Lately, I've been thinking about creative re-use of technology, which usually means I've been spending too much time looking at MAKE or Instructables. When littlestar was showing me some novelty usb drives, what kept running through my mind was "Hmm. I could make that. All I need is..."
Of course, seeing DataMancer's wonderful steampunk laptop got me thinking about things too, particularly about materials. Although we can house computers within just about anything these days, for your average consumer, they often come in plastic or metal cases, and they pretty much look like any other computer. Every once in a while, you hear about wooden peripherals or one that has leather accents, there isn't use of much other materials. There is a practical reason of course to not using fabric on computers, and that's cleaning, but why has has laptop design not substantially changed in the last 15 years?
In 1993, my parents bought me a laptop to take to school. It was one of those generic deals that you'd be able to find in a mom and pop computer store, equipped with a 486 processor and with 33 mhz of processing power, it was as fast as my desktop computer at home, and amazingly I was able to play SimCity 2000 on it. The keyboard was built in, and the 7 inch screen was monochrome with 256 shades of gray, it had a 10 megabyte harddrive and it cost about $2000. It also weighed about 10 pounds. No built in modem or network card, not even a built in trackpad. But it was clad in the all-too-familiar black plastic shell that still wraps modern laptops today.
Now, through the advancement of computer technology, you could make that same machine today for a fraction of the cost, with all sorts of bells and whistles attached to it, and make it still cost a great deal less than two grand. Much of this has to do with the falling prices of components, and the progress of technology. For example, you can now buy an ASUS eee PC with an Intel Mobile processor, 512 RAM, a 4GB flash drive, 7 inch screen, built in webcam, speakers, network card, and weighs just 2 lbs for $400. While 4GB of drive space doesn't seem like a whole lot, it is enough as long as you use mostly web applications and don't do any graphics work. The ASUS eee PC comes with Linux pre-installed, (Windows is also installable, as they include the drivers) The move to using solid state electronics (no moving parts) and using a flash drive instead of a hard drive is a big step. While larger flash drives are still more expensive than the traditional hard drive, it has the benefits of a smaller physical footprint, less energy consumption and greater reliability, I see flash drives going forward for consumer computers, and replacing physical hard drives for devices in which size and weight will make a difference.
Asus isn't the only one thinking about replacing hard drives with flash, Dell has recently unveiled the M1330, which also uses a 64 GB solid state device (as a $1000 upgrade).
Leave a comment