[geeks] Laptops that suck and why.

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 02:16:02AM -0500, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> It would be nice too, if we could have modern laptops with current  
> power saving technology, but relatively low power CPU and other bus  
> goodies, so we could have a simple apps laptop that would run all day  
> on a charge.

I can see many threads following this, but I'm going to limit my responses
to what I know and what I learned from desiging similar devices. 

First of all, the concept of a general purpose laptop is a IMHO a good one.
If you can get $100 (retail) laptops, you might actually want to have
more than one, each dedicated to a function, but would you really?

Do you want to carry around 5 notebooks? Or end up not writing an email
you need to send because you only have your video player notebook today?

I much prefer a good solid base, with expansion capability. Currently,
you can get what you want in expansion with several USB 2.0 ports. It
won't be the fastest thing on the planet, but you can add external
storage, DVD/BLU-RAY drives, WiFi, telephone handsets, video cameras
bith high and low resolution, etc. Each of these devices adds weight,
expense and power consumption to the device, but if they sit on a shelf at
home when not in use only add expense.

Another issue is CPU. ARM type CPU's are limited in function compared
to X86, but they use far less power, produce far less heat and cost less.
You can do many things with an ARM chip that you could do with an X86, as
long as the programs are native mode and do not use CPU emulation. 
Depending upon what you do an ARM is 10%-20% of the speed of an equivalent
X86 when emulating it, but very close in native mode. 

There are other CPU arichectures around, such as the MIPS and PPC. Sony has
done good things with their MIPS chips and the PSP, but Apple never did 
anything good with low power, high performance PPC chips (but that may
have been FeeScale, not Apple). 

Intel and AMD make a nice line of lower power laptop chips, and the Intel
ones are easily scaleable being multiprocessor. If you want more performance,
and are willing to spend the power and feel the heat, you can almost double
or quadruple your performance by using a drop in multi-core CPU.

Screens are aslo a big issue. A passively lit screen such as an LCD uses very
little power and is much cheaper, but they are slow and have lighting problems.
However, I don't know if people would accept a cheaper device with an LCD screen
and instead of expensive, high voltage flourescent backlights, white LED ones.

Obviously they are not good for full motion video, games and similar things,
but for word processing, spreadsheets, ebook reading, etc, they would do
nicely. 

Another issue is battery life. IMHO no one really "grocks" batteries. 
If they did Lithium Ion batteries would have long since been abandoned
as a dead end. They contain corrosive elctrolyte which if they are not
properly charged or discharged can leak and cause fires. If they don't
catch fire, they still can do lots of damage to the circuit boards, etc.

They have a limited lifetime, about 300 charge cycles. One day they hold a 
charge, the next day they don't. A charge cycle is unfortunately every time
you go from charging to discharging, so taking you laptop off the AC power
to go out for an hour and putting it back on the charger is a cycle.

They can not be used to their claimed capaticy. If you do, they fail.
Once discharged, they will never take a charge again. 

Geoff.


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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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