I didn’t even know there was a desktop version. Now I feel emasculated.
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Dave Jones delivers as always
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I incline to agree but my little Sony is only half an inch taller than an iPhone 4, weighs the same and has a screen an inch larger. It has taken Apple ages to get rid of that stupid circular button. The iPhone 8 is 4.7 inches, the Xperia Compacts are 4.6 inches, I think that’s about the best tradeoff.
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A year or so after my brother-in-law got his Osborne, my other brother bought a Kaypro II, which he eventually gave to our mother around 1986 so she could write her memoirs on it. Still a heavy POS, but that 9" screen was a huge upgrade over the Osborne’s five-incher.
I hung onto it for years, but eventually ditched it around 1994 when I realized I’d already lost all the disks for it.
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i was fine with the “stupid” circular button – aside from being functional, it also helped to quickly visually orient which end was the top of the phone, and also served as an iconic shorthand when depicting an apple smartphone. but i’m also willing to venture that if Steve Jobs could’ve gotten away from having a physical button entirely while he was in charge, he would have done it.
my main problem with the larger phones/phablets is that they are too damn uncomfortable to carry in my front pants pocket. i have to take out the phone and put it on the desk/table whenever i sit down, which means i risk accidentally leaving it behind.
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I would never do that anyway, but I have shirts with pockets and big phones are too heavy.
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Me too – until I got an iPhone 7 whose button is mushy and harder to press than my 4. More “new, improved!” by a manufacturer.
This squared.
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Hehehe! Dunno why you should be - the capabilities were, I’m sure, practically the same. Mine wasn’t, um… luggable.
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Ours wasn’t all that luggable either. It mostly sat on a desk next to a daisy wheel printer to begin with. Remember those?
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I was the first student to ever turn in a paper printed by a dot matrix printer to my 9th grade English teacher. It was the “good” type with 18 pins not 9. Let’s see…
- The paper edges were too rough.
- It was too hard to read
- The lower case k and upper case K differed by only a dot (so any word starting with a k got circled for inappropriate capitalization)
She threatened to make me hand in the final “properly typed” but since I was a favored student otherwise, she let me get away with it.
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The weird thing is that Sony basically solved the problem - the side on/off switch is also the fingerprint reader - but in the US the fingerprint reader is disabled for some obscure IP reason.
The other thing is that the original iPhone button was design over function - it was simply too big and the Chinese iPhone copyists immediately replaced it with a flattened version. But it may have been there to disguise the amount of non-screen space required to get all the bits in.
I say weird because there have been counter examples, like the enormous fins on GM cars of the 1950s. They were regarded as a rather pointless design exercise, but in fact they improved fuel consumption by, eventually, around 15% on the freeway, and it’s said that GM actually encouraged the idea that they were pointless to discourage others copying their aerodynamic work. European/Japanese monoboxes have tiny vestigial fins around the backend which improve consumption and help keep the back clean.
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“Design over function” is Apple’s motto, I think. (Ducks thrown cabbages.)
Interesting about GM’s fins. I’ve always thought they were pure design conceit.
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Apparently the air follows the line of the fin and then detaches smoothly well away from turbulence-inducing surfaces. Attempts at streamlining the front end were less successful, mainly because they didn’t understand aerodynamics that well. One of the challenges of car design nowadays is to make efficiency features inconspicuous. For instance, look at modern front ends. Look at the little skirt just at the base of the front wing. It has an important air steering function, and you can see how they gradually came in over the last 15 years or so as manufacturers worked out how to create a front air dam without it looking like a boy racer.
It occurs to me that in ten years nobody will notice this stuff any more because convergent evolution means there’s going to be fewer and fewer shape variations, just as with the felidae.
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Like so many things automotive, we saw it coming first in NASCAR. The Car of Tomorrow template adopted in 2007 meant that, unlike all preceding seasons of “stock” car racing wherein race cars were intended to at least superficially resemble actual cars at actual dealerships, the new race cars would be pretty much identical in shape, differentiated only by paint and decals to evoke their Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, or Toyota-ness.
Actually, I noticed car designs starting to blend together and be less distinctive back in the 80s, following the jellybean-like aerodynamic look of the Ford Taurus and Probe. Cars are so much safer and more efficient now, but it sure is a lot less fun to watch them drive by now.
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I remember that as the tipping point. I remember riding the bus to Jr High with my bestie (who was also my partner in the Apple ][ lab for BASIC class) remarking on the new Taurus next to us, how it looked so futuristic that a time traveler from the past might mistake it for a space vehicle.
It’s funny how mundane that car looks now but it truly was the harbinger of the current paradigm. cars were still stuck emulating 70s k-cars up to then.
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Using brand new Tauruses painted to look like beat up old cop cars was one of the smartest art direction decisions made in Robocop.
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My youngest sister first used a computer before she was out of diapers, it was a Commodore 64.
When she was in 3rd grade, she typed up some homework assignment on the family’s (probably, at the time) IBM-PC, printed it herself and turned it in. Her teacher accused her of plagiarism or that a parent did the work, because she thought a child could not have done what she did. It was the late 80s, I think, so not some kind of magic trick, just a kid with access to a computer, and the gumption to use it.
My mother raised holy hell, because it was insulting, just because the teacher didn’t know how to use a computer didn’t mean my sister couldn’t.
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I got my first computer in my room in the late 80’s- a fat Mac, as I recall- though that might have become a Mac Plus at some point. Regardless, I started typing papers in 2nd or 3rd grade and never looked back.
The Mac Plus had an external hard drive, I think- maybe 30 or 40 meg of storage and it sounded like a jet engine when you fired it up. Fantastic.
I’d like to grab a suitably retro computer case, gut it, and shove a Rasp Pi 3 or something in there. Just because.
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The funny thing being that they actually were not that aerodynamic, and cars like Audi TTs now look rather retro.
Well, you did. Over here we regard NASCAR as funny old stuff going round in circles.
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At a Certain State University, one had to get the Thesis Editor to approve the style of a dissertation, after the professors accepted the content. Laser printed copy from the computer science department was rejected for a while, until enough people protested. After that one had to use the exact format of the first one approved. I had trouble with printout from a HP laserjet because the right justification didn’t line up exactly (I had some trouble with Greek letters). It was infuriating that style seemed to matter as much as (or more) than content. That was the mid '80’s.
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