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These days I simply can't recommend anyone (especially nontechnical people) buy a computing device that isn't either: - An Apple device - First-party (Microso

These days I simply can't recommend anyone (especially nontechnical people) buy a computing device that isn't either: - An Apple device - First-party (Microsoft Surface, Pixel phone, etc) - Running Linux (assuming they can deal with everything else that comes with that) Even these aren't perfect, but everything else I assume to be hot garbage unless you're planning to install your own OS anyway. The problem, though, is that this mostly excludes the real budget-tier devices (at least for nontechnical folks), which is unfair to those who can't afford anything else Burn it all down

nrki 4y ago
Anecdotally, I purchased a surface pro 7 and the ridiculous number of unexpected automatic updates and reboots without warning (overnight) lost me a bunch of data. Luckily it wasn't work related, but it has continued my deep-seated hatred of the MS "user experience". Don't get me started on the tracking & surveillance crap built into Windows 10+. It was okay after about a year of random reboots. It's a shame because MS was looking to become "better", but they're just better at increasing their bottom line at the expense of user data and their privacy. Software development and everything feeding into it should have a code of ethics like other professions: medical, law, engineering. I don't know how it will survive long-term without losing trust. But then again it's been limping on from scandal to breach to incident to overreach for decades now.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  > Don't get me started on the tracking & surveillance crap built into Windows 10+. Doesn't MacOS have the same amount of telemetry? I guess it is rather hard to quantify, but MacOS still does collects a lot of data
- LionTamer 4y ago
  Software development actually does have a code of ethics [0] (I learned about it through a university assignment in a software design class). [0]: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
- delecti 4y ago
  A Surface device just gets you away from additional OEM crap (since most MS "OEM crap" is included in Windows anyway). You still have to deal with running an OS written by Microsoft.
lowercased 4y ago
Apple or MS Surface or Pixel are the only ones where there's some direct connection between quality (os quality, ux, physical build quality, etc) and the people actually building it. Every other player who is not first party can just point fingers, it seems. A couple years ago, when there was an MS Store in a physical mall in the area, I got close to buying a surface book (or... surface pro, or ... I can't remember the naming). The build quality and specs seemed decent in person. It's been the only time I have been tempted to jump back in to the windows world in the past... 15+ years. Even google - I bought what as a 'flagship' phone from them in ... 2010(?). About 2 weeks later, it was discontinued, and I couldn't get any updates a year later. And the experience of setting it up and using gmail was... abysmally slow and just BAD. And this was getting whatever their 'top of the line' was at that time (it cost north of $500 at that time). I've dipped my toes in and out of Android over the years, needing to get devices for testing client projects, etc. Sometimes it's been OK, but never enough to make me trust it again. If the experience from google on their own device with their own service was subpar, I just don't have the time to dig in and 'make it work'. When I showed someone, they told me the problem was gmail was slow because I had 'too much email'. As if the selling point of gmail for the previous 4-5 years wasn't "we'll hold all your email".
strix_varius 4y ago
While this is covered under "first-party," I wanted to name the Chromebook category here. Getting my father a Chromebook totally eliminated the regular fix-it sessions that I'd gotten used to having with all his previous computers.
- darzu 4y ago
  Yes. Technologists seem to have a blindspot around Chromebooks even though they are quite popular. Related rant to OP: compute power is so ubiquitously affordable nowadays that there is no excuse for apps to be slow even on these cheapest new devices. I recently made a 3D game in my custom engine for the Ludum Dare 51 game jam[0] and I was shocked to see it run at a solid 50fps on a $118 IdeaPad 3[1]. 50fps means every _20ms_ the game does at least: - builds an oct-tree and auxiliary data structures for 1000+ physics objects, traverse this to find collisions, solve all physics constraints, compute new transform matrices for each obj. - serialize and upload each object, view, and scene data to the igpu (no dedicated gpu) - do vertex transformations on ~25k vertices + rasterize 30k triangles TWICE: once for the main camera, once for the shadow camera; rendering to 5 textures/gbuffers - run two post processing passes over 1,049,088 pixels, doing outline + concavity detection, vignette, and gamma correction (18 texture samples per pixel). - all the game logic including: reading inputs, character controller, firing cannons, updating projectiles, splintering meshes, updating game state, audio, UI, custom ECS query engine, etc. The whole payload, unminified code + 3D assets + sound + textures, is 1.2mb over the wire. This is an engine I built over the last ~year in javascript(!), so it's not had nearly as much optimization as Unity etc. And yet every day I encounter websites and apps that fail to be responsive to even basic button clicks. There's no excuse for this. [0] https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b...
  - going_ham 4y ago
    There is some serious flaw with software people (all stakeholders). It's like they are addicted to "staying relevant." Most of the time people don't need new features. Why isn't it being drilled over to the project managers? Instead of maintaining and supporting what they created, they are more into ruining and adding bloats of features. (looking at you, Jira). There are enough engineers to have custom tailored softwares. Figma was a stellar example of one well-designed single purpose software. All they did was maintained and optimized the crap out of it! Game dev is one crazy field that proves how bloated the modern tech stack is.
celestialcheese 4y ago
100% agreed - but I'd also add Framework[1]. Completely unaffiliated with them, just a fan. They make an incredible product for a new company and the ability to repair and upgrade parts in the laptop form factor is incredible. 1- https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/

nrki 4y ago

Anecdotally, I purchased a surface pro 7 and the ridiculous number of unexpected automatic updates and reboots without warning (overnight) lost me a bunch of data. Luckily it wasn't work related, but it has continued my deep-seated hatred of the MS "user experience". Don't get me started on the tracking & surveillance crap built into Windows 10+. It was okay after about a year of random reboots. It's a shame because MS was looking to become "better", but they're just better at increasing their bottom line at the expense of user data and their privacy. Software development and everything feeding into it should have a code of ethics like other professions: medical, law, engineering. I don't know how it will survive long-term without losing trust. But then again it's been limping on from scandal to breach to incident to overreach for decades now.

woojoo666 4y ago
> Don't get me started on the tracking & surveillance crap built into Windows 10+. Doesn't MacOS have the same amount of telemetry? I guess it is rather hard to quantify, but MacOS still does collects a lot of data
LionTamer 4y ago
Software development actually does have a code of ethics [0] (I learned about it through a university assignment in a software design class). [0]: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
delecti 4y ago
A Surface device just gets you away from additional OEM crap (since most MS "OEM crap" is included in Windows anyway). You still have to deal with running an OS written by Microsoft.

lowercased 4y ago

Apple or MS Surface or Pixel are the only ones where there's some direct connection between quality (os quality, ux, physical build quality, etc) and the people actually building it. Every other player who is not first party can just point fingers, it seems. A couple years ago, when there was an MS Store in a physical mall in the area, I got close to buying a surface book (or... surface pro, or ... I can't remember the naming). The build quality and specs seemed decent in person. It's been the only time I have been tempted to jump back in to the windows world in the past... 15+ years. Even google - I bought what as a 'flagship' phone from them in ... 2010(?). About 2 weeks later, it was discontinued, and I couldn't get any updates a year later. And the experience of setting it up and using gmail was... abysmally slow and just BAD. And this was getting whatever their 'top of the line' was at that time (it cost north of $500 at that time). I've dipped my toes in and out of Android over the years, needing to get devices for testing client projects, etc. Sometimes it's been OK, but never enough to make me trust it again. If the experience from google on their own device with their own service was subpar, I just don't have the time to dig in and 'make it work'. When I showed someone, they told me the problem was gmail was slow because I had 'too much email'. As if the selling point of gmail for the previous 4-5 years wasn't "we'll hold all your email".

strix_varius 4y ago

While this is covered under "first-party," I wanted to name the Chromebook category here. Getting my father a Chromebook totally eliminated the regular fix-it sessions that I'd gotten used to having with all his previous computers.

darzu 4y ago
Yes. Technologists seem to have a blindspot around Chromebooks even though they are quite popular. Related rant to OP: compute power is so ubiquitously affordable nowadays that there is no excuse for apps to be slow even on these cheapest new devices. I recently made a 3D game in my custom engine for the Ludum Dare 51 game jam[0] and I was shocked to see it run at a solid 50fps on a $118 IdeaPad 3[1]. 50fps means every _20ms_ the game does at least: - builds an oct-tree and auxiliary data structures for 1000+ physics objects, traverse this to find collisions, solve all physics constraints, compute new transform matrices for each obj. - serialize and upload each object, view, and scene data to the igpu (no dedicated gpu) - do vertex transformations on ~25k vertices + rasterize 30k triangles TWICE: once for the main camera, once for the shadow camera; rendering to 5 textures/gbuffers - run two post processing passes over 1,049,088 pixels, doing outline + concavity detection, vignette, and gamma correction (18 texture samples per pixel). - all the game logic including: reading inputs, character controller, firing cannons, updating projectiles, splintering meshes, updating game state, audio, UI, custom ECS query engine, etc. The whole payload, unminified code + 3D assets + sound + textures, is 1.2mb over the wire. This is an engine I built over the last ~year in javascript(!), so it's not had nearly as much optimization as Unity etc. And yet every day I encounter websites and apps that fail to be responsive to even basic button clicks. There's no excuse for this. [0] https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b...
- going_ham 4y ago
  There is some serious flaw with software people (all stakeholders). It's like they are addicted to "staying relevant." Most of the time people don't need new features. Why isn't it being drilled over to the project managers? Instead of maintaining and supporting what they created, they are more into ruining and adding bloats of features. (looking at you, Jira). There are enough engineers to have custom tailored softwares. Figma was a stellar example of one well-designed single purpose software. All they did was maintained and optimized the crap out of it! Game dev is one crazy field that proves how bloated the modern tech stack is.

celestialcheese 4y ago

100% agreed - but I'd also add Framework[1]. Completely unaffiliated with them, just a fan. They make an incredible product for a new company and the ability to repair and upgrade parts in the laptop form factor is incredible. 1- https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/