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What the youngsters have to look forward to when they buy used ipads

I think desktops and laptops are good for us older folks since the screens are bigger (bad eyesight), hardware keyboards and mice (shakey hands and arthritis make touching small screen difficult), and we don't have to hold the damn thing up in front of us when we watch a video (cramps and aches in the arms make holding stuff up next to impossible).

I wonder if the youth will figure this out before they get old?

Seaken
 
Unknown_K said:
While internet only machines never caught on the smart phone ended up taking that job. These days there are people who do all their internet, gaming, banking, shopping, video viewing, etc. just with a phone.

My son the IT guru.
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seaken said:
I think desktops and laptops are good for us older folks since the screens are bigger (bad eyesight), hardware keyboards and mice (shakey hands and arthritis make touching small screen difficult), and we don't have to hold the damn thing up in front of us when we watch a video (cramps and aches in the arms make holding stuff up next to impossible).

I wonder if the youth will figure this out before they get old?

Seaken
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I hear millennials have a word for "when you can't do something on your phone and have to get out a real computer."
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I hear millennials have a word for "when you can't do something on your phone and have to get out a real computer."
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HEY, I am a Millennial (by numbers at least, my history reads more like a Gen Xer though). LOL.

Truth be told, either I'm a rare breed or I actually prefer working on a true desktop or laptop computer. My big fat-ass fingers SUCK on those tiny touch screen devices. Nothing used to upset me more than having to text people, and nothing bugs me more than "they got an app for that" - yeah, an app that doesn't have the settings I need to do things my way (usually).

However, the vision of the earlier posts I got of a bunch of Zoomers struggling with their old handheld devices (iPhones, iPads, Switches, Steam Decks, etc.) makes me laugh. But I also kinda feel their pain because I've been getting started early messing with these devices myself. Some won't even work unless the battery works - some of you with the first Macintosh Portables probably know the pain - and others will work but they're so covered in glass or aluminum it becomes a literal laceration hazard to try and remove the bad battery if it starts leaking (Seriously, some of those old Samsungs had GLASS backs on them, paired with a LIthium Ion Battery, they're a literal digital landmine).
 
I recently found a discussion about how big purchases are best made on a computer (as opposed to a phone) in order to see all the details, and avoid making an impulse buy. I personally can't stand trying to make purchases on my cellphone, but once in awhile it becomes a necessity, usually for food pickups where complexity of orders and payment precludes the possibility of a phone call. I think my brain still reverts to advice I heard in the early 00's about not sharing credit card info online, and thinks "my phone doesn't need this information, I really don't want to input that unless I have no choice."

So as someone typically classified as a millenial, I will gladly take a full-sized desktop (and as big of a screen as you can give me) for most everything I want to do. The phone is a necessity for travel telecommunications and whatnot, but I'd rather not sit in my own home staring at my 7" phone screen when I can do the same thing on a much larger screen without an insipid touch screen that I will fumble with. No, I don't want to use voice input either. Mouse and keyboard, please.

That said, while ipads and other more complex smart devices may not have the longevity you might expect, I know for a fact that purpose-built ipods have enjoyed a renaissance. Fans replace batteries, upgrade to solid state storage (for the older models), and even run non-standard operating systems. And what's more, many of them are too young to have experienced these devices when they were new. Now I wonder if there will be a fanbase in a few decades for today's steamdecks, VR, or other motion controls.

tl;dr: the kids are alright.
 
krebizfan said:
Given the plateauing of performance, a user in 2050 who wants to run games from 2030 might need to little more than set performance to 80%.
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Only to discover that the server is long gone and the game can no longer be played.

CommodoreZ said:
I think my brain still reverts to advice I heard in the early 00's about not sharing credit card info online....
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Which is pretty weird, since credit card is the only payment method you should use on-line since it's the only one where the payment provider must allow you to dispute charges and get a refund after the fact.

As for the desktop vs. phone thing, I see the same in other areas. Most developers younger than me seem fine doing all their work in a single window just 20-40 lines high; I and other older developers I know tend more towards 2-3 editing windows of 70-100 lines. Perhaps they all have much better memories for the code around what they're working on than I do, but I'm rather doubting that. I think they just ignore focus in on whatever little bit they're looking at and ignore context.
 
Having an external keyboard makes editing on a phone or tablet much easier. A wired keyboard plugged into an adapter plugged into the OTG port seems fairly hit or miss. I have keyboards that work and other keyboards that don't and I don't have any clear reason why. External displays seem to get to a point of almost being useful before Google changes strategy and a different method of hooking up the display is created which also does not work reliably.

My phone has a superior CPU and storage to many of the budget desktops or laptops offered at the box retailers. If a few minor issues were corrected, the phone docked with good keyboard and monitor would be better as an emergency desktop than what I could buy in 15 minutes at the retailer.
 
krebizfan said:
My phone has a superior CPU and storage to many of the budget desktops or laptops offered at the box retailers. If a few minor issues were corrected, the phone docked with good keyboard and monitor would be better as an emergency desktop than what I could buy in 15 minutes at the retailer.
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That seems...very odd. Is that just because the shops in your area don't sell used devices or something? (My viewpoint might be different because I can just pop over to Akihabara, if I want to buy retail, and there are a ton of shops selling used electronics.)

Just the other month I upgraded to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen4 with a 15" FHD screen, some reasonably powerful i5, 8 GB RAM and 250 GB SSD and it's a quite decent desktop system as far as I can tell, though I generally don't have more than 30-40 tabs open in Chrome at once. (Chrome is the only app I run that really eats large amounts of memory.) It does three or more 80-line terminals on a single desktop with fine readability, and of course requires no external keyboard or mouse. Total cost, less than US$150. There's no way I could find a phone with this level of power even if you ignore that the screen is vastly inferior for how much stuff you can see at once.
 
cjs said:
That seems...very odd. Is that just because the shops in your area don't sell used devices or something? (My viewpoint might be different because I can just pop over to Akihabara, if I want to buy retail, and there are a ton of shops selling used electronics.)
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Not close by and most seem to be built around listing comparatively high prices to donate for tax write offs. There are mail order suppliers with reasonably priced older hardware but those take considerably longer to get here.

The local electronics retailer sent off an advertisement for a system using a 1 GHz Celeron which seems rather useless.
 
I tried using my phone back around 2010 to do stuff like this...

krebizfan said:
Having an external keyboard makes editing on a phone or tablet much easier.
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Absolutely agree. I too have a phone that was a flagship five years ago, and still has more power than I will ever fully use.

You can add a mouse to Android phones as well, and then the only problem is that the screen is a bit small... But I've run terminal software on my phone to configure Cisco routers before and it works OK - Once a mouse is there, it's no worse than a small PC.

Interestingly, I found a new pocket foldable keyboard last night that seems to get good reviews with has normal key spacing and found myself once again buying yet another folding keyboard to try... I blame this thread for reminding me I've been looking for one for a long time and found another one to buy...

cjs said:
That seems...very odd. Is that just because the shops in your area don't sell used devices or something? (My viewpoint might be different because I can just pop over to Akihabara, if I want to buy retail, and there are a ton of shops selling used electronics.)
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I envy that - Though computers are ubiquitous enough in most of the world, even if choice is limited, and low cost machines are still common.

I share Krebizfan's sentiment here - Being able to use a phone with a keyboard is a huge improvement over just web browsing. Editing documents, even posting on this forum, become a lot more practical. I would even seriously consider it over having my laptop at times. I'll never be without a laptop for more than a while ( I have two I use regularly, and a spare I keep charged ) but there are times that if I lost my laptop, having the phone would be enough - If it had a keyboard and mouse.

I also have three surface tablets I use just for drawing on which would benefit just the same.
 
I have for a long time felt like a device that looks like a laptop but that you plug your phone into to have a laptop sized monitor keyboard and mouse would be a highly useful thing. Phones certainly have enough processing power to do it. I often wonder why no ones produced such a device.
 
krebizfan said:
https://nexdock.com/samsung-dex-laptop/ might be what you are looking for.
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That is pretty cool. I wasn't aware that you could "back-feed" a keyboard/mouse up the USB-C cable on which you're receiving video. My first thought was, "what about devices that don't support that," but they're ahead of me: you can use plain old HDMI for the display and a separate USB cable for the keyboard/trackpad.

That said, the "connect to your phone" idea doesn't appeal to me at all. Even if Android did support letting me bring up a terminal, clone a Git repo, build the software, and run the ancient system emulator that I just built, why would I want to do that in an awkward click-to-focus desktop environment rather than my own nice X11 desktop environment that I've been using and improving for thirty years? Not to mention that all but the most expensive phones simply don't have the RAM or storage capacity of a $150 laptop.

And once you've got the $150 laptop, do you really need this?
 
Samsung DeX comes with the higher end Samsung phones. The A55 (lowest end DeX capable phone if I got the marketing material right) can have 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage for a little more than $300 which places it well against much of the budget laptop market.

My system is running at idle with roughly 2% utilization. It won't take much of a phone to match up against an i7 running at 800 MHz. Yes, when I have a workload that can actually tax the i7, no phone will come close but that isn't a very common occurrence.
 
krebizfan said:
https://nexdock.com/samsung-dex-laptop/ might be what you are looking for. I think there was something similar designed back during the smartphone desktop mania about a decade ago.
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Fujitsu did something similar back then, laptop with detachable camera and screen.

Android devices are unusable as main driver, I have a HP slatebook which is tablet with detachable keyboard in form of a laptop. HP used base Android and just put some drivers in, there's storage in the keyboard too that gets unionfs'ed with the tablet one. I used root uninstaller to remove everything from that machine, and the machine started working lightning fast. But there is no way to get sane keyboard mapping (goodbye function keys) and right click mouse, and without that it's all useless.

Per that American age classification I would also belong to 'a millenial' yet I don't have absolutely any nostalgia for cellphone stuff. I had a first smatphone in use at age 16. In the following years I used a number of devices, OSes, shapes and forms. There were certain mid 00s Windows phones that got it right. A good full keyboard, with D-pad kind of cursor section. A good sized landscape crisp touchscreen. A yoke on the side. Playing games? Use the keyboard. Browsing around? Use the touchscreen. Configuring something, working in menus? Use the yoke. Not to mention they weren't connected to the hive at all times and they did not even expect to be used mainly online, the assumption was syncing content between PC and it. In any case, these devices used to be interesting. 10 years into smartphones I got the iPhone and then some Android afterwards. Things have been first half-interesting, then boring, and then in last several years, highly annoying. No, I do not want to scan your QR, I want a waiter.
 
cjs said:
That is pretty cool. I wasn't aware that you could "back-feed" a keyboard/mouse up the USB-C cable on which you're receiving video. My first thought was, "what about devices that don't support that," but they're ahead of me: you can use plain old HDMI for the display and a separate USB cable for the keyboard/trackpad.

That said, the "connect to your phone" idea doesn't appeal to me at all. Even if Android did support letting me bring up a terminal, clone a Git repo, build the software, and run the ancient system emulator that I just built, why would I want to do that in an awkward click-to-focus desktop environment rather than my own nice X11 desktop environment that I've been using and improving for thirty years? Not to mention that all but the most expensive phones simply don't have the RAM or storage capacity of a $150 laptop.

And once you've got the $150 laptop, do you really need this?
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You don't need it, definitely. I don't need it either because I have desktops. But its not designed for me or you.

Its designed for the guy who's already got the $900 cellphone it works with and who thinks he needs a $1,500 laptop to check email and browse facebook. To him, that $300 add-on for his $900 cellphone is a bargain.

Now that guy could probably also get buy with a $150 laptop same as you or me, but there's something to be said for the advantages of a single do-everything device.

Of course Apple will never make such a product as they rely fully on you buying their $1400 cellphone AND $3,000 laptop in order to survive.
 
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