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Recycled Computing

Designing a Better Laptop: Look to the Past

- 2008.03.27

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Once in a while everyone becomes so frustrated with something that they growl under their breath, "Even I could have designed a better ______" (fill in with the object of your wrath).

Not to defend the merchants of commerce, but the thought of someone as technofeeble as myself jumping ahead of engineers, designers, and marketing executives is bit silly. But there is no harm in visiting a fantasy world every once and a while.

There are some niggling details which continue to escape me. For instance, why can't all cellphone manufacturers standardize their power adapter plugs. I have five individuals with cellphones in my house that require 4 or 5 different AC wall plugs and DC car chargers. They all get shoved into a drawer and (I swear) start to mate! I know, it's a plot by cunning marketeers who want to sell more and more useless things until the planet is hip deep in cellphone car chargers.

Automobile diagnostic equipment is another peeve of mine. I used to be able to fix minor problems with my car. Note that I said used to. Every manufacturer has its own system and its own diagnostic gear - and won't sell the gear (or even the codes) to independent garages. I know it's technologically possible to create a digital interface in every car sold that would allow the owner to be alerted to diagnostic issues as they occur. Why can't we have that now? I know, dealerships make more money off of repairs than sales. But wouldn't it be safer if we knew what was going on in that 3,000 pound deathtrap they sold us?

A Better Laptop

There is no limit to my hubris, so let me go on to design a better laptop. In my (not so) humble opinion, there are some issues that would seem to make sense. Removable batteries are essential. No matter what the battery manufacturers do, batteries eventually wear out. If you can replace the battery, you're back up and running in no time. If not, you're without your computer. It's also nice to be able to have a spare battery when you know you're not going to be near an AC line anytime soon. One of the features that I positively love about my PowerBook G3 Pismo is my ability to take the laptop out for the day without having to bring along my yo-yo AC adapter. This is true wireless computing.

Pismo with 2 expansion baysI really do prefer the removable module bay in a laptop. With this feature, you can add different drives or storage devices that allow you to increase the laptop's versatility to that of a desktop. If the MacBook Air had a removable bay, you could even add all the missing connectivity I complained about. Aftermarket manufacturers could also develop devices that could extend the useful life of your laptop.

I also believe that a PCMCIA/PC Card card slot is a real godsend. I know that the MacBook Pro models have ExpressCard/34 slots, but there are still a whole lot of PCMCIA cards out there. My Pismo has one, and I just bought a USB 2.0 card to bring an 8-year-old computer out of the USB 1.1 stone age. I could use a Compact Flash adapter to add another memory device - or even run the operating system from it to increase battery life and save some wear and tear on the hard drive.

Laptops are either easy to service or have been designed by technical imps from heck who delight in increasingly Byzantine assemblies. Why can't we change out a processor, hard drive, and (more importantly nowadays) a video card? Maybe it makes the computer "loosy-goosey" and not as reliable as a less accessible laptop, but I'm not the only Pismo fanboy. Mine keeps on chugging along as well as other PC and Mac laptops past their prime.

"RAM is the Geritol of older computers" - so says my boss. He's right. So another item on my wish list is upgradable RAM. I don't think you can provide too many RAM slots, but every year brings more and more memory requirements from that fancy pants software we just have to have. It is retro to suggest that maybe there is a market for a bare bones operating system, but that would be another column. In my dream world, a better laptop would able to add more RAM in some fashion.

Would this be a better laptop? I don't know, but it would probably be a longer lasting one. I think we can all admit that if we're not careful, we could be hip deep in old laptops and their power adapters. LEM

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