Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can’t find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150
So… That
A physical slide out keyboard case for iPhone.
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:
- fanless
- good screen preferably 3:2 or 16:10
- long battery life
- unlike the air expandable storage and ideally non soldered ram
- solid build quality
- priced at maybe 600-800€?
- doesn’t have to have the greatest performance
Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.
Honestly this sounds like a Chromebook to me.
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.
Ah, good point!
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.
Right angle charging cord helps #1.
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.
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 SEGA Dreamcast
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 smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know I’ll have to charge it more often or it’ll be thicker. I’m willing to make that trade-off.
And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I don’t 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 it’s several millimeters thicker, so be it.
rip Asus Zenfone line :( It was almost exactly what you wanted.
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.
Android (or at least my Galaxy) has a setting that lets you disable the portion of the screen where the notch is, which makes it essentially identical to a phone with no notch.
Looks like its a developer option, “display cutout”
I have a nothing phone 2a and it’s just a circle on the screen, standalone. Idk if that’s much better but it’s smaller and not connected to the top.
there are multiple phones without camera notches, the sony ones with just a thicker top bezel, the redmagic’s with an under-display one and some of the older ones with popup cameras
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.
If you don’t need much power, you could probably look for something used and get a good deal on a 17" laptop.
Reliable software. It’s a thing of the past.
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.
I have an iPod that I use for music and I love it. I could put Rockbox on it so I don’t need iTunes, but I do really love the stock firmware.
Anyway, point is, my 2nd gen iPod mini has 128gb of microSD storage and is the best portable DAP I’ve ever owned.
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 5€ sata-usb connector but it’s not very practical, a usb hub + 7 of these connectors would cost like 40€ … Not reliable or anything but it would just need a box!
https://www.amazon.fr/ORICO-daccueil-magnétique-Adaptateur-Compatible/dp/B07QD5DXV2
there is this ^ thing for 130, which is more expensive that what you mentioned but seems to fit your criteria moreso.
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).
