Right, consumer motherboards sold on their own do offer such kind of support (and BIOS updates for future CPUs and critical fixes), are free from OEM crap like always-on Secure Boot, hardware whitelists or incompatibilities, or other nonsense. There might still be the header for PC speaker, I have not checked this yet. Some new mobos have dual PS/2. One of the vendors put single PS/2 + dual USB 2.0 on all their AM4 motherboards, where you usually plug keyb/mouse. Some not quite old supported Windows XP, I think AM1 socket motherboards did - almost current, the processor is about a cheap low performance version of the PS4 and Xbox One's processor. Prolly useful for legacy non-networked stuff. You can also run Windows 7/8/10 32bit on all of the motherboards if you so need/want.
I don't know how this will end. MS would like to close down the hardware, but they don't control it. The IBM PS/2 died out long ago, replaced by the beige boxes it tried to replace. Longer term perhaps we'll use some virtualization/hypervisor thing? Would be nice if the GPU vendors allow to use the "virtual GPU" feature, even if limited to only one guest (multiple guests can use an actual GPU nowadays, on "professional" or "enterprise" versions of the hardware)
Can't be any other way than the UEFI legacy mode / Compatibility Support Module (CSM) / BIOS emulation? Let's call it the CSM, since they made up that acronym just so we have a name for it.
As for full USB read/write under DOS, this is courtesy of needing of BIOS (emulated or not) needing to read USB drives in the first place ; otherwise you wouldn't be able to boot from USB, or other features. DOS will read/write the USB drive you booted from.
As for CHS, this would give you the old drive limit of slightly less than 8 GiB. LBA took care of this and it might be the BIOS's job, not DOS (I don't know). A version of DOS that supports fat32 will help of course (prior to 98SE, a buggy fdisk was bundled, partition size above 64GB rolls over). You will certainly be able to use any drive up to 128 GiB / 137 GB, quite possibly up to 2 TiB. (don't make a fat32 partition that big if you worry about cluster allocation size)
Sound card support is the only thing really missing to have some fun IMO. I did see that mpxplay (a music player) includes drivers for certain cards and sound chipsets (some Intel, VIA, other in there but no Realtek) ; I never tried it but with supported hardware it might actually be useful.
What os is this? Doesn't look like a linux problem, unless you have way too little memory?
Yes it's a problem, although I see it on desktop when running out of swap (a credible user scenario when your browser fills up all remaining ram + swap). Sometimes there's not enough memory left to log in on a text console (after ctrl-alt-F1) to kill the biggest process. Sometimes, if you have a graphical task manager running you can use it (but if it's not running you won't have enough memory left to launch it, and the start menu might have been swapped out). If all fails you have to hit the reset button (if you're lucky to have a reset button) or ctrl-alt-backspace which kills all your stuff anyway so on a desktop it's about as bad as a reboot.
I was describing the common use case for common people, i.e. 90%+ people only use a word processor infrequently to write a curriculum and don't know about the features, that's all. Maybe the Clippy assistant was a good idea but I've never really encountered it. Anyway blogs, wikis and emails replaced writing word processor document in the 2000s, for common home users. Or the lazier alternative of not writing any documents at all.
In the late 90s/early 00s I might have written letters maybe, but my parents had got an Epson inkjet printer (and eventually another one). It didn't work the one time we needed something important printed. Bad timing of technology. Inkjet printers is garbage technology that doesn't work, with the printer vendor actively fighting you. Black and white laser still cost like a used car back then. So in my experience, unless you were a professional whose tasks including writing word documents, word processors were never really that important. The general public went from handwritten letters and school homework and essays etc. to Internet stuff. Not everyone had a printer, in my country at least.
Is there a "word processing mode"?, or "content mode"? When we hit return twice to space out paragraphs, it's because that's easier and in the mean time the paragraphs are spaced out, like we intend to. If we're not supposed to do that, so much as it's considered harmful, maybe there should be a GUI mode where you're constrained from doing that. You hit enter and it doesn't let you go down one more line unless you do something "right" like introduce a new paragraph, section, page break etc.
If word processors default to being a typewriter, and the proper way of using it (even since the 90s) is an "advanced" feature that requires going into menus and trying to figure out what the hell a "style" is, while a single manual adjustment breaks it all, then maybe the design of word processors is flawed.
But the operating systems don't always do a great job. For example, linux distros require software to keep being updated and maintained forever so that it stays compatible with what's reasonably current. So, it seems like we'll be stuck forever with Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, Audacity, Libre Office etc., not that there's necessarily anything wrong with these but there's not much else at all. Little new software (e.g., deadbeef music player) compared to a decade ago, besides new versions of toolkits and libraries and the move to 64bit so that stuff is less buggy and eats a lot more RAM.
There are other platforms, which are spyware and are incompatible with each other, like Steam, Microsoft Store and Google Play. Of course Web Assembly will be all too easily exploited for applications that are spyware (e.g. make some application that requires a log in and store data about every single thing the user did), though it technically doesn't have to.
Obviously this will allow much faster "apps" but we all know what that means. Tons of "features" i.e. yet more bloat and "innovation" i.e. new version of shit that looks like it's for cell phones and runs 4x slower. Javascript engines got a lot faster a few years ago and all we got was a ton of garbage and google making their "Maps" excruciatingly slow unless you run brand new hardware. Also, javascript Doom got taken off the internet for copyright infrigement and all the games are on Android Google Play anyway. Devs, stop masturbating to your i5/i7 laptop and your Samsung S7 and don't forget to also test on sensible specs like 1GHz and unsupported AMD graphics. People aren't interested into upgrading every other year to a computer that can run Crysis just to do the same things we did back in 2005 or so.
Actually yes there's a saying that 10nm is a crappy node again and GPUs are likely to go straight for 7nm (those nm sizes being creative accounting) It's a new normal to get two GPU architectures on the same process node, we all expect a 16nm Volta.
I recently ran some Tetris or Pacman type of game that was super smooth (and looked like early 80s, except it has to be about 1000-pixel wide now) Well, it is butter smooth except for the garbage collection pause every second that makes it super jerky. It was not WebGL stuff though.
I wonder if we'll see 3D shit in web pages that suddenly makes your browser consume 1GB more memory, or half GB, pushing the PC into swap hell, not to mention "run out of swap" hell. I will eventually map a keyboard key to "killall Web\ Content".
Fun fact, I eventually tried Classic Theme Restorer and found it looked like ass anyway, like it didn't play well with the GTK theme and had some "default" looking colors or shape that would work fine on the Windows 7 x64 SP1 that everyone uses except linux users. The configuration GUI looks like a space shuttle simulator, which is why I went not far and moreover the Firefox 4 GUI isn't that "classic" to me. But I don't want to flame the authors or the users!
Hopefully Firefox moves on in a good way. After XUL is completely removed, and after version 52 runs out, we'll lose things, but we might gain new things. i.e. the derivative browser scene won't die out and maybe we'll see more of them based on the "new Firefox" instead of webkit or Blink.
What's up with the start menu in KDE 5 that takes almost all the screen height, and other overweight GUI elements? It's like we're back to default Windows XP in 800x600.
Optimizing for poor saps who have an otherwise unusable 13.3" laptop with 1920x1080 was a good idea, but to make it the default, that's jarring. Combined with copying the Windows 2.0 / Android / iOS style, this makes it hard to see what's going on. So, I would have to spend hours learning the GUI to fix it, while not knowing how far that can be done.
FWIW they advertise a Stream with 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, and 802.11ac if you care about that. I would not like a toy with everything soldered but why not with you're okay with it. It would be good specs if t were a phone lol.
The one I used was closer to this one but slightly newer I think (dual core 1.0GHz actually) and gray. They do not say too bad things about it. https://liliputing.com/2012/07... It's a nightmare to look for their ever changing laptop models, lol. Not exactly a feather, but perhaps the weight loss from removing the mechanical HDD is noticeable.
A couple company execs choosing the new aspect ratio on a whim in the 1980s or 1990s ruined it forever. It came down to one man agreeing to making something about half way between cinemascope and 4:3, but would he have pushed for 5:3, about 1.66.. and had the other guy agreed, the entire world would have been a bit different. 16:9 is arguably a bit too wide for TV as well.
Heck, I did see some dual LCD panel for VR on alibaba, one for each eye, with an aspect ratio of 1.2. This should give an idea about what the useful field of vision for one human eye is. 1.37 was an important historical ratio (even used on post-war French TV before switching to a PAL compatible standard) Now we've got a generation reaching age 21 right now with no attention span, perhaps because 16:9 TV is too wide and literally doesn't allow them to focus on the people in the little box.
There are laptops that come with no OS at all (or FreeDOS, which is hardly an OS). Often mid range ones, i.e. those mundane ones with an RJ45 port and such. Surprise : regular laptops never stopped being built, they just don't make the news. The cheap ones even take 32GB RAM now, with the switch to plain DDR4 memory. Too bad, 15.6" 1600x900 doesn't exist anymore (not that it used to be the most common), which would have allowed to run an unscaled desktop without squinting at tiny text and icons.
Um, yeah about the linux part. This might be your bet for a "linux laptop", albeit it doesn't actually comes with linux. I think the OEMs simply don't want to bear any responsibility or support cost. (as an aside, look how bad it is in the Android world) Distros have their own life cycles, even if OEMs wanted to ship a "safe", most mainstream distro. For example, main Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with linux 4.8 kernel : this might be a good bet for a vanilla, consumer oriented distro with lots of users on modern laptops. But this particular version was released less than a month ago;)
Dunno if the size suits you, but HP makes 1366x768 11.6" laptop and I found the build quality was surprisingly not crappy. I don't know if the screen was reflective or not. Obviously not a really good one, but size makes it crisp and about good looking. I can't stand regular quality 14" and 15" laptop screens in general, I'd rather use a 1990s CRT.
The particular laptop came with a 500GB HDD - you can always replace it with a 120GB desktop SSD (it's cheap and will be faster/reliable than a 32GB). It was perhaps made in 2014 (with a quad core Kabini AMD). AMD "Stoney Ridge" low-clocked CPU with amdgpu linux driver would be decent I think.
Maybe they could make a high end ish laptop with a 10" 2560x1600 IPS LCD. This sort of screen is available for tablets (I hope so?). Industrial and commercial availability are what makes it possible, not technology. Sadly perhaps no vendor wants to come up with a PC laptop that's not 16:9. At least Cinnamon / Gnome 3 can use it as a virtual 1280x800 display of sorts. But for this I reckon Wayland needs to not be vaporware anymore, so as to reduce CPU load and make the graphics smoother. I.e. keep up with Windows Vista/7/8/10 and Android.
A low end, small SSD might be not that great (perhaps it's an eMMC chip that's optional, perhaps it's an mSATA), for reliable writes and swapping.
Not to mention the HDD is over 15x bigger! Quite simply, netbooks took off when they replaced the 4GB and 8GB SSD-lite things with a 160GB (later 250GB) hard drive. The upgrade to 1024x600 resolution helped as well. Many bought them as their main computers, e.g. students who couldn't afford a $1000 laptop, which is all there was a couple years earlier.
Some users won't install anything more than a web browser and maybe an IM app like Skype, and will make do with 32GB. But with a hard drive you cover more use cases. Even people who stream everything, but store 13 megapixel pictures on the computer without worrying or even knowing about disk space. Also, $20 is a nice "luxury" option, having / on 32GB,/home on 500GB (if done like that) is not bad (although if you simply do that, you'll have browser cache on HDD). Yes booting in 10 seconds instead of 30 seconds and launching a big program in 1 second instead of 5 seconds is convenience not essential functionality. You'll also wait on the cpu for packing/unpacking archives (program installation and updates) whether your disk is mechanical or not.
When your Xorg process uses a ton of CPU and your graphics driver is bad, a linux desktop is quite bad with overhead also Gnome 3, KDE are pigs or at least quite heavier than XP was.
I did like that right analogue stick. I also liked the consoles with only one analogue stick - those are the N64 and Dreamcast. These forced games to use only one stick. The N64 game pad would have been good if they had fixed that silly problem with the stick eroding.
The Game Cube controller also had that clicking on the analog triggers, that was innovative.
You're missing the i686 Macs (dual core CPU half-way between a Pentium M and a Core 2 Duo) Also, Core 2 Duo systems are old themselves (old graphics, old firmware) so I wouldn't count on them not being deprecated.
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Right, consumer motherboards sold on their own do offer such kind of support (and BIOS updates for future CPUs and critical fixes), are free from OEM crap like always-on Secure Boot, hardware whitelists or incompatibilities, or other nonsense. There might still be the header for PC speaker, I have not checked this yet. Some new mobos have dual PS/2. One of the vendors put single PS/2 + dual USB 2.0 on all their AM4 motherboards, where you usually plug keyb/mouse.
Some not quite old supported Windows XP, I think AM1 socket motherboards did - almost current, the processor is about a cheap low performance version of the PS4 and Xbox One's processor. Prolly useful for legacy non-networked stuff.
You can also run Windows 7/8/10 32bit on all of the motherboards if you so need/want.
I don't know how this will end. MS would like to close down the hardware, but they don't control it. The IBM PS/2 died out long ago, replaced by the beige boxes it tried to replace.
Longer term perhaps we'll use some virtualization/hypervisor thing? Would be nice if the GPU vendors allow to use the "virtual GPU" feature, even if limited to only one guest (multiple guests can use an actual GPU nowadays, on "professional" or "enterprise" versions of the hardware)
Can't be any other way than the UEFI legacy mode / Compatibility Support Module (CSM) / BIOS emulation? Let's call it the CSM, since they made up that acronym just so we have a name for it.
As for full USB read/write under DOS, this is courtesy of needing of BIOS (emulated or not) needing to read USB drives in the first place ; otherwise you wouldn't be able to boot from USB, or other features. DOS will read/write the USB drive you booted from.
As for CHS, this would give you the old drive limit of slightly less than 8 GiB. LBA took care of this and it might be the BIOS's job, not DOS (I don't know). A version of DOS that supports fat32 will help of course (prior to 98SE, a buggy fdisk was bundled, partition size above 64GB rolls over). You will certainly be able to use any drive up to 128 GiB / 137 GB, quite possibly up to 2 TiB. (don't make a fat32 partition that big if you worry about cluster allocation size)
Sound card support is the only thing really missing to have some fun IMO. I did see that mpxplay (a music player) includes drivers for certain cards and sound chipsets (some Intel, VIA, other in there but no Realtek) ; I never tried it but with supported hardware it might actually be useful.
What os is this? Doesn't look like a linux problem, unless you have way too little memory?
Yes it's a problem, although I see it on desktop when running out of swap (a credible user scenario when your browser fills up all remaining ram + swap). Sometimes there's not enough memory left to log in on a text console (after ctrl-alt-F1) to kill the biggest process. Sometimes, if you have a graphical task manager running you can use it (but if it's not running you won't have enough memory left to launch it, and the start menu might have been swapped out). If all fails you have to hit the reset button (if you're lucky to have a reset button) or ctrl-alt-backspace which kills all your stuff anyway so on a desktop it's about as bad as a reboot.
I was describing the common use case for common people, i.e. 90%+ people only use a word processor infrequently to write a curriculum and don't know about the features, that's all. Maybe the Clippy assistant was a good idea but I've never really encountered it.
Anyway blogs, wikis and emails replaced writing word processor document in the 2000s, for common home users. Or the lazier alternative of not writing any documents at all.
In the late 90s/early 00s I might have written letters maybe, but my parents had got an Epson inkjet printer (and eventually another one). It didn't work the one time we needed something important printed. Bad timing of technology. Inkjet printers is garbage technology that doesn't work, with the printer vendor actively fighting you. Black and white laser still cost like a used car back then.
So in my experience, unless you were a professional whose tasks including writing word documents, word processors were never really that important. The general public went from handwritten letters and school homework and essays etc. to Internet stuff. Not everyone had a printer, in my country at least.
Is there a "word processing mode"?, or "content mode"?
When we hit return twice to space out paragraphs, it's because that's easier and in the mean time the paragraphs are spaced out, like we intend to.
If we're not supposed to do that, so much as it's considered harmful, maybe there should be a GUI mode where you're constrained from doing that. You hit enter and it doesn't let you go down one more line unless you do something "right" like introduce a new paragraph, section, page break etc.
If word processors default to being a typewriter, and the proper way of using it (even since the 90s) is an "advanced" feature that requires going into menus and trying to figure out what the hell a "style" is, while a single manual adjustment breaks it all, then maybe the design of word processors is flawed.
But the operating systems don't always do a great job. For example, linux distros require software to keep being updated and maintained forever so that it stays compatible with what's reasonably current. So, it seems like we'll be stuck forever with Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, Audacity, Libre Office etc., not that there's necessarily anything wrong with these but there's not much else at all. Little new software (e.g., deadbeef music player) compared to a decade ago, besides new versions of toolkits and libraries and the move to 64bit so that stuff is less buggy and eats a lot more RAM.
There are other platforms, which are spyware and are incompatible with each other, like Steam, Microsoft Store and Google Play. Of course Web Assembly will be all too easily exploited for applications that are spyware (e.g. make some application that requires a log in and store data about every single thing the user did), though it technically doesn't have to.
Obviously this will allow much faster "apps" but we all know what that means. Tons of "features" i.e. yet more bloat and "innovation" i.e. new version of shit that looks like it's for cell phones and runs 4x slower.
Javascript engines got a lot faster a few years ago and all we got was a ton of garbage and google making their "Maps" excruciatingly slow unless you run brand new hardware. Also, javascript Doom got taken off the internet for copyright infrigement and all the games are on Android Google Play anyway.
Devs, stop masturbating to your i5/i7 laptop and your Samsung S7 and don't forget to also test on sensible specs like 1GHz and unsupported AMD graphics. People aren't interested into upgrading every other year to a computer that can run Crysis just to do the same things we did back in 2005 or so.
You're mistaken a bit, Fury X is a single GPU board. The dual GPU one is the Radeon Pro Duo, which is likely very rare.
Actually yes there's a saying that 10nm is a crappy node again and GPUs are likely to go straight for 7nm (those nm sizes being creative accounting)
It's a new normal to get two GPU architectures on the same process node, we all expect a 16nm Volta.
I recently ran some Tetris or Pacman type of game that was super smooth (and looked like early 80s, except it has to be about 1000-pixel wide now)
Well, it is butter smooth except for the garbage collection pause every second that makes it super jerky. It was not WebGL stuff though.
I wonder if we'll see 3D shit in web pages that suddenly makes your browser consume 1GB more memory, or half GB, pushing the PC into swap hell, not to mention "run out of swap" hell. I will eventually map a keyboard key to "killall Web\ Content".
Fun fact, I eventually tried Classic Theme Restorer and found it looked like ass anyway, like it didn't play well with the GTK theme and had some "default" looking colors or shape that would work fine on the Windows 7 x64 SP1 that everyone uses except linux users. The configuration GUI looks like a space shuttle simulator, which is why I went not far and moreover the Firefox 4 GUI isn't that "classic" to me. But I don't want to flame the authors or the users!
Hopefully Firefox moves on in a good way. After XUL is completely removed, and after version 52 runs out, we'll lose things, but we might gain new things. i.e. the derivative browser scene won't die out and maybe we'll see more of them based on the "new Firefox" instead of webkit or Blink.
Maybe ExFAT will be part of that short list eventually?, once it is not "protected" by patents anymore. By which time we will all be old...
Intel says yours has a 55W TDP.
So that's a great laptop you have there, but it is out of the ordinary.
Perhaps someone could make a "luggable" that takes regular 65W desktop CPUs for max performance at min prices.
In sealed Egyptian tombs and other dry environments. Pretty much all European papyrus writings rotted away.
To take a lazy example, Ubuntu 16.04 advertised its ZFS support.
What's up with the start menu in KDE 5 that takes almost all the screen height, and other overweight GUI elements? It's like we're back to default Windows XP in 800x600.
Optimizing for poor saps who have an otherwise unusable 13.3" laptop with 1920x1080 was a good idea, but to make it the default, that's jarring. Combined with copying the Windows 2.0 / Android / iOS style, this makes it hard to see what's going on. So, I would have to spend hours learning the GUI to fix it, while not knowing how far that can be done.
FWIW they advertise a Stream with 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, and 802.11ac if you care about that. I would not like a toy with everything soldered but why not with you're okay with it. It would be good specs if t were a phone lol.
The one I used was closer to this one but slightly newer I think (dual core 1.0GHz actually) and gray. They do not say too bad things about it.
https://liliputing.com/2012/07...
It's a nightmare to look for their ever changing laptop models, lol.
Not exactly a feather, but perhaps the weight loss from removing the mechanical HDD is noticeable.
A couple company execs choosing the new aspect ratio on a whim in the 1980s or 1990s ruined it forever. It came down to one man agreeing to making something about half way between cinemascope and 4:3, but would he have pushed for 5:3, about 1.66.. and had the other guy agreed, the entire world would have been a bit different.
16:9 is arguably a bit too wide for TV as well.
Heck, I did see some dual LCD panel for VR on alibaba, one for each eye, with an aspect ratio of 1.2. This should give an idea about what the useful field of vision for one human eye is. 1.37 was an important historical ratio (even used on post-war French TV before switching to a PAL compatible standard)
Now we've got a generation reaching age 21 right now with no attention span, perhaps because 16:9 TV is too wide and literally doesn't allow them to focus on the people in the little box.
There are laptops that come with no OS at all (or FreeDOS, which is hardly an OS).
Often mid range ones, i.e. those mundane ones with an RJ45 port and such. Surprise : regular laptops never stopped being built, they just don't make the news. The cheap ones even take 32GB RAM now, with the switch to plain DDR4 memory. Too bad, 15.6" 1600x900 doesn't exist anymore (not that it used to be the most common), which would have allowed to run an unscaled desktop without squinting at tiny text and icons.
Um, yeah about the linux part. This might be your bet for a "linux laptop", albeit it doesn't actually comes with linux. I think the OEMs simply don't want to bear any responsibility or support cost. (as an aside, look how bad it is in the Android world) ;)
Distros have their own life cycles, even if OEMs wanted to ship a "safe", most mainstream distro. For example, main Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with linux 4.8 kernel : this might be a good bet for a vanilla, consumer oriented distro with lots of users on modern laptops. But this particular version was released less than a month ago
Dunno if the size suits you, but HP makes 1366x768 11.6" laptop and I found the build quality was surprisingly not crappy.
I don't know if the screen was reflective or not. Obviously not a really good one, but size makes it crisp and about good looking. I can't stand regular quality 14" and 15" laptop screens in general, I'd rather use a 1990s CRT.
The particular laptop came with a 500GB HDD - you can always replace it with a 120GB desktop SSD (it's cheap and will be faster/reliable than a 32GB). It was perhaps made in 2014 (with a quad core Kabini AMD). AMD "Stoney Ridge" low-clocked CPU with amdgpu linux driver would be decent I think.
Maybe they could make a high end ish laptop with a 10" 2560x1600 IPS LCD. This sort of screen is available for tablets (I hope so?). Industrial and commercial availability are what makes it possible, not technology. Sadly perhaps no vendor wants to come up with a PC laptop that's not 16:9.
At least Cinnamon / Gnome 3 can use it as a virtual 1280x800 display of sorts. But for this I reckon Wayland needs to not be vaporware anymore, so as to reduce CPU load and make the graphics smoother. I.e. keep up with Windows Vista/7/8/10 and Android.
A low end, small SSD might be not that great (perhaps it's an eMMC chip that's optional, perhaps it's an mSATA), for reliable writes and swapping.
Not to mention the HDD is over 15x bigger!
Quite simply, netbooks took off when they replaced the 4GB and 8GB SSD-lite things with a 160GB (later 250GB) hard drive. The upgrade to 1024x600 resolution helped as well. Many bought them as their main computers, e.g. students who couldn't afford a $1000 laptop, which is all there was a couple years earlier.
Some users won't install anything more than a web browser and maybe an IM app like Skype, and will make do with 32GB. But with a hard drive you cover more use cases. Even people who stream everything, but store 13 megapixel pictures on the computer without worrying or even knowing about disk space. /home on 500GB (if done like that) is not bad (although if you simply do that, you'll have browser cache on HDD). Yes booting in 10 seconds instead of 30 seconds and launching a big program in 1 second instead of 5 seconds is convenience not essential functionality. You'll also wait on the cpu for packing/unpacking archives (program installation and updates) whether your disk is mechanical or not.
Also, $20 is a nice "luxury" option, having / on 32GB,
When your Xorg process uses a ton of CPU and your graphics driver is bad, a linux desktop is quite bad with overhead also Gnome 3, KDE are pigs or at least quite heavier than XP was.
There is not much freedom on mobile phones yet. What about a GNU/Linux phone that can run Android in a VM?
Might we see a Windows phone that can run desktop software first, including an Android emulator? (perhaps too CPU hungry to use it for long)
I did like that right analogue stick. I also liked the consoles with only one analogue stick - those are the N64 and Dreamcast. These forced games to use only one stick.
The N64 game pad would have been good if they had fixed that silly problem with the stick eroding.
The Game Cube controller also had that clicking on the analog triggers, that was innovative.
You're missing the i686 Macs (dual core CPU half-way between a Pentium M and a Core 2 Duo)
Also, Core 2 Duo systems are old themselves (old graphics, old firmware) so I wouldn't count on them not being deprecated.