I want to take you through what I feel are the needs of modern computing. Caveat: I do not have completely typical use. I currently have three laptops and two desktops. Nobody should buy a desktop unless they already have two laptops. This is more for my record keeping:
- Laptops
- Dell Mini 9, netbook, $350, Intel atom processor, first full laptop with no moving parts (solid-state hard drive and no cooling fan needed)
- Asus a900, netbook, $180, Intel atom processor, cheap and energy efficient (~10W), refurbished (used)
- Dell M70, Intel Pentium M processor, big-ass laptop, Rose-Hulman 2005 student laptop, old but with a beatiful 1920×1280 screen
- Desktops
- Handmade “Bennebulous”, $1000, AMD athlon processor, an old footstool I made into a computer, clear Lexan sides, low power, 1 TB hard drive, rubber caster wheels, blu-ray and floppy disk drive
- Handmade “Bennaroo”, $350, Intel atom processor, size of a dictionary, clear all-Lexan frame, 320 GB hard drive, external blu-ray, and a cool front display panel that shows date/time, song info, and internet usage
Among the more important things worth mentioning is that both my desktops use a 490nm LED as a power light because it is my favorite color. I import them from Germany after using them at an internship. Disk drives are a thing of the past. Using a CD is like using a floppy disk drive a few years ago. Energy efficiency is important to me for the philosophical reason of helping the environment, but it is practically about noise reduction because hot computers require loud fans that make noise. I built “Bennaroo” because it was cheaper to make and put in my suitcase than ship Bennebulous to Saudi Arabia. I – and a very few others – beat manufacturers to punch on the super-tiny computers. They are down to rhyming thesaurus size devices that can sit on the back of your monitor.
I am very happy keeping things small and portable. This is a reaction to the huge laptop I had to/got to buy as a college freshman in college. Custom building a computer is a wonderful project and requires very basic knowledge of what hooks up to what and mechanical knowledge of building a box that air can flow around (put holes it in). It is wonderful in this age that you can just buy a bunch of stuff off the internet, spread it out on a table, hook connectors together, and it just works. Desktops are pointless for almost everybody. Even with an external monitor, you pay little premium for it in the cost of the monitor and the loss of performance they undergo in making them mobile. This is the past, what about the future?
In the future there will by synergy. Nobody knows what this means. Ipads, god willing, will go quietly into the night. Ipads will fail because there exist natural sizes of things that people like to carry around. Except for women with large purses, most anybody who can carry around an iPad could carry around a slightly larger 10″ laptop. Pluto will always be a planet, books should always be read on paper, and kids should get off my lawn. Laptops will continue to exist because of the strength of the form factor.
My next step is a more powerful laptop. When I go back to the US of A and the end of the semester/start of the summer, I plan to get an Alienware m11x. It will cost ~$1000. It will provides the horsepower I currently miss from my atom processors. Let me tell you about Atoms.
Intel had two objectives with Atom processors: low-end computer processors for emerging market and something to test new manufacturing techniques on. Atom resulted. It was never meant to be sold to Americans. They wanted to charge the developed world for computing power they often didn’t need. My current conspiracy theory is not intended, but the result of better hardware allowing for lazier software. My classic example is that Microsoft Word takes the same amount of time (if not more) to start now versus a few years ago. These things have only 50,000,000,000 transistors versus the 500,000,000,000 of even modest processors today. So think population of the West Coast of the US versus all of the Americas. They are simple and less prone to failure and thus perfect to move them ahead to the next processing node (Intel is going to 32 from 45 nm). You could fit 1,000 across a strand of hair.