stickmunch 4 hours ago

Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.

Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.

  • stephenhuey an hour ago

    When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.

    Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.

  • bmitc 16 minutes ago

    > Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard

    Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.

  • trelane 4 hours ago

    Indeed, "iPad" is almost a generic term for "tablet," especially for kids.

al_borland 4 hours ago

“Cool” is subjective, so you can use that to dismiss any example, but you know exactly what is being referenced.

muvlon 8 hours ago

USB-C I guess?

  • teekert 8 hours ago

    Weeeeelllll that was mainstream a long long time before they adopted it. And I'm still annoyed that the only devices with Lightning in our house are my Airpods en iPhone mini 12 and wife's iPhone 14 Pro.

    Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.

    • _fw 8 hours ago

      I think the person you’re replying to meant MacBooks. They were USB-C exclusively way before Windows machines.

      • virgildotcodes 6 hours ago

        It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything.

        I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.

      • teekert 7 hours ago

        Ah ok, yeah sure, that was nice (could have added an A and HDMI port in this case, but ok, they were early with that.)