I tried to find a 17" laptop at the weekend... the effing things don't seem to exist anymore more! I once had a HP Pavilion that was built like a tank, with a 17" screen, full keyboard including numpad (unbelievably important for CAD and 3D), DVD burner, dual 2.5" SATA HDD slots, upgradable RAM 🥲
All because of the crap called "innovation" when truth be told, the older stuff works better and lasts longer than this newer plastic crap ever will.
Hang on.... a billion tiny smartphoness are doing the job a billion great big computers and laptops would have been doing. Data centres and permanent infrastructure have replaced physical distribution of millions of tonnes of plastic discs plus their associated distribution costs. The environmental>
net benefit of shifting from physical media on large devices for everyone all the time to streaming data down fibre optic networks to devices that barely weigh 100 grams has been unspeakably large. My gripe is that nobody still makes a certain class of paticularly beefy, capable computer>
that was easily customised and allowed for tonnes of storage with a large screen size. I still collect Blu-Rays of my favourite films, I'm up to about 50 very carefully chosen discs now, and I still have my 5.1 surround sound system and Blu-ray player, but if that was the universal experience >
> then we'd be generating gigatonnes more e-waste than we do currently and burning even more billions of tonnes of hydrocarbons just to transport bytes. Streaming is pure solarpunk.
And before you go trying to defend the outrageous prices nowadays because of said innovation just remember it costs pennies for companies to make devices these days that they are charging thousands of dollars for all because of shareholders, and greed.
Oh the biggest scam going is paying €1,000 more for the same model with €100 extra RAM and €100 extra storage installed. Every Apple product, every Surface product, every smartphone is a total rip.
Exactly
I was talking about how nothing lasts anymore. Even the simplest things break way too easily and are way too expensive to justify the cost of constantly having to replace them. Sure technology as a whole has improved but build quality and therefore the longevity of such tech has plummeted.