Posts Tagged → computer

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

The new Microsoft Surface Arm laptops are in the wild now and getting properly tested. The Verge did a full set of benchmarks that conclude with a few relevant points:

  • It runs a little faster than a MacBook Air and quite a bit slower than a MacBook Pro. These really are aimed at the MacBook Air.
  • Battery life is behind the MacBook Air’s. This isn’t a surprise, as I suspect they have a lot of experience with the MacBook Air.

Together, these two points make sense. They upped the clock cycle count to outperform the MacBook Air — which is an admittedly sexy headline for Microsoft — at the expense of some battery life. Regardless, I think it’s great news that people running Windows now have an option that’s competitive with MacBook Air performance and battery life. Now, if it just ran a better operating system…

The Apple Jonathan

I enjoyed this story by Stephen Hackett on Apple’s unrealized modular computer project, “Jonathan”, from the 1980s. I remember when the idea of a modular computer was in vogue. It makes sense. Everything back then was super expensive and letting users construct their hardware by plugging the right pieces together was a popular dream. The first time I saw this go to market was with the truly dreadful Timex Sinclair.

However, I have no recollection of modular computing ever actually working. I can imagine a lot of reasons for this. Getting hardware to work in a modular fashion has never been easy, and available ports back then were slow. Instead, the market for this sort of thing drifted into build-your-own PC, which doesn’t surprise me. The only people interested in this were nerds and there was nothing nerdier than building your own PC.