The device I have and the device I need
Each time I power up our Windows XP/Dell tower system (cost: about $1200) at home, I'm reminded of my tendency toward numbness of the brain. What I want to do: access the internet for email or to pay a bill. What I need to do to achieve that: Fire up this steam locomotive and wait till the steam reaches a certain pressure before I can give it throttle. As long as the system is up, I'm in peril of various malware and viruses, in acknowledgment of which I've got to spend considerable time in preventive measures. I've got some nice graphics card and a ton of disk space and RAM and, of course, XP. The whole shebang will be obsolete in three years, which period would've been shorter but for the clunkiness of and slow surrender to Vista.
What I should've bought: Mac Mini. About half the cost (about $650 with employee discount), so creeping obsolescence is less painful. It has everything I need and less of what I don't. In contrast to the Dell's periodic hard-disk moaning, the Mini is... silent. It's about about one-twentieth the size of the Dell box, virus-type threats (while existing) are less, and it's a Mac. In the competition between delight on one side and cessation of pain on the other, that's the rough equivalent of saying: it's not Windows!
What I really need: The ability to connect to internet with an inexpensive device that has the bare minimum of local storage, with a decent graphics display (what I have now is fine), that allows me to get out of the virus-prevention, driver-download business. For financial transactions (e.g., doing my taxes), I'd need secure storage and, for all files, simple (preferably automatic) backup. Of course, for this we'd need a much-improved internet infrastructure, probably beyond what our current phone networks (and maybe cable networks) are capable of.
Postscript: My remark about "slow surrender" to Vista was incorrect. In Microsoft's earning announcement yesterday, they indicated that Vista adoption was proceeding according to plan. Mothers, raise your children to be monopolists.
Have you looked at the Nokia N800? Plug in a decent sized SD card for storage and it sounds about ideal. It runs the Maemo OS (which is Linux-based), is entirely solid state (and therefore silent) and connects over WiFi.
Posted by Ian on January 25, 2008 at 08:42 AM PST #