You can have pixel-level precision - You can have fast movements from edge to edge of the screen - You can use it without moving your fingers away from the keyboard - You can use it without moving your elbows…

Ha, the trackpoint is a necessity for me too. I have acquired various Thinkpad USB and bluetooth keyboards so that my desktop and home media computers also have it. I feel a bit baffled if forced to use a trackpad on someone else's machine. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, since I first learned on a Thinkpad T20.

However, I also use Fedora Linux almost exclusively, and have suffered through several shifts in the drivers and input systems. There were times that my desktop trackpoint became much harder for me to use, as the behavior of the cursor went haywire. I was never able to find configurable parameters to put it completely back to normal, but instead had to also retrain my fingers a bit.

I find that I am much more "fluent" on my laptop with a 1080 screen. On my desktop with side-by-side 4K screens, my efforts are a bit spastic. I have traded off precision so that I can get the cursor around all that real estate without coffee breaks in the middle of long movements. But, trying to grab window corners and other small targets can be a bit hit or miss as I over-shoot.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#224

Post by teddyc »

owenversteeg wrote: post #207
joezydeco wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a real hacker's port, dammit! Too young to remember the PC parallel port? That was the hacker port.

Hah, how could anyone forget them? lp0 on fire and daisy chained dongles (back when dongles were dongles), those were the days :) That said, I think the parallel port died out not too long ago. I remember the serial port went first (2003?), then a few years later (2005?) the parallel port went, which caused a number of people to think their parallel ports were serial ports. I know nearly anything with XP had both, an…

Love this: "back when dongles were dongles"

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#225

Post by stevenwliao »

forgingahead wrote: post #149
Synaesthesia wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install OSX on most intel based laptops, getting the drivers for certain things can be a pain. For wifi and bluetooth you may need to replace the internal card.

Sure I get all that -- my comment was that if someone made an easy to use alternative with OSX on this machine (basically buy it and it works, simple Hackintosh), there's likely a good market for that. Anecdotally, I'd pay essentially up to what I'd fork out for a Macbook Pro now. It just needs to work, the way Apple stuff works, without any headaches. The problem with Apple machines for me now is that they've done a…

> If someone made an easy to use alternative with OSX

Psystar did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation#Legal_issu...

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#226

Post by learnfromstory »

Foivos wrote: post #152
learnfromstory wrote: post #21

I see tiny has been redefined. Doesn’t anyone remember when there were 6” subnotebooks in the vaio catalog?

They also were the futuristic portable computers in "Terminator salvation".

Interesting! Terminator 2 used the Atari Portfolio as the portable computer with hackerly qualities.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#227

Post by znpy »

harperlee wrote: post #182
znpy wrote: post #179

Its just moronic how laptop companies are rushing to make smaller laptops at the cost of basically everything. A ThinkPad-X220-sized laptop would still be absolutely acceptable both in size and weight, and could have all (or at least, most of) the ports that one could need. And swappable battery, keyboard, ram, disk etc.

It’s not moronic, it’s just not for you. The moronic thing is to kill bigger laptop lines. But I travel a lot and can’t use work’s laptop for my things, so I asolutely need something below 1kg to not kill my back with 2 heavy laptops, I don’t mind 12”, I’d like to also draw in it with a stylus, and I can’t use an ipad for offline programming... so the convergence of laptops to tablets is something I like.

I understand that if you move around a lot you prefer traveling lighter.

But this doesn't mean that a whole industry must drop all of the features (ports, in this case)

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#228

Post by yyyk »

jpindar wrote: post #206
yyyk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some old UPSs and industrial machinary use RS232 connections. This can be solved by other means (e.g. USB to RS232 adapters), but virtual com ports are not helpful there.

I use virtual comports (with an FTDI adapter) every day to control industrial instrumentation, and I'm honestly curious to know specifically why they are not helpful in your case, so I can be prepared in case any of my clients experience the same issues. Does your equipment require the higher voltage levels (I don't remember the last time I saw any that required the full 12V), or do you need all the handshaking lines…

Our assessment was that latency would be a problem for $client. Eventually, it turned out the "just throw ancient hardware at it until it dies" was far more efficient then going along with it.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#229

Post by yyyk »

intopieces wrote: post #220
yyyk wrote: post #119

Half the comments seem to be surprised by VGA. But just about every 1080p monitor has the port, and even Steam statistics[0] show that over 60% of their users use 1080p, and about 75 percent use resolutions that are VGA compatible. 4K computer monitors are still uncommon - and Steam is likely tilted towards higher resolutions. In short: Most existing monitors support VGA, and probably a good deal of those actually us…

Sure. But monitors don’t move around, so who cares what ports are on them? A VGA to whatever adapter can just hang there. I fully understand that there’s a network engineering / hacker group that goes place to place hooking into all manner of legacy hardware, and that this laptop is a welcome sight to those who have been left behind by the push towards simplicity. However, the implication (in other comments) that VGA…

I was arguing for the flip side of your comment: that in practice VGA is still supported by most display equipment and is often used, and that including support for a still widely used port is not all that surprising.

Maybe five or ten years from now (given long lifetimes of equipment in question) it would be surprising to still have a VGA port.

I agree that docks and adapters are perfectly fine, at least for me and my use cases. But it's not unreasonable for some users to desire direct support for a widely used port. I've had cases where adapters went bad and created issues - the most serious one was a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter which caused display artefacts. But I've never yet had a VGA adapter cause issues. To each their own I guess.

Re: VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports

#230

Post by owenversteeg »

wishinghand wrote: post #106
owenversteeg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Nearly all projectors, even new and expensive ones I've used, do not have HDMI I can’t remember the time I saw a projector that didn’t have an HDMI port. Are these in a niche you frequent? The consumer and semi-professional ones I run into at libraries, Meetup spaces, and offices all have HDMI and sometimes DisplayPort. They sometimes have VGA or one of the ones that look like VGA but have more pins.

I've had to plug in to quite a number of projectors; I've owned ~5 myself in the last few years. I've used projectors in conference centers, at YCombinator events, startup spaces, universities... Maybe 5% (and that is generous) had HDMI. Almost all of these were high end projectors, in pretty nice spots (in the US/Europe.) Furthermore, as someone else noted, if it's a mounted TV or projector, even if it does have HDMI I've never seen it be accessible.

I think new consumer projectors are far more likely to have HDMI than professional projectors though. A quick look at Amazon confirmed my suspicion that HDMI is a heavily advertised feature for consumer projectors and is almost always important enough to be in the title. Companies, meeting centers and universities are all likely to order from a non-Amazon source. Which is good, because on Amazon I just had to scroll my way through weird advertisements for "VANKYO", "GUDEE", "Dr. J", "DHAWS" and "OKCOO" (adorned with ugly "2019" badges like terrible spam Android apps) before making my way to a single legitimate projector brand.

Even for consumer projectors, though, I think HDMI is fairly recent and will take some time to get out there. When I was shopping for a new consumer projector two years ago, there weren't any with HDMI that fit my modest demands for brightness and quality, but that seems to have changed.

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