As a potentially serious answer, you'll have full access to its filesystem without any special tricks, fully functional USB ports for things like printing and the ability to run arbitrary non-tablet applications for stuff like software dev work. And it's cheaper than running all that stuff in a VM on a Surface Pro or the like.
I agree that this thing is too expensive for a kind of lame ARM system from a off-brand OEM, but there's probably a niche out there that is willing to pay $300 for a 10" Linux tablet instead of buying a $150 one and reflashing .
I've got some NUCs sitting around. There's one behind my TV at home and we use them in my office for presentation systems and the like. They range from Celerons to i5s (mostly i3s) and they're all Haswell or newer, with the latest having M.2 for storage.
So here's what I want to say: NUCs get hot. M.2 SSDs also get hot. There's almost nothing that can be done inside the NUC enclosure to cool the damned things down. You can point a box fan at one or put it on a large block of aluminum and it's not going to have much impact for the internal temperatures. Almost every NUC does a certain amount of thermal throttling, so there seems to be very little difference between an i3 and an i5. Putting an i7 in the same space with the same basic cooling options really isn't going to help.
All the arguments that apply to trying to claim that a "gaming" laptop with a high end CPU and no discrete GPU are also going to apply in this case. I understand that Thunderbolt in theory brings some options to the table in that regard but in practice I'd rather have an Expresscard given how limited (and expensive) support for Thunderbolt is on Windows and how well I know external Expresscard PCIe bridges work.
Of course, I wasn't aware of it at the time. The damage manifested as a hairline crack at the corner of the screen and didn't become significant for another few days, after which my car had already been totalled.
Yes, I could've amended the claim, but $80 to buy a new screen + dropping the monthly insurance fee for my phone vs. the $15k I got for my wreck just didn't seem worth the hassle.
I have an LG G4. Not long after I got it, I was in an automobile accident that damaged the screen. The phone was insured from the carrier, but the carrier insisted for no reason I can think of that it should be an issue for my auto insurance policy.
So I bought an aftermarket screen and fixed the damned thing myself. It takes about two minutes to strip all the components off, using only a small philips scewdriver and no other tools, and other than the TINY trick of knowing that you have to remove a little rubber grommet around the light sensor, the fix was incident free. The whole affair took less than five minutes.
Compare that to the Galaxy S6, which has a glass back that requires a heat gun or a hot pack to remove and adhesive strips to put back. Even though I have the tools and I've taken plenty of phones apart, I'd infinitely rather have the thing I can fix easily, especially when it's also the thing with a replaceable battery and a card reader.
... Except full blown Office 2013, which came with the devices and works beautifully if what you want out of a 10", ~1lb. tablet with a passable keyboard and nice screen is something to run Word and Excel.
(They're also great for kids who need something on which to do schoolwork because the damned things can't do anything else.)
I also found that to be true when I put together a system for my bedroom. And then I got a PicoPSU + transformer, only to find that the transformer had its own disagreeable little hum.
I went back to a traditional desktop and some fancy Noctua fans. They make noise I can hear but almost anything else I do is quiet enough for it to not be an issue.
I really did offer a lot of feedback on Windows 10 during its testing period, using several methods that were made available for that purpose. As far as I'm aware, none of my feedback was reviewed or commented upon and some of the issues I reported were still problems in the shipping releases of Windows 10. I'll admit that I was testing Windows 10 more for my own professional needs than for the benefit of Microsoft or the final product, but why should I offer feedback at all if it will fall on deaf ears and be met only with inaction?
I still get discs from Netflix, especially for big-budget special effects movies where I'd prefer to have a high bit-rate/high fidelity rip rather than a 2GB file from YIFY or the like.
There are also parts of the USA where high bandwidth internet connections are simply not available. My cousins, who live in central Illinois, visit their local video store probably three or four times a week and can only dream of having a 3Mbit DSL connection that would allow them to watch a 480p Youtube video in real time.
I had a couple phones that I installed various releases of CyanogenMod on as soon as I got them. Those phones had pretty uniform experience, even between versions. Then I got Samsung phone that I just never bothered to root. I didn't like its dialer, but I assumed that was just the standard dialer application for that version of Android. Then I got an LG phone. The Dialer was different from Samsung's and also from a Nexus phone, which finally gave me the "Eureka!" moment that dialers are a module component on Android. Five minutes later, I had disabled the existing LG dialer via ADB commands and installed the CyanogenMod Dialer I actually like.
I bring this up primarily because, in spite of being well aware that things like the Contacts, SMS Messaging and Calendar apps on Android devices are almost always vendor-supplied rather than a stock version, I had never considered that the Dialer would also be that way. Moreover, it's trivial to find an alternative if you don't like the one you were given.
iPhone users are of course still hosed if they don't like Apple's defaults, but they signed up for that the minute they bought a Fruit device.
These don't address the fundamental privacy issues related to the parent post, but once you've agreed to own a smartphone it's fairly clear that you're already giving up a huge chunk of your privacy no matter what you do.
If you're shooting a lot of images or video or making heavy use of the screen and your LTE connection, you'll drain a battery, no matter what the device is. In those circumstances, I'd far rather slap in another battery than be semi-permanently tethered to an external battery pack (although nothing stops an LG G-series phone from using those as well - the external charger that came with mine can even act as one).
Most smartphones I have some experience with will shoot two or three hours of full HD video before they're drained. This include the reasonably new iphone 5.
Bring a dedicated camera? Why? My phone fits my pocket and I'm 100% certain I'll have it with me at all times. It's easier to throw a spare battery in my jacket pocket or laptop bag than haul around another full piece of kit.
By the same token, having a card reader still makes a lot of sense to me. There's something to be said for having 232GB of storage connected to a device I know I will always have on hand. You can argue you don't need it, but it seems shortsighted to suggest that reasoning applies to anyone else who might use a smartphone.
HGST drives are manufactured by a different division, using different processes and different engineering teams. I was told by a WD engineer that HGST stuff is still entirely separate on a manufacturing level.
Of course, I'm just some guy on the internet, but based on my own experiences with a few hundred 3 and 4TB drives in service, the Hitachi/HGSTs are worth going out of my way to obtain and Seagate 4TB drives don't seem to have the problems the 3TB units did.
One reason I still recommend Adblock Plus for non-technical users is that it is branded consistently and works across all major web browsers. It's much easier to train users that they should have a little red Stop Sign with an ABP in it regardless of their web browser than it is to explain that they need multiple products across IE, Chrome, Firefox and their mobile devices.
Also, while in my view there are no acceptable ads and I preach zero tolerance for advertising, some of my customers are more sensitive about the idea of blocking Google Ads, and are more comfortable with the idea of supporting services that do allow static, text-only advertisements than a blanket ban on everything.
I'm overwhelmingly a user of Palemoon rather than Firefox. I am extremely satisfied with Palemoon, particularly given the stewardship Mozilla has provided of late.
I hate what Firefox has become. At this point, It's a marketing company with a technology product, not a technology company. I don't like third party applications being inflicted on me. I don't like the state of flux in the UI that has existed since Firefox 26, the change or removal of features I've been using for years. I don't like arbitrary, zero-notice changes to features I'm using. These are all bad things.
But I'm going to stick with a Mozilla-derived browser for as long as humanly possible because all the alternatives seem worse. I like leaving tabs open. Browsers that use One Process-per-tab will annihilate my available RAM. Chrome (-ium), Opera and Safari all lack privacy and security-related addons that I won't surf without. Edge, with no addon support at all and forthcoming "We're gonna try to use Chrome's!", is a complete non-starter. I need Java in a browser for IT operations tasks. Anecdotally, I see as many issues with fake/bad addons in Chrome's Extensions as I did with BHOs in IE6's heyday.
Chrome has gone from the simple, lightweight option to a bloated mess that duplicates a lot of OS functions. I don't even want to load on a low-spec machines any more. I know it's the web's new favorite, but I'd rather take the ham-fisted marketing driven Mozilla mismanagement any day than live in an ecosystem where Noscript and RequestPolicy aren't really available.
The drives have been swapped at least three times over that system's life. The damned thing is using 9GB Seagate X15s right now, albeit only the first ~2GB of them. I've got the database stuff backed up and I think I could make it work on a new box if I had to, but I'm also absolutely positive there's two or three ~18 month old spare X15s sitting on a shelf for the next time I want to swap out the drives.
The thing has also outlives six or seven DDS/DAT drives. Nowadays it just gets copied to a couple flash drives and then on to Crashplan, so I don't worry so much about what Legato thinks it should be doing.
The guy signing the checks does not like change and he paid $35k for this whole custom system back when I was still in high school and he's bound and determined that it's going to run until he decides to retire and/or die.
A customer of mine has a Netware 3 server running on a 1994-vintage IBM machine. It runs and makes reports from an inventory database they use. I was selected as the new IT guy for that customer on the basis that I'm the youngest person they could find with first-hand Netware experience. I'm 40.
Another customer I deal with has an IBM System/38 in his private office. He still has an active terminal for it. He's a photographer but I think in another life he was an engineer. He will not tell me what that thing does, but I do know he has a lot of hush-hush secrets around his (film) photo printing processes.
10GbE Ethernet, (at least over copper, which is the only way I've gotten to mess with it), kinda sucks. Cost per port is really high and actually so are the power requirements per port. Infiniband was a lot easier and cheaper for me to deal with and having it implemented in relatively common hardware might improve its adoption.
I've been building inexpensive PCs with Gigabyte H81 ITX motherboards, LGA1150 Pentium G CPUs, 4GB RAM, 120GB mSATA drives and Rosewill ITX chassis. I can build a whole machine for around $250. The chassis will still have room for an optical drive and a pair of hard disks, should you want them.
I specifically like the Gigabyte board for having both mSATA and mini-PCIe slots, plus the cutout to add antennas for 802.11/bluetooth. There's just a lot of flexibility for an ITX machine.
Palemoon has (or had, I never used it) a Bookmark and Settings Sync service very similar to the one present in Firefox. It was a first-party tool maintained by the people who are responsible for Palemoon.
IIRC, both Chrome and Firefox for Windows are also packaged as web installers rather than.MSIs or the like. This is not unprecedented behavior.
I'm guessing the social integration has more to do with streaming/recording for Twitch and Youtube than anything to do with Facebook.That stuff is kind of a PITA to set up,so if it's automated somewhere or other, I can see a case made for that adding value, sorta.
Windows memory requirements haven't changed since Vista. Windows 10 actually runs surprisingly well on 1GB RAM and for most everyday purposes there's very little subjective need to have more than 4GB on any version of Windows right now.
There are games I know I'm never going to be good at. The Binding of Isaac games are an example of this for me. I suspect that a lot of people would rather watch top-level teams in LoL compete than try spend months learning the quirks of 40 or 50 different competitive characters in the current metagame.
There are games for which I won't personally tolerate the DRM or user agreement but still want to know what happens. Many PC games are Steam or Origin only at this point. In my case, Dragon Age Inquisition is a specific example.
There are games with a multiplayer component that I'd like to see, but don't care to join. When I played an MMO, I'd often be on at odd times where I couldn't do some of the big group content. At least with videos, I still got to see it.
Finally, there are games you watch 'cause you don't have the right hardware. I don't have that particular problem, but not everyone has an expensive gaming GPU or the latest console.
That's weird. When I did Server 2012r2 on my big home system (Gigabyte X99), I found that the USB installer kept bombing but the DVD worked fine. It's weird how picky and non-standardized UEFI implementations are.
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As a potentially serious answer, you'll have full access to its filesystem without any special tricks, fully functional USB ports for things like printing and the ability to run arbitrary non-tablet applications for stuff like software dev work. And it's cheaper than running all that stuff in a VM on a Surface Pro or the like.
I agree that this thing is too expensive for a kind of lame ARM system from a off-brand OEM, but there's probably a niche out there that is willing to pay $300 for a 10" Linux tablet instead of buying a $150 one and reflashing .
I am very much saying that it's a problem, especially when combined with an M.2 storage device.
I've got some NUCs sitting around. There's one behind my TV at home and we use them in my office for presentation systems and the like. They range from Celerons to i5s (mostly i3s) and they're all Haswell or newer, with the latest having M.2 for storage.
So here's what I want to say: NUCs get hot. M.2 SSDs also get hot. There's almost nothing that can be done inside the NUC enclosure to cool the damned things down. You can point a box fan at one or put it on a large block of aluminum and it's not going to have much impact for the internal temperatures. Almost every NUC does a certain amount of thermal throttling, so there seems to be very little difference between an i3 and an i5. Putting an i7 in the same space with the same basic cooling options really isn't going to help.
All the arguments that apply to trying to claim that a "gaming" laptop with a high end CPU and no discrete GPU are also going to apply in this case. I understand that Thunderbolt in theory brings some options to the table in that regard but in practice I'd rather have an Expresscard given how limited (and expensive) support for Thunderbolt is on Windows and how well I know external Expresscard PCIe bridges work.
Of course, I wasn't aware of it at the time. The damage manifested as a hairline crack at the corner of the screen and didn't become significant for another few days, after which my car had already been totalled.
Yes, I could've amended the claim, but $80 to buy a new screen + dropping the monthly insurance fee for my phone vs. the $15k I got for my wreck just didn't seem worth the hassle.
I have an LG G4. Not long after I got it, I was in an automobile accident that damaged the screen. The phone was insured from the carrier, but the carrier insisted for no reason I can think of that it should be an issue for my auto insurance policy.
So I bought an aftermarket screen and fixed the damned thing myself. It takes about two minutes to strip all the components off, using only a small philips scewdriver and no other tools, and other than the TINY trick of knowing that you have to remove a little rubber grommet around the light sensor, the fix was incident free. The whole affair took less than five minutes.
Compare that to the Galaxy S6, which has a glass back that requires a heat gun or a hot pack to remove and adhesive strips to put back. Even though I have the tools and I've taken plenty of phones apart, I'd infinitely rather have the thing I can fix easily, especially when it's also the thing with a replaceable battery and a card reader.
... Except full blown Office 2013, which came with the devices and works beautifully if what you want out of a 10", ~1lb. tablet with a passable keyboard and nice screen is something to run Word and Excel.
(They're also great for kids who need something on which to do schoolwork because the damned things can't do anything else.)
I also found that to be true when I put together a system for my bedroom. And then I got a PicoPSU + transformer, only to find that the transformer had its own disagreeable little hum.
I went back to a traditional desktop and some fancy Noctua fans. They make noise I can hear but almost anything else I do is quiet enough for it to not be an issue.
I really did offer a lot of feedback on Windows 10 during its testing period, using several methods that were made available for that purpose. As far as I'm aware, none of my feedback was reviewed or commented upon and some of the issues I reported were still problems in the shipping releases of Windows 10.
I'll admit that I was testing Windows 10 more for my own professional needs than for the benefit of Microsoft or the final product, but why should I offer feedback at all if it will fall on deaf ears and be met only with inaction?
I still get discs from Netflix, especially for big-budget special effects movies where I'd prefer to have a high bit-rate/high fidelity rip rather than a 2GB file from YIFY or the like.
There are also parts of the USA where high bandwidth internet connections are simply not available. My cousins, who live in central Illinois, visit their local video store probably three or four times a week and can only dream of having a 3Mbit DSL connection that would allow them to watch a 480p Youtube video in real time.
As a bit of an aside to these comments...
I had a couple phones that I installed various releases of CyanogenMod on as soon as I got them. Those phones had pretty uniform experience, even between versions. Then I got Samsung phone that I just never bothered to root. I didn't like its dialer, but I assumed that was just the standard dialer application for that version of Android.
Then I got an LG phone. The Dialer was different from Samsung's and also from a Nexus phone, which finally gave me the "Eureka!" moment that dialers are a module component on Android. Five minutes later, I had disabled the existing LG dialer via ADB commands and installed the CyanogenMod Dialer I actually like.
I bring this up primarily because, in spite of being well aware that things like the Contacts, SMS Messaging and Calendar apps on Android devices are almost always vendor-supplied rather than a stock version, I had never considered that the Dialer would also be that way. Moreover, it's trivial to find an alternative if you don't like the one you were given.
iPhone users are of course still hosed if they don't like Apple's defaults, but they signed up for that the minute they bought a Fruit device.
These don't address the fundamental privacy issues related to the parent post, but once you've agreed to own a smartphone it's fairly clear that you're already giving up a huge chunk of your privacy no matter what you do.
If you're shooting a lot of images or video or making heavy use of the screen and your LTE connection, you'll drain a battery, no matter what the device is. In those circumstances, I'd far rather slap in another battery than be semi-permanently tethered to an external battery pack (although nothing stops an LG G-series phone from using those as well - the external charger that came with mine can even act as one).
Most smartphones I have some experience with will shoot two or three hours of full HD video before they're drained. This include the reasonably new iphone 5.
Bring a dedicated camera? Why? My phone fits my pocket and I'm 100% certain I'll have it with me at all times. It's easier to throw a spare battery in my jacket pocket or laptop bag than haul around another full piece of kit.
By the same token, having a card reader still makes a lot of sense to me. There's something to be said for having 232GB of storage connected to a device I know I will always have on hand. You can argue you don't need it, but it seems shortsighted to suggest that reasoning applies to anyone else who might use a smartphone.
HGST drives are manufactured by a different division, using different processes and different engineering teams. I was told by a WD engineer that HGST stuff is still entirely separate on a manufacturing level.
Of course, I'm just some guy on the internet, but based on my own experiences with a few hundred 3 and 4TB drives in service, the Hitachi/HGSTs are worth going out of my way to obtain and Seagate 4TB drives don't seem to have the problems the 3TB units did.
One reason I still recommend Adblock Plus for non-technical users is that it is branded consistently and works across all major web browsers. It's much easier to train users that they should have a little red Stop Sign with an ABP in it regardless of their web browser than it is to explain that they need multiple products across IE, Chrome, Firefox and their mobile devices.
Also, while in my view there are no acceptable ads and I preach zero tolerance for advertising, some of my customers are more sensitive about the idea of blocking Google Ads, and are more comfortable with the idea of supporting services that do allow static, text-only advertisements than a blanket ban on everything.
I'm overwhelmingly a user of Palemoon rather than Firefox. I am extremely satisfied with Palemoon, particularly given the stewardship Mozilla has provided of late.
I hate what Firefox has become. At this point, It's a marketing company with a technology product, not a technology company. I don't like third party applications being inflicted on me. I don't like the state of flux in the UI that has existed since Firefox 26, the change or removal of features I've been using for years. I don't like arbitrary, zero-notice changes to features I'm using. These are all bad things.
But I'm going to stick with a Mozilla-derived browser for as long as humanly possible because all the alternatives seem worse. I like leaving tabs open. Browsers that use One Process-per-tab will annihilate my available RAM. Chrome (-ium), Opera and Safari all lack privacy and security-related addons that I won't surf without. Edge, with no addon support at all and forthcoming "We're gonna try to use Chrome's!", is a complete non-starter. I need Java in a browser for IT operations tasks. Anecdotally, I see as many issues with fake/bad addons in Chrome's Extensions as I did with BHOs in IE6's heyday.
Chrome has gone from the simple, lightweight option to a bloated mess that duplicates a lot of OS functions. I don't even want to load on a low-spec machines any more. I know it's the web's new favorite, but I'd rather take the ham-fisted marketing driven Mozilla mismanagement any day than live in an ecosystem where Noscript and RequestPolicy aren't really available.
The drives have been swapped at least three times over that system's life. The damned thing is using 9GB Seagate X15s right now, albeit only the first ~2GB of them. I've got the database stuff backed up and I think I could make it work on a new box if I had to, but I'm also absolutely positive there's two or three ~18 month old spare X15s sitting on a shelf for the next time I want to swap out the drives.
The thing has also outlives six or seven DDS/DAT drives. Nowadays it just gets copied to a couple flash drives and then on to Crashplan, so I don't worry so much about what Legato thinks it should be doing.
The guy signing the checks does not like change and he paid $35k for this whole custom system back when I was still in high school and he's bound and determined that it's going to run until he decides to retire and/or die.
A customer of mine has a Netware 3 server running on a 1994-vintage IBM machine. It runs and makes reports from an inventory database they use. I was selected as the new IT guy for that customer on the basis that I'm the youngest person they could find with first-hand Netware experience. I'm 40.
Another customer I deal with has an IBM System/38 in his private office. He still has an active terminal for it. He's a photographer but I think in another life he was an engineer. He will not tell me what that thing does, but I do know he has a lot of hush-hush secrets around his (film) photo printing processes.
You are correct in your presumption. I was not aware there's been any real improvement WRT Cat6 PHYs. Thanks.
I've read 5 - 7W per port. That's far from inconsequential.
10GbE Ethernet, (at least over copper, which is the only way I've gotten to mess with it), kinda sucks. Cost per port is really high and actually so are the power requirements per port. Infiniband was a lot easier and cheaper for me to deal with and having it implemented in relatively common hardware might improve its adoption.
I've been building inexpensive PCs with Gigabyte H81 ITX motherboards, LGA1150 Pentium G CPUs, 4GB RAM, 120GB mSATA drives and Rosewill ITX chassis. I can build a whole machine for around $250. The chassis will still have room for an optical drive and a pair of hard disks, should you want them.
I specifically like the Gigabyte board for having both mSATA and mini-PCIe slots, plus the cutout to add antennas for 802.11/bluetooth. There's just a lot of flexibility for an ITX machine.
Palemoon has (or had, I never used it) a Bookmark and Settings Sync service very similar to the one present in Firefox. It was a first-party tool maintained by the people who are responsible for Palemoon.
IIRC, both Chrome and Firefox for Windows are also packaged as web installers rather than .MSIs or the like. This is not unprecedented behavior.
I'm guessing the social integration has more to do with streaming/recording for Twitch and Youtube than anything to do with Facebook.That stuff is kind of a PITA to set up,so if it's automated somewhere or other, I can see a case made for that adding value, sorta.
Windows memory requirements haven't changed since Vista. Windows 10 actually runs surprisingly well on 1GB RAM and for most everyday purposes there's very little subjective need to have more than 4GB on any version of Windows right now.
There are games I know I'm never going to be good at. The Binding of Isaac games are an example of this for me. I suspect that a lot of people would rather watch top-level teams in LoL compete than try spend months learning the quirks of 40 or 50 different competitive characters in the current metagame.
There are games for which I won't personally tolerate the DRM or user agreement but still want to know what happens. Many PC games are Steam or Origin only at this point. In my case, Dragon Age Inquisition is a specific example.
There are games with a multiplayer component that I'd like to see, but don't care to join. When I played an MMO, I'd often be on at odd times where I couldn't do some of the big group content. At least with videos, I still got to see it.
Finally, there are games you watch 'cause you don't have the right hardware. I don't have that particular problem, but not everyone has an expensive gaming GPU or the latest console.
That's weird. When I did Server 2012r2 on my big home system (Gigabyte X99), I found that the USB installer kept bombing but the DVD worked fine. It's weird how picky and non-standardized UEFI implementations are.