On Thursday 17 March 2005 03:05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > That's not what he [ME!] said at all. He said if you make compromises when > speccing a machine to get a *lower* price tag or a lighter weight (in > which case you often pay more and get less on purpose), you're a > sucker. That's flat out wrong, as well as insulting. To suggest that > a person that buys a machine that meets their specifications but not > yours is a "sucker" is elitist and egocentric at best.
What I meant was more or less a satirical joke - by and large marketing departments seem to decide what consumers want, and use pricing policy to force niche products out of the marketplace. For instance, you _used_ to be able to obtain a laptop system which was _really_ rugged - would stand immersion in water, being run over by a truck, etc, etc. Now for a lot of users (icluding those who want to use a laptop in conjunction with e.g. a telescope, outdoors in the dark with little if any protection from environmental accidents; landscape photographers who have converted to digital; ...) that makes a lot of sense - even if the system specification numbers are very low in comparison with current systems. But no, the marketers seem to have decided that laptop systems are not computers but fashion articles, and enough consumers have decided that's what they want too. That might make the bulk of consumers "suckers" in _my_ opinion. Satire appears not to be a common expression of humour outside the United Kingdom. I truly and unreservedly apologise to anyone who I have personally offended, whilst reserving my right to poke fun at the general mass of the public. > > Again, this is your specification, but may not work for everyone. > Personally, I do a lot of heavy lifting on my laptop since I'm often > on the road without reliable connectivity to my machines at home or > the office (though connectivity is getting better in general all the > time, there are still plenty of occasions where I can't reach the > remote machines or else can't maintain a connection with sufficient > reliability). If you're buying a high-spec laptop system on the basis that you really need the computing power whilst unable to get online, you're by no means a sucker. If you're buying a high-spec system as a fashion accessory, when a much lower spec system at a lower price - or ruggedised and built to last but at the same price as the more powerful system - would meet your requirements fot e-mail / small spreadsheets / presentations / playing solitaire or minesweeper, then IMHO the term "sucker" might well be applicable. Now I suspect that laptop sales to customers who really need the power are somewhat less than 5% of total unit sales. I could also rant about all current laptops needing a flat surface to run a mouse on, as trackpoints seem to have become extinct and trackpads are IMO totally and absolutely useless to drive a WIMP interface. It's also very difficult if not impossible to buy new laptops without paying Windows Tax; discarding the pre-loaded OS in favour of linux is not always practical due to many of the built-in devices being software driven rather than hardware devices with a proper industry standard interface; and, even if drivers are available, using these devices drains CPU power. All of these factors appear to be driven by marketing pressures (including marginally legal lock-in strategies) rather than genuine customer demand; in fact the "digital rights management" built into Windows Media Player acts directly against the requirements of many customers. Finally, even a >3GHz P4 desktop system _can_ be almost if not entirely silent, whereas a laptop system generating comparable performance is very likely to sound like a fully-loaded Boeing 747 making a takeoff run right outside the window, at any rate for the rather limited time before the battery runs flat. Performance cannot be maintained without cooling; in a laptop case, cooling means small fans running fast, and aerodynamic noise is proportional to the eighth power of the jet velocity, whereas cooling is proportional to the mass of air moved - using a half size fan requires quadrupling the velocity of the air stream, multiplying aerodynamic noise from the fan by a factor of 65536. Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
