Also, that was one of the lowest-content and worst-thought-out TechCrunch writeups I've seen ("If you’ve ever wanted to plug a Windows machine into your TV for a little hot and heavy Excel slinging, you’re in luck"... really? I've done so with Laptops for the last decade).
And they even acknowledge "These single-stick computers are nothing new " (heck, we've got some Intel Compute Sticks at my work). I guess it's not fun having to write up these things.
Came here to say this. No thanks, Lenovo, I can get the same performance and form factor directly from Intel with no "added value" spyware, and I can even get it with Linux preinstalled if I want.
Their business line is decent, I had a ThinkCentre machine a while back that was rock solid. Their consumer line is not nearly as polished, and with the spyware stuff from last year I now won't even touch their business hardware, which arguably wasn't affected. I moved our company from Lenovo to Dell and HP for any new workstations, specifically because of the loss of trust. It's not even about the possibility of an infection as I always re-image any new machine we get immediately, it's more about the principle, and my boss agreed.
It has the same processor, memory, and peripherals mentioned in the compute stick announcement, so it appears to be the Compute Stick with whatever exterior decorations and software Lenovo wants to add. I think we can expect to see a few more similar announcements as various other OEMs continue to rebrand the same device.
It's nice to see a device from a well-known brand that stays close to the anonymous Chinese manufacturers, but at the end of the day the innovation that makes it possible comes from the chip makers.
Just the other day I was thinking it would be nice if a cell phone can fire up multiple normal OSs (i.e., desktop Linux/Windows/OSX), so at hotel/library/friend's home/etc., one can pull it out of pocket, connect to a display and hack away.
I wonder when we can have that level of power and convenience in our regular phones.
That's not so much a computing power limitation but a limitation imposed by the manufacturers on what you can run. The Nokia N900 had Linux running on it in 2010.
If you're one of the lucky few with an Ubuntu phone, you can do this as well.
True, but it depends on what you want to do with it. I can run Linux on an Intel Edison board (did some Python and C++ programming on one last weekend), but I wouldn't dare to try to write code on anything heavier than vim.
I am not familiar with the specs of these phones. Does the Ubuntu phone (or its near future upgrades) has the capacity to _comfortably_ run, say, IntelliJ IDEA and make writing/compiling code a tolerable experience? That would be very nice.
Different strokes/folks. You would need a keyboard, but if it had/has bluetooth support, you could just get one of those fold-able keyboards. It'd take less space and be extremely cheap in comparison to the Air, which might be a huge factor for some people.
When everyone's cell phone has that amount of power and can function as a PC, it's likely many places (hotels, airport, cafe, offices) will try to accommodate them by providing lots of display/keyboard sets.
If you're wondering about the target market for these devices, the main answer is digital signage. Those LCD signs in train stations and shopping malls constitute a huge market for small, low-powered and fanless computers. There are at least a dozen SaaS startups in this space, targeting a wide variety of hardware and OSes.
I doubt that this particular Lenovo mini PC is targetting that niche. You wouldn't need 32GB of storage for something as basic as digital signage, and there are Android-based alternatives for 3x cheaper... http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/mini-pcs/mk808-android-mini...
I wish the MK808 was a plug and play digital sign, but it's actually kind of a pain to set up and use. I've got one sitting in a drawer.
If someone came out with a stick computer that simply connects to wifi and displays a webpage in a relatively modern browser at 1080 (or at least 720) and makes it easy, I would buy several of them at a nice premium over whatever the hardware normally costs.
I actually think an Android hacker or RaspberryPI hobbyist could make some money selling something like that.
"I wish the MK808 was a plug and play digital sign, but it's actually kind of a pain to set up and use. I've got one sitting in a drawer."
What did you find painful about using it? Looks like it supports custom ROMs, did you try using something like CyanogenMod (or the Finless ROM mentioned in the linked article)?
I tried one firmware (maybe it was finless?) downloaded from a sketchy looking site that cause the wifi to no longer connect. There did not some to be many firmware choices that supported 1080 output. Even getting an app to run automatically on bootup felt like a chore.
Regardless, I would gladly pay twice as much for the device if it came already set up. I am very pro-hobbyist, but in this case I want a fully formed product.
"Regardless, I would gladly pay twice as much for the device if it came already set up. I am very pro-hobbyist, but in this case I want a fully formed product."
So something as simple as a Raspberry Pi B+ ($25), an OmniVESA (approx $7), a USB WiFi dongle (approx $9), a 4GB MicroSDHC card (approx $6), a micro USB charger (approx $4) and a short HDMI cable (approx $7). Total cost $58. Could add a cheap case if you wanted. Perhaps there are ways to do all this cheaper with an Android mini PC, but a RasPi setup would be very flexible, and wouldn't require too much setup. It's also easy to boot straight into a web browser (can find some distro recommendations here https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=8502...).
A significant proportion of digital signage and kiosk systems run Windows, for a variety of reasons. Things like departure boards and PoS are often based on proprietary client software that is integrated into unrefactorable legacy backends. Fitting a Win7/8 install into less than 32gb is possible, but it just isn't worth the effort when hardware is so cheap.
If the stick has enough power to play the majority of MAME games, this might be a nice addition to the home entertainment rig. I bought an Ouya a couple of years ago for this purpose, but I just didn't like it. Running a TinyXP installation on this stick with MAME32/MESS32 with a Bluetooth keyboard w/ touchpad from my comfy chair would be pretty sweet.
I wonder if any hosting providers are offering such micro PCs, or planning to. They would be a great alternative to VPS, arguably with better security. I've seen some Raspberry Pi hosting, but its USB NIC is too slow.
If the price point gets too low, the IPv4 address might become the bottleneck. Bandwidth is cheap, power is cheap for a device like this, and the space could be very low. So you might get close enough to the sun to hit the IPv4 cost limit.
Keep in mind you can buy a much more powerful machine than this from Amazon or Microsoft for around $10 all in (yes, running Windows). So they'd have to be looking around $5 and IPv4 addresses can cost $1.5-2/each.
So these C1 ARM servers are built in house, I gather. Their features page says "true dedicated hardware", but I wonder how well those 18 servers on each board are isolated. IPMI could be a disaster.
They do! See http://www.kimsufi.com/ (which belongs to OVH). The SSD box is terrible value though. I have a KS-1 for ~6€/month (incl VAT) and while it isn't a particularly fast machine, it fulfils all my server needs. It's also incredibly cheap for a dedicated server.
I don't understand why they have added a tiny speaker to this gadget. It wouldn't imagine it is very loud and in most cases would be stuck around the back of your TV. Could someone enlighten me to when a speaker would be useful?
Too bad it makes me have to move my flat tv 10 cm of the wall. An HDMI connector at an angle would have been nice (or I could buy an extension HDMI cable of course.).
Many flatscreens nowadays have ports that are facing to the sides, so those people would've had a problem with an angled connector. I'd rather have power over HDMI to get rid of that annoying powercord to the stick :)
The forthcoming Google Chromebit has a clever design that pivots so you can choose if you want the connector straight at the end or at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the stick.
Can you install Linux on it, i.e. is the boot loader unlocked? If so, it can be a great air-gapped stick for generating and storing keys and certificates on the go.
I own a Windows tablet (Voyo A1 Mini) with exactly the same CPU and amount of memory and storage, which I have been using as 7" keyboard-less laptop replacement, so I thought it would be interesting to share my opinion.
The CPU is fast enough for moderate web browsing, using Office, playing videos and music, etc. In other words, the casual tasks of an "average user". Of course, it wasn't made to compile software or run complex simulations, and it has some thermal throttling (my tablet has no fans and this stick doesn't appear to have any, either), so if you use the four cores to the maximum for some time, the speed will start decreasing from 1.56 GHz (I have made the max go as low as 0.96 GHz due to throttling). This is the kind of thing that doesn't show in all benchmarks, so beware. (To be fair, spec sheets also don't say that when cores are not fully used, turboboost kicks in and a single core can be working at 1.8 GHz for quite some time).
The integrated Intel graphics are (as usual) good for media playing, web browsing and dealing with Windows UI animations, but forget any kind of gaming that demands more than a smartphone game.
The biggest problem, for me at least, is the lack of RAM: 2 GB of RAM are filled quite fast with 6-8 Chrome tabs and some background software open. It also doesn't take much to fill the whole 4 GB of commit space, and of course, bringing pages in and out of the pagefile is quite slow (the storage is flash, but not quite a SSD). It is easy to make Windows show a "system running low on memory" message just by opening 20 Chrome tabs, some with heavy sites. If all you want to do is run Microsoft Office, I found it to actually be much lighter on memory use than I previously thought (I never saw OneNote, Excel or Word go beyond 90 MB).
Storage gets quite full very easily, mine is always with ~1 GB free (Windows and Office installed on C:, most other things installed on the SD card), and this is using things like NTFS compression. If this stick is like my tablet, it will have 6 GB of storage "wasted" on a recovery partition. Also, the trick Microsoft recommends OEMs use for fitting Windows on systems with as few as 16 GB of storage, which consists on using WIM images for storing the system files, works only while the install is fresh: as more and more system updates are installed, the altered files seem to be stored out of the image, which means there's effectively more space used with Windows files than with a normal install. I have "reserved" the Windows 10 update and I'm eager to see how it will deal with background-downloading the (possibly gigabytes) of files into a system with only 1 GB free.
I once thought of installing Visual Studio just to see how slow it would run, but gave up once I understood most components must be installed to C: (it appears that installing VS effectively equates to "extending Windows" with developer tools).
I am still quite happy with the purchase (it was about $150) since it allows for doing things Android tablets don't do, like running the full MS Office or using proper desktop versions of browsers and other software. I imagine this stick opens the same kind of possibilities.
Every single TV in my house as a Windows device plugged into it. We've tried Roku, Chromecast and others - but you can't beat Windows if flexibility is what you want.
Having just a Chromecast sucks because you need a whole other smart device to actually do things. The Roku is a little better, but honestly it's too slow to navigate.
With Windows, I can do whatever the heck I want. We can play classic game emulators with Xbox controllers, watch ripped exercise DVDs with VLC media player (my wife does this), we run Netflix for Windows or Kodi to watch movies/TV and then of course we can do anything that a Chromecast does by simply opening Chrome (with adblock). It's awesome.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem you really can't beat Apple TV. Bring up the content on your phone then Airplay to the TV and use the phone as an awesome media remote. Random internet videos? Bring up on the phone = on the TV. Netflix, YouTube, Twitch? Awesome phone apps = on the TV. Your own video files? I use Air Video Server HD on PC with companion iPhone app; every video file I own = on the TV. Its just perfect.
Sure, it's perfect if you're content to live in the confines of Apple's prison yard. I just can't stand Apple the company or their dumbed-down products though. They are the the king of "streamlined but extremely limited", so there's no way that a person like me who values ultimate flexibility is going to belong to the Apple ecosystem.
Can you look at funny memepics on the web while Pandora is playing in the background on Apple TV? Shop for a new game on Steam while playing a YouTube video? Connect an Xbox 360 controller to play games? We do all of these things. I haven't used an Apple TV, but somehow I doubt that it excels at multi-tasking or interoperating with the non-Apple universe.
You are comparing a $69 Apple TV to a desktop that will cost at least 4x that. And the usage models you are describing do not correspond to how most people watch TV. People sit on the couch with the TV on, potentially fiddling with their phone. This works with Apple TV perfectly. If you want flexibility then what you want is a much more expensive computer, and then you've got ten-foot-ui problems even in the most basic usage scenarios. I too have my (gaming) pc hooked up to my TV (via a long HDMI cable) but I only use it to play games because the user experience is horrendous when doing anything else.
> dumbed-down products
> streamlined but extremely limited
What the hell are you even talking about here? It's certainly not TV sticks because all of them offer similar functionality. It's certainly not Apple laptops or desktops and their unix backed OSX. What then? Phones? What activities do you do on your phone that cannot be done on an iPhone? In what tangible way is an iPhone dumbed-down and extremely limited compared to, what, Android? And most importantly, in what way does using an iPhone irreversibly force you into the Apple ecosystem?
The product in the OP is $130, which isn't too far off of that $69. You can also get 7" Windows tablets for about $80, so I think it's a fair comparison.
Someone (it was you) told me that Apple TV is "perfect" and I disagreed and I said all of the reasons why. You did continue the comparison though by talking about how bad you think the UX is, but it would be nice to have some actual examples instead of empty claims.
All of Apple's products are dumbed down compared to competing products. Windows has soooo much more flexibility than OS X and I'll be glad to give you a couple of good examples to shore up my argument.
For starters - the really big obvious one is that OS X only runs on a very small sub-set of the hardware that Windows runs on. I don't care if their business plan dictates it, it's dumb and I won't use OS X because of it. Windows runs faster on the same hardware anyway.
Here's a big one for which there are lots of examples - Apple simply does not let you customize OS X nearly as much as you can customize Windows. Apple's dumb-it-down attitude reaches all the way to the smallest of features - for instance, go try and change the color of your mouse cursor in OS X. One day I tried to change it to white because I like that better and I found out that OS X has the cursor bitmap burned into a fucking ROM or something... that's just a tad ridiculous, don't you think?
I think it's hilarious that some people are so in love with Apple that they don't even see the most basic examples. If the mouse cursor example hasn't convinced you please let me know and I'll come back with a larger list of just how many ways OS X is limited (and therefore dumbed-down) compared to Windows and Linux desktops.
(EDIT: And the same arguments go for the iPhone versus others. Apple doesn't let you customize it nearly as much as Android and of course they don't let you run it on the hardware you want, so yeah the iPhone is dumbed-down. Enjoy your prison yard!)
You claim Apples products are dumbed down but the first example you give is that OSX only runs on certain hardware. That's not what "dumbed down" means. This goes more towards your point of their products being limited (extremely-limited is still a stretch). But if you think about it their product is Macbook + OSX. This pair is not limited, its as feature rich as any Windows laptop (even more so I'd argue because of the unix backed OS). The Windows ecosystem indeed has a larger selection of products but your claims were significantly more far reaching than this simple fact.
> Here's a big one for which there are lots of examples - Apple simply does not let you customize OS X nearly as much as you can customize Windows. Apple's dumb-it-down attitude reaches all the way to the smallest of features - for instance, go try and change the color of your mouse cursor in OS X.
You escalate the notion of a mouse cursor theme being difficult to change into the entire operating system being difficult to customize. An operating system does a lot of stuff, I don't see how any of this follows.
> I think it's hilarious that some people are so in love with Apple that they don't even see the most basic examples.
I'm not sure what you think this tiny thing is indicative of, but I guarantee to you that most people have never even thought about this because it is irrelevant to their lives.
> And the same arguments go for the iPhone versus others. Apple doesn't let you customize it nearly as much as Android and of course they don't let you run it on the hardware you want, so yeah the iPhone is dumbed-down. Enjoy your prison yard!
To summarize your arguments: Apple provides fewer hardware options and a lot less theming options. Seems to me like your words are a bit too harsh considering you are describing a full desktop operating system and a full mobile operating system, both of which have significantly more knobs to tweak than just themes. They also run software you know. Limiting access to fiddle with themes is hardly a prison yard. Also, not everybody has the time to fiddle with themes. Also, just because something is customizable doesn't mean you can make it look good (customizability comes at a cost to coherency). Also, plenty of people use Apple strictly because of how their products look and feel. I think your theming metric is quite weak in general, but especially when used to back up the claims that every single thing Apple makes is "dumbed down" and "extremely limited."
Limited options is exactly what "dumbed down" means and Apple is known for offering dumbed down limited devices and computers. The examples I gave are just that - examples. I can give you a whole laundry list of ways that OS X is limited compared to Windows and yes, the fact that you can only run OS X on one single brand of hardware is a major limitation.
Being able to change the color of the cursor is not a "theming" option, it's a usability option because I can see the white cursor and find it on the screen much better than the black one. It's just one example though.
I'll go through every piece of software that comes with OS X and show you a better default application that comes with Windows if you want. Let's start with the basics - Finder - which is super limited compared to other file browsers.
- Just added the ability to cut and paste in Lion/2011!
- No hooks to extend it the way you can Windows Explorer. (So, you simply cannot have a whole class of software, like TortoiseGit.)
- No address bar to quickly see and/or enter a path. You can get close with the status bar thingy, but it's still limited in ways that matter - namely, having an obvious place to enter a path...
- Cannot remove it from the Dock because reasons. (I don't care about the reasons, you simply cannot do it.)
Yep, lets ignore the fact that the OSX and Windows are highly similar in functionality, over-leverage some small differences all in favor of Windows as if OSX is an exact subset, and continue to drill that all Apple products are "extremely limited" and "dumbed down." Come on, man.
> Limited options is exactly what "dumbed down" means and Apple is known for offering dumbed down limited devices and computers.
> .. the fact that you can only run OS X on one single brand of hardware is a major limitation.
What are you trying to pull here? You know that's not what "exactly" means. You painted a very vivid picture with your earlier words and you know god damn well that it wasn't: "Apple has a limited hardware selection." No, you claimed that all of their products are "extremely limited" and "dumbed down." Meanwhile half of your argument relies on the fact that just the selection process simplified. That's like calling Mazda products dumbed down because they only sell a handful of cars. Its an absurd metric, its absurd for it to be a large part of why you bad-mouth the entirety of their products, and it is absurd to imply that bad-mouthing the entirety of their products in a vacuum exactly implies that the selection process is limited. And by the way limiting the hardware selection only to the high-end and providing a tighter integration the software is a major reason why Apple is the company it is today. That means regardless of how strongly you feel about this you have to concede that you are being subjective. So what you've got here is a subjective opinion about just the selection process being leveraged into calling all products dumbed-down. Its just ridiculous.
> Being able to change the color of the cursor is not a "theming" option, it's a usability option because I can see the white cursor and find it on the screen much better than the black one. It's just one example though.
A large part of my objective was how you were heavily implying that this one example strongly supports your grandiose claims.
I am not familiar with accessibility options on Macs historically but on my work Mac there is an option to increase cursor size, and it can be made quite big. Also, it's black precisely for visibility. The OSX themes have always been bright and the vast majority of web pages and apps are bright so a black cursor offers contrast. Doesn't Windows offer a black cursor as a means to increase visibility?
> - Just added the ability to cut and paste in Lion/2011!
Note how you're not complaining about the underlying functionality but only about the UX differences. This is a complaint that OSX is not Windows and its four years old.
> - No hooks to extend it the way you can Windows Explorer. (So, you simply cannot have a whole class of software, like TortoiseGit.)
I'm not familiar with this so I can't comment about specifics. Though this does seem like a very niche use case, the lack of which does not warrant calling the entire operating system "extremely simplified" and "dumbed down."
Why not just use git? Oh, right, dos. That's why I develop on macs.
> - No address bar to quickly see and/or enter a path. You can get close with the status bar thingy, but it's still limited in ways that matter - namely, having an obvious place to enter a path...
From the menu: Go > Go to Folder ... or Command + Shift + G. Functionality is there, it could be easier to access, its a trade-off. Though the vast majority of the time that I go to specific code paths I'm in bash.
> - Cannot remove it from the Dock because reasons. (I don't care about the reasons, you simply cannot do it.)
Hiding Finder is the equivalent of hiding the start menu on Windows. I have no idea how to do either, I'm not sure why anybody would want to, and I don't see a logical relation between this and calling the operating system "dumbed down".
When you say device, can you give an example of what you're referring to? My wife got a me a Chromecast for Christmas, a great friend of mine got me a FireTV stick for my birthday loaded with emulators on it, but I'd really like to be able to carry a full-fledged PC around if that were possible.
Sorry, nothing really portable - we have a couple of Zotac ZBOX "nano PCs" (http://www.amazon.com/Zotac-ZBOX-CI320NANO-U-W2-nano-Plus-Wi...) and the others are an old laptop (Dell XPS L502X) and an old Shuttle SH67H3 barebones PC. Each site except the laptop also has a Logitech K400/r wireless keyboard/touchpad which is great except when it occasionally loses signal.
But that's 8 times the price of a Chromecast (if you include the keyboard and mouse).
For me, a Chromecast is very close to the perfect device, as my iPad lives in the living room most of the time and allows me to conveniently control the Chromecast, without any keyboards or mice lying around. While it's not as powerful or flexible as your setup, I prefer its convenience. It does everything I need it to (Netflix, Youtube, other players [ZDF Mediathek etc], play local files with Plex or Videostream for Chrome, ...), and does so hassle-free. For surfing, I prefer the iPad over the TV anyway.
The only problem I've had with the Chromecast is that the wifi connection feels a little finnicky at times, and maybe I'm just not using it right, but if you can't actually get it on the internet, it doesn't do much for you. That said, I still really like it.
The main problem for me is that it's 2.4GHz only. As lots of people live in the inner cities in Europe, where lots of flats are in close proximity, that spectrum is extremely crowded even in residential areas. I guess that's much less of an issue in the suburbs though.
For me, the 2.4 GHz spectrum is only usable during "off-peak" hours, or extremely close to the router (the Chromecast is <1m from the router, so it's fine). But since I use 5 GHz for everything else, I muddle through with surprisingly few issues :)
Absolutely. (Unless you count the cost of the iPad or other devices that's required to run the Chromecast.) The Zotac box is actually ~16 times more expensive than a Chromecast, but unfortunately I just can't do whatever I want with a Chromecast and I'm totally willing to pay to get what I want.
I don't think there is more inherent convenience in the iPad -> Chromecast setup. My $20 wireless keyboard is actually more convenient in my opinion because it's a dedicated input control that's ready to go as soon as I pick it up. With a smart device, I have to setup a whole other device with apps that are compatible with Chromecast and when we're picking stuff to watch we don't have to huddle around a tablet or phone - we just look at what's on the TV.
