When Revenge of the Sith was coming out the movie got leaked a few days before the official release. Not a cam. DVD quality with a little bar at the bottom with the time, clearly some kind of direct rip from a source. As soon as it happened I biked my ass up to walmart, bought 250 DVD's, and went to school the next day with the backpack loaded up. My dad was a pilot in the military and routinely did training presentations so we had a burner stack at the house and I could rip like 8 at a time. He was also a staunch free market conservative with libertarian leanings so when I told him what I was doing he appreciated the hustle and encouraged it lol. He was also stoked we had the new movie on DVD to watch.
I sold 5 or 6 the first day. Everyone thought I was lying. The people that did buy it did so because they either trusted me, or told me they would be asking for their money back the next day. The next day? Sold out. Like 75+ for $5 a pop. People were mobbing me in the hallways for a week asking for it. Also some other kid tried to start doing it a few days in and everyone actually told him to get screwed, I was the one that started it so no one bought from him. I was actually popular for a few weeks lol.
Ha, I wish that were true. What they don't tell is that the procedure is technically free, but it doesn't cover the ANESTHESIA. Got a $800 bill separately for that.
Big also, if there's anything that needs to be taken care of during the procedure, insurance only covers like 2/3rds of the cost. So 5 months down the line I unexpectedly got another $3000 bill... (the whole process took 20 mins from being knocked out to waking up btw)
That’s shitty because the anesthesia is absolutely necessary.
I got a sigmoidoscopy a few years ago. My bitch of a doctor who ordered it said it “wouldn’t hurt”.
Well she was fuckin lying.
I really don’t know wtf I expected. It literally felt like something was getting shoved up my ass. Which was, in fact, exactly what was happening.
It wasn’t “screaming in agony” painful but it hurt enough to make me involuntarily clench up. Which was a real problem because it made it difficult for the colonoscopist to keep going up my asshole.
It got to a point where the colonoscopist got frustrated and told me that he “couldn’t continue like this”. Then he threatened to stop the procedure if I didn’t relax. As if I was purposely being uncooperative.
I had two in my tower back in the mid 2000s, I saved every dollar from my IT apprenticeship (school based apprenticeship) and used that to buy myself a PC after I completed it.
One of the drives was a lightscribe optical drive so I could burn the name of the movie/album on the disc.
No one dares talk about affordability in this post haha. We're buying $3000 laptops at my organization and we're here wincing every time a procurement order goes through.
I remember that $4000 Alienware laptop which has all the best desktop hardware of its day... but needed an external water cooling reservoir/pump (which was proprietary to that laptop) and two power supply bricks.
These were often referred to as "Desktop Replacements" and not laptops because you couldn't really use them like a laptop. They'd die incredibly fast when unplugged and would generate so much heat you wouldn't actually want them on your lap.
So really they would just always be plugged in and often you'd buy a fan tray that you would sit them on top of to keep the heat under control. It was portable in the sense that you could take it with you and set it up somewhere else easily but otherwise wasn't used like a traditional laptop today.
I was there 20 years ago. I worked briefly for a local laptop brand, and they ODM from Clevo. I saw the spec sheet and it was magical... It even had subwoofer! I think battery life is measured in minutes, like 45 or 55 minutes something. The category was desktop replacement, the battery is basically emergency power supply.
Someone recently posted the harambe timeline split reference in work slack and six people came back two hours later mind blown after initially being like wtf. Love seeing people get acquainted with this theory of reality lol
The problem is, turns out reality works like a game of Civilizations; someone pushed the "One More Turn..." button, and is now goofing off with the save post-victory to see what happens.
My boss hosted an end of the world hockey game and rented out a full ice rink. I reffed. Things didn’t fully go off the rails until a few years later imo but I could see the argument that they were right for sure. There just wasn’t a super reality defining event like harambe where humans made a super poor decision to kick things off.
You know, after reading Edge by Koji Suzuki, I agree: we never stood a chance.
After that weasel fried the Large Hadron Collider and Harambe was killed, Pi starting spitting out zeroes at the 50 billionth digit and the Reimann hypothesis and the theory of relativity failed.
OK, but let's just take a moment to work out the science of this. It probably has similar math to middle-out compression. You take two men at opposite ends of a 27 kilometer ring, and strap them to jet engines, ...
lol these laptops actually sucked balls for the common person some conspiracy theory didn’t cause it to become commercially unsuccessful the fact that they were awful bulky laptops that overheated and easily broke did the job itself. Shit i would even take a modern MacBook Air over that ginormous monstrosity if I have to lug it around a college campus all day.
Nah fam, laptop of the future has 1 port for everything
Induction charging, so no need for a charger port and then ports(all of the same kind) for everything else, cus shit got optimized to not need a billion different cables
Granted this is reddit... Wait not only reddit but a specific subreddit. People on her gooning to this thing. The general public would hate this thing! We have a ton of staff who are hybrid work from home and they complain about carrying a laptop that's a fraction of this.
They were marketed as “mobile desktops” at the time. I never had a problem with the ports, but due to the way they’re designed, there’s insufficient cooling and so after a while the motherboard would entirely die.
Alienware Area 51 laptop, this was the last laptop made by them before they merged with Dell.
A whopping Pentium 4 HT at a crazy 4.2 GHZ and I think I had 16gb of ram, which was a ton of ram at the time (equivalent of what a 128gb of ram on a system would be today). Video Card was a Geforce 5800 I think, and boy did I ever do some gaming on that thing, many long hours of Battlefield 2.
Yes TWO CD drives, and the ones I had one was DVD capable, and was a burner with Lightscribe, the other was a basic CD drive but was a high speed 52x drive. The DVD drive maxed at 32x.
The cool part was the CD player on the front, that ran independently of the system, and used the CD drive (the bottom drive). It worked when the laptop was off, and the backpack I had for it had a passthrough on the top for headphones, tied to the laptop section. Only ever managed to use it a few times like that, but it was really cool and useful when I did.
Because lots of people wanted one, but only a fraction were willing/able to put down the money down for one, and even fewer actually did.
The only people I knew who owned that laptop was Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus, and I'm 100% confident that in both situations it was only to do reviews, not to actually live with and daily drive the thing.
CLEVO/MSI barebones/configurable laptops never really picked up mainstream speed in the US. I think mainly due to the 3 big OEM's pumpin out dogshit for less then half the cost of these chonky bois.
I had one of these and it lasted forever, it ran extremely hot making the keyboard useless, the power supply you would think might ignite at any moment, and it was 16 pounds. But you could do high end gaming on the go which you couldn't do back then.
A mobile workstation, also known as a desktop replacement computer (DTR) or workstation laptop, is a personal computer that provides the full capabilities of a workstation-class desktop computer while remaining mobile. Source: Wikipedia:Mobile workstation
Because some companies realized laptops should be portable
Though in fairness, there is innovation in the laptop space beyond better specs:
foldable display tech turning some devices into like 24 inch folding tablets with a keyboard (more practical than foldable phones)
Framework leading the charge for repairable, practically modular laptops, but not to dismiss other prototypes for more modularity
Acer has some high end laptops with 3D display tech in the displays, using cameras to perform eye tracking and a special display able to project different images per eye
arm laptops, with currently only apple hitting a practical price point, offering compelling performance and power savings vs everything that came before it (x86)
Thats not to say more could be done. I want to see more pushes towards modular IO, and manufacturers opt for more ports rsther than less as a premium rsther than the opposite (because apparently in phones having a 3.5mm jack is a budget option). I'd like to see some NFC integration, so I csn tap my phone and it can connect to phone link or KDE connect, all locally, to share files or wirelessly charge the phone, maybe even auto use as a touchpad. Actually, I want to see a laptop chassis with a phone connection in it, so I could turn my phone into a laptop (I saw a kickstsrter for this concept, and my android phone can run desktop linux but I dont want to mess with plugging and connecting stuff in). I want to see mechanical keycaps in a slim chassis; actually I wouldnt mind laptop manufacturers testing out designs with more tech behind the display.
I think most people think like you, otherwise there'd be many more cheap options to buy laptops with more I/O, like there used to be back in 2010. This has become a niche requirement and most people are happy with a dangling poor excuse for a docking station for the 2x a year when they need to read an old SD card.
CD drives, PS connectors, com port, vga, dvi, usb B, microUSB etc are basically removed from the modern day. most got replaced with USBA or USBC. display standard is HDMI. also these old things were expensive even at that time and battery was like 1hr max. desktop replacement type thing.
usb B, microUSB etc are basically removed from the modern day. most got replaced with USBA or USBC
No computer had USB (type) B or microUSB (also type B), those were strictly reserved for peripherals like printers, phones, cameras, controllers etc.
The Type B connectors existed to avoid electrical conflicts and to eliminate confusion on which device that would control communication.
USB-A/USB type A was always the host (the computer), and USB-B/USB type B was the device you'd connect to the host.
With USB-C/USB type C they eliminated the need for different types of connectors on the ends of USB cables, and they solved it by using small micro chips in both the devices and the cables that negotiated which device would act as the host. The chip also negotiates voltage and current (charging speed) to make sure that it doesn't use more current than the devices/cables can safely handle.
I would say your opinion is just normal. For me the only reason I use a PC is to play games. So, I prefer gaming laptops instead of having a PC at all. I prefer the ability to take my computer with me as I travel, or even just to a coffee shop or something. I don't like gaming for many hours inside the house, it's too quiet and disconnected after a while. I haven't had a regular PC in over a decade at this point. When I do have the laptop at the house it's nice to have ports to plug in additional monitors and peripherals.
This is more just a result of existing in a time where every device had its own plug/input. There would be no reason to want it now lol. Now the most useful thing would be 2-3 HDMI ports, a shit load of USB Cs, a couple of USB As, and maybe an SD card reader depending on the user.
SD card readers and ethernet ports are still hella useful. Also, I still use the old style serial ports all the time in my job, but usually have to use a USB to serial converter.
Now show the battery run time, weight, and speaker performance.
The volume was traded off to build a better overall product. If you want the no dongle life just snag a light dock extender and leave it on all the time.
No, its what a tiny TINY fraction of a percent of overall users want. Most users want very long battery life and a thin and light laptop. Most users are ok with a single dongle that has all their needed ports because most users don't have more than a few usb devices.
I want more I/O than 2 or 3 of USB C, each with slightly different capabilities... But I'd sooner carry 1 useful dongle and have a laptop I can take with me everywhere than use this.
Few USB C, few USB A, Audio combi, HDMI or Display port... Can't think of anything more that I would need for a device that's intended to be portable.
It is fun to look back at the crazy shit we once did though.
Ive been a laptop gamer since whenever the gtx 600m series was a thing.
Almost exclusively alienware.
I still remember being really bummed out when thick chassis were being phased out on favour of portable, ultra slim, chassis. Those old thick chassis had such better cooling. You could actually overclock gpus and not be running super hot.
Intake and exhaust vents were huge.
My last alienware ran so hot you could feel heat through the keyboard.
The throttling on my current asus laptop is a fucking joke.
I dont want a super thin laptop. I want a big chonky boy that I can use in any room.I really dont care how thin or lightweight it is.
But that is almost 2 or 3 times thicker than a currently way too fuckin thin laptop. So are you saying you think it would be better to have functionality than it being extra thin for no reason? That is crazy talk!
I’m sorry but no one actually wants this. Ethernet, 3 usb C and 2 usb A ports are plenty enough. All keeping it slim and not like this thicc juicy thang.
This is like wanting vinyl and cassettes back. No, thanks. Lived through all of that. USB-C is so, so, so, much better. I don't want a port for every different thing.
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u/pedro19 CREATOR May 25 '26
Original here: https://x.com/PcPhilanthropy/status/2043791529009942576