A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
A proper non-Apple Macbook Air equivalent. Because imo for the average user that just browses the internet and does some light office work it seems perfect. And with that I mean:
Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.
Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it's trying to compete with the Air.
Sadly doesn't seem to be fanless, which imo is a really nice feature when you dont care about high performance. Not sure if in the real world you can find good deals on the snapdragon laptops, but list price is also quite high and that keyboard with touch function keys doesn't seem great either.
So in my book that's still no match for what a macbook air m1/2 offers, which by now are a few years old and can be found for decent prices. They might be aiming at the same market, but aren't equal.
I'll join the ranks asking for a perfect phone.
Mine would have:
I'd like to add some strength too. I don't give a shit about the latest AI fuzzy on any phone, but if it would please last at least a year without cracking the screen or the back that would be amazing. And a record for me. Doesn't have to be razor thin either. Just make it beefy.
A smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know Iβll have to charge it more often or itβll be thicker. Iβm willing to make that trade-off.
And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I donβt give a shit. I use my phone for reading text, listening to music, and taking pictures. Just make the fucking camera top of the line and let me use my good headphones. If itβs several millimeters thicker, so be it.
Phones with smaller screens
A media player that isn't just a modified android tablet in a box with an HDMI output. (And loaded with spyware). And doesn't require an always-on internet connection.
I'd like some PC support for HDMI CEC
My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.
My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what's hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.
I'm aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I've been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.
Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.
I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it's not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I'm currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I'm not a billboard. I'm not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked "hey, what laptop is that" than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don't come at me with stickers.
I'll extend that to every product as well. I hate branding specially in clothing.
A low power 17 inch or larger laptop in a sub $1K price point. I have big hands (and crap vision) and I use the fuck out of numpad, but i really dont need a gaming GPU or a higher end cpu in a laptop.
the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then itβs a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
Edit: Actually, there are some decent options for Snapdragon 7/8 refurbs on Amazon. Mass market brands can be so hit or miss by model, so thisβll take some research, but it looks like there are 20-30 results to consider.
A IP68 e-ink Linux phone with both wireless charging and induction charging (to charge other devices), no cameras at all, solar panel on the back, usb-4 and headphone jack, 1TB storage , 15'000 mAh battery, two separate WiFi cards (to allow simultaneous hotspot and client use), and finally a radio transiever for both short range comms and long range AM and FM radio.
Technically possible with current technology, but as far as I can tell, completely unavailable in the consumer market.
Price, size and weight are irrelevant for all usecasses of such a product, as far as I'm concerned.
I'd really love to find a new radio for my car that: 1) can serve as a monitor for my back-up camera, and 2) isn't a fucking touch screen.
There are models that are one or the other, but I haven't found anything that's both. The closest I've found is a compromise - a touchscreen that also has a few tactile controls. But I don't want to have to rely on any touch screen when I'm driving. I simply don't feel compelled enough to spend $400+ for a frustrating half-measure.
I settled on a SPH-10BT a few years ago. It didn't have backup camera support though IIRC there is a radar add-on, but don't know how available it is anymore.
It seems insane to me, especially with the prevalence of Apple/Android Auto, that no car company is willing to have the phone be the supplemental screen in the car.
That there's no built-in phone mounts in cars still bugs me. Put wireless charging on a spot on the dash, NFC/Bluetooth to get it to automatically snap into car mode. Don't have to develop an in-house UI that everyone hates and can focus on making a car.
As I'm getting more and more into keyboards, I've realised I dont want a laptop anymore.
I want a powerful phone (16GB RAM, 8-cores) that I can:
That is, I can come home from work, slide my phone into a USB-C dock and start typing away on my Linux desktop with my fancy keyboard
A phone with a 5-5.5" screen. I'd be fine with a midrange chipset and camera. The Zenfone 10 was the last one that even came closer but they would only support it for two years and locked the bootloader (and lied about the unlock service eventually coming back online).
A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230
Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can't be that crazy of a product. There's already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.
Cheap large e-ink android screen. Doesn't need to do anything other than be a consistent, always on display with a long battery life.
A 3.5mm-to-Bluetooth adapter that can do simultaneous headphones + mic. I have a device with no Bluetooth, only a 3.5mm TRRS jack (headphones+mic). I want to connect it to a wireless Bluetooth headset but the only adapters I can find won't do both at the same time, only one or the other.
There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can't just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.
if you're saying what i think you're saying you may be interested in something like a nexdock
Basically a laptop with no internals that acts as an external monitor, battery bank and peripherals for another device
A power efficient e-ink laptop.
A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don't care how chonky it is.
A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.
Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It's not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.
Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.
A Clockwork uConsole device that's a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they're alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn't mind a laptop in this format.
Toilet that posts updates to Facebook
A low power laptop with a massive battery that lasts a week.
Small portable pen plotter or printer that isn't thermal (thermal print fades)
A Linux phone with colour e-ink screen and writing capabilities like the reMarkable.
A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I've only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it's a bit pricey for something that I'd still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.
Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150
So... That
A device I'd really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that's something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.
Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d'etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.
You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you'd always have a backup ready that you could swap in.
Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn't need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.
This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn't have to worry about network connectivity. You'd still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.
A standalone remote or phone app that connects to my car's entertainment system that can control the satellite radio without the need for a passenger to have to lean way forward to use the touchscreen all the time. I miss the days of screen controls next to the cup holders instead of everything going through the touch screen.
A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom. This makes using the phone easier when it is being charged. Also, recessed camera lenses. Why do they have to stick out? When placing the phone on a surface, the camera lens cover will get scratches over time. If the phone was just one milimeter thicker, the cameras on the back wouldn't stick out and one wouldn't need a phone case, that adds to thickness anyway. It also would be nice if phone manufacturors would still have smaller screen sizes (max. 6") in their portfolio, as it is inconvenient to carry a larger phone in a pocket.
why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.
I have a GPD laptop with a tiny screen, itβs good enough to run most games. I changed the no name NVMe to a Samsung and itβs way more reliable and faster. Also runs Linux now. Built in game controller works well for most games (shows up as Xbox controller or a mouse using a switch).
Remember when MP3 players were a thing? Well I still listen to mp3 files, but I can't put them on my smartphone because manufacturers artificially reduce storage size on phones to force people to use cloud services, and the available mp3 players that accept microSD cards are remarkably bad in many ways. It makes me pessimistic about tech in general, there is no sense of humanism or building progress, that in the future the products will be easier or better. Based on current trends, it seems like in the future the tech will just be more exploitative and consumers are just captive at this point.
Depends what you call tech. I've been looking for a salt nic vape (say 10 watts) in the 1 ohm range with a easily replaceable battery for the last year. Bonus points if it doesn't leak to hell and gone. Haven't had a whole lot of luck with that so far.
Pretty much any portable device with a standard type, user replaceable battery. God bless Ryobi and the other power tool companies for building weird but useful tools beyond power drills. All with replaceable batteries.
At one point I was looking for any type robust portable storage media that had reasonable storage capacity and good shelf life (2+ years), and was large enough to actually write on a label what was on it. So far the closest I've seen since 2005 have been the portable SSDs and the newish USB m.2 enclosures but that's still not quite what I'm looking for. Too large and non-standardized. Gave up on it several years ago and built a publicly accessible Nextcloud server. Yes I'm an old fart, dislike cloud storage and miss the floppy, Zip and Mini-Disk storage formats. I currently have a dozen mystery jump drives sitting on my desk in a 3d printed rack with only the vaguest clue whats on any of them. Most of them so small you can't even put a key tag on them. I hate it.
A reliable multi port (4 or more) USB-C charger that can output 65+ watts on all of its ports at the same time.
A reliable source for 100w USB-c 3.x PD cables that don't cost an arm and a leg. Anker makes good PD cables but tops out at USB 2.whatever.
Pretty sure more would come to mind if I sat and though about it for a while, but I've got to head to work now.
A phone with current hardware but without a camera notch in the screen. I absolutely hate the notch, it annoys me on a deep level that I can't get over.
Direct replacement for the wonderful Facebook PortalTV unit. Its digital pan and zoom to follow a speaker is excellent. It could start and end calls completely hands-free before meta killed the service to which voice control was tethered. It sits on top of the TV, it does its job, and does it well.
Now that it's abandonware by Facebook, I need something else before its hardware dies. I have 4 of these in the field and some of them are with remote geriatrics who have no tech support, and it has to work.
I'm gonna miss it.
Rootable Android (or Linux) based "mp3 player". Basically an iPod touch. No cell radio.
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that's a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it's always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it's even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I'd even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the 'usable with one hand' criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I'd also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that's a pretty niche thing to be after.
I don't know if it's possible but it feels like a cheap box for (sata) hard drives would be super useful for people having a bunch of old drives. The only ones I can find are top of the line expensive NAS or DAS stuff for say 2 to 4 large drives, not my 7 drives from 500GB to 2TB...
I use a 5β¬ sata-usb connector but it's not very practical, a usb hub + 7 of these connectors would cost like 40β¬ ... Not reliable or anything but it would just need a box!
