othercharles
- to the informed, a device like this should not be necessary. It did not exist because it was never required, and where a desire for mobile screenspace is required, better solutions have existed for a long time. I define "better" as "less hinges", "more optional", "cheaper", and ideas along this dimension. A skilled engineer carrying this without an extraordinary reason would automatically strike me as a deeply impractical person, thus limiting the trust I would be willing to place in them. I appreciate trying to push boundaries, but the instant interpretation is that it could only be intended as something like a souped up Mini Cooper covered in blinking LEDs and under-the-hood neon lighting.
- to the uninformed, a laptop like this basically scares normal people away. One of the greatest accomplishments of the technology industry in the past 10 years is that regular people now carry laptops. There is no longer any reason to stand out, so it is even more noteworthy than ever before when one explicitly chooses to stand out (we lost our "special case" rights no later than 2010). You can pack an 8-core workstation with 16TB of NVMe in a perfectly useful and unobtrusive device the average person might only suspect were slightly outdated. The tone set by this device would be the same as wheeling a minicomputer into a coffee shop in the mid 1980s -- outlandish, curious, unaware of social norms. It would be as if you'd willingly dress in a neon pink 80s shell suit out of a desire to avoid being hit by passing cars, when the alternative is simply to stay on the sidewalk.
Social norms matter. They open doors just as easily as they slam doors shut. And this laptop most certainly would have people saying "no" more often in relative terms than they might say "yes" to you, much as turning up to a business meeting wearing that neon shell suit rather than a formal jacket would in most scenarios.
I hope this helps
Similarly, the second comment regarding what I believe many would agree are obvious social implications arising from a device like this could also have been better phrased. Isn't it also a rule on HN to treat all comments as being made in good faith where multiple interpretations exist? In any case I apologise for the phrasing, it was rather blunt and certainly somewhat off the point, but I also believe it captured important sentiments that would have been difficult to conjure with alternative phrasing.
I have no idea what "1 vCPU" means in this context but severely doubt it even means "1 hyperthread", unless the physical hardware were something like dual 16 core or single 32 core chips.
Definite pass
Separately, (random top Google result cutpaste):
Architectural-level power optimization can target different system
components such as CPU, caches, main memory,and buses [5, 6, 22, 4]. Power
spent in off-chip buses can be a significant portion of the overall power
budget. As an example, the core power consumption of Intel Celeron at
266MHz is 16W, while its off-chip bus (for a standard configuration)
operating at 133 MHz consumes 3.3W [12, 13]. The contribution of off-chip
bus power consumption to the overall power budget increases even more for
embedded systems with low-power processor cores and memories, making
off-chip buses a potential candidate for power optimization. Figure
1 shows the power consumption due to off-chip data bus for several embedded
benchmark codes as a percentage of the overall power consumption (which
includes processor data path, caches, buses, TLB, register file,
instruction issue logic, clock, and off-chip memory) for an
embedded processor. From this figure, we see that the off-chip data bus
consumes between 9.8% and 23.2% of the total power consumed by the system
depending on the benchmark being run. So, reducing the power consumption
of the off-chip data bus would reduce the overall power consumption of
the system to a considerable extentHigh performance ARM with m.2 PCI, not sure, but guessing if it's around it probably isn't cheap
This is not to suggest replacing a keyboard with a touchscreen, any more than suggest a keyboard is no longer required since a mouse or trackpad is available. It's just an additional form of input, and one I'd personally definitely miss.
Touch is definitely much faster to get through certain styles of forms. The first that came to mind where I'd often tend to touch is the TFL (Transport for London) journey planner.
After 12 years on Macs I picked up a touchscreen PC and would simply never go back to a non-touch machine, it is not essential, but it is incredibly convenient. Why shouldn't it be possible to touch rather than tap when appropriate? After a few months selecting an appropriate option for any particular input is totally natural and subconscious. I have no idea why noting the lack of touch on a Mac should be considered "biased".