Asklemmy

A high-quality laptop without any branding.

I'm currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.

I'm not a billboard. I'm not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked "hey, what laptop is that" than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.

It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.

So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-

Oh, and don't come at me with stickers.

A smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know I’ll have to charge it more often or it’ll be thicker. I’m willing to make that trade-off.

And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I don’t give a shit. I use my phone for reading text, listening to music, and taking pictures. Just make the fucking camera top of the line and let me use my good headphones. If it’s several millimeters thicker, so be it.

A laptop with trackpad buttons

Lenovo is the only one I can find, and they're above the pad for the nub

A Linux phone with colour e-ink screen and writing capabilities like the reMarkable.

A power efficient e-ink laptop.

A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don't care how chonky it is.

A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.

Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It's not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.

Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.

A Clockwork uConsole device that's a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they're alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn't mind a laptop in this format.

Magnetic audio cable break-aways

1. remember netbooks? yeah so i would love a 10"-ish laptop (with current hardware) for taking notes etc.

why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.

2. also a smartphone that reacts quickly to user input with an OS that doesn't look like the love child of windows mobile (remember that?) and the first iphones. looking at you iOS18 settings menu (among others)

I'd like some PC support for HDMI CEC

My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.

My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what's hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.

I'm aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I've been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.

Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.

I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it's not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.

Direct replacement for the wonderful Facebook PortalTV unit. Its digital pan and zoom tomorrow a speaker is excellent. It could start and end calls completely hands-free before meta killed the service to which voice control was tethered. It sits on top of the TV, it does its job, and does it well.

Now that it's abandonware by Facebook, I need something else before its hardware dies. I have 4 of these in the field and some of them are with remote geriatrics who have no tech support, and it has to work.

I'm gonna miss it.

My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that's a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.

It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it's always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it's even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I'd even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the 'usable with one hand' criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.

I'd also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that's a pretty niche thing to be after.

A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230

Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can't be that crazy of a product. There's already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.

A low power 17 inch or larger laptop in a sub $1K price point. I have big hands (and crap vision) and I use the fuck out of numpad, but i really dont need a gaming GPU or a higher end cpu in a laptop.

Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150

So... That

the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.

A phone with a 5-5.5" screen. I'd be fine with a midrange chipset and camera. The Zenfone 10 was the last one that even came closer but they would only support it for two years and locked the bootloader (and lied about the unlock service eventually coming back online).

A cheap ARM laptop.

Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.

I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.

Edit: Actually, there are some decent options for Snapdragon 7/8 refurbs on Amazon. Mass market brands can be so hit or miss by model, so this’ll take some research, but it looks like there are 20-30 results to consider.

A 3.5mm-to-Bluetooth adapter that can do simultaneous headphones + mic. I have a device with no Bluetooth, only a 3.5mm TRRS jack (headphones+mic). I want to connect it to a wireless Bluetooth headset but the only adapters I can find won't do both at the same time, only one or the other.

A device I'd really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that's something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.

Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d'etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.

You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you'd always have a backup ready that you could swap in.

Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn't need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.

This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn't have to worry about network connectivity. You'd still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.