[ale] A modest proposal for the times

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

>Apparently the home user desktop is dead... And when did they >drop
optical drives?

The last time I checked there are an estimated 2.5 billion laptop and
desktop "PC"s installed, with 250 million laptop and desktop PCs shipped in
2023.   This is a slight drop from 2022, but as Mark Twain once said "The
reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

As to the "optical drives" they have not been used for a long time.  You
may be thinking of SATA Solid State Digital (SSD) drives where for a long
time the 2.5" either HDD or SSD were standard in laptops.   You may have
noticed that laptops are getting thinner and thinner.   They have dropped a
lot of large connectors like VGA, RJ45 Ethernet controllers, etc for USB -
C and HDMI.

Likewise they have dumped the slower SATA controllers (600 MBytes per
second) for M.2 NVMe solid state memories that typically attach to the
motherboard's PCIe bus and have speeds of 7,000 MBytes per second or even
faster if attached to PCIe 5.0 and doing the equivalent of RAID with them.
I have had reports of 20000 MBytes per second reading.  They are very thin
and I have seen sizes up to 4TB and very price competitive with an external
HDD of the same capacity.

md

On Mon, Apr 7, 2025 at 8:47 PM William Bagwell via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> On Monday, April 07, 2025 01:25:55 PM jon.maddog.hall--- via Ale wrote:
> > I bought a fairly high-end Lenovo (not that model).   The main time the
> > fans come on is when I am updating the kernel.   Otherwise it is
> > completely silent.
> >
> > Unfortunately with the new tariffs that 2K laptop will probably be over
> 3K.
>
> Same with the wife's budget PowerSpec, very quite and never notice it. Not
> a
> gamer, but it was so much better and cheaper than anything aimed at office
> users. Apparently the home user desktop is dead... And when did they drop
> optical drives?
>
> BTW your long post below was an interesting read!
> --
> William
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20250407/c955b262/attachment.htm>