How many computers you own?

[The Penguin]

I got an Alienware nanananananana!!!!!!

Use to have interest in them but now I'm going to get an ASUS gaming laptop

 

[Axeman52]

I'm not really a very 'computery' person - I still have a bunch of dedicated devices for TV/Music etc. Really I just use computers for work and for accessing the internet. My phone is just a phone, too.

Having said that, I still have a desktop PC, a laptop, an old mac G3 that I've had for about 8 years and really do have every intention of fixing the power supply that broke due to a leaking water pipe shorting out the electricity in our house, which happened not long after I got the mac up and running with what was then the most recent version of OSX. Also I have a bunch of old sinclair, commodore and amstrad computers from the '80s and '90s I like them because I remember them from my childhood, my older cousins always seemed to have things like that.

 

[indigogrl1979]

I have a touchsmart pc... but since I got a smartphone & xbox one I dont even turn on my pc now

 

[pushpin]

I have my brother's old Lenovo ThinkPad and a new Lenovo g40 that I just purchased for school.

 

[ExplosiveTMT]

I have a gaming PC. It doesn't have an official name (It was built for me by my uncle).
The thing's a beast!
I guess I'll just call it Godzilla.

 

[Harrison]

I have an Acer Predator G3 pc, a Toshiba and a Sony laptops, iPad and Galaxy Note thingys, a Kindle, iPhones 4,5,6. Only thing I don't use is the Kindle as I have the app on all the other ones for that.

 

[inabox]

I used to have 3 working desktops. A compaq,2 dells and a non working Compaq that I stripped for parts. And 2 laptops. One Toshiba that failed (bad buy) because the graphics had major error. Now I just have one old dell laptop cos I had to move unexpectedly and it all got left behind :-(

 

[ThatSkyWing]

I used to own a desktop and a laptop, but they both got old an quit working. Now I'm using an iPad that used to be great but now it's a bit slow and annoying.

 

[Fraktal]

1 Tablet
1 Notebook
1 Netbook
3 Towers, 2 of which self-assembled ... oldest is a Pentium III and still has a purpose

 

[Bad Wolf]

Geez, counting working boxes and ones kept for parts or being rebuilt, I'm not sure.

My desktop computers are all assembled from selected components, so the name on the case (if any) is meaningless.

My primary PC has four quad-core processors, 64GB ram, and 12 TB disk storage. It is dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.1. (I hate Windows 8). It is a work machine (I do a lot of state-of-the-art commercial digital video/audio programming so speed, memory, and storage get strained). It has a variety of monitors, the primary "desktop" comprising two 32" HDTV (1080p) ViewSonics, but also has flatscreens from China ranging from 42" to 60" and covering advanced resolutions (4320p, 8640p, and 10,800p). The U.S., which only "fakes" 1080p by downloading 720p and "up-converting (stretching) the image to 1080p in the set-top box, is decades behind the rest of the world in TV and internet download technologies (yet we pay at least 10 times as much as everybody else), but I work remotely with a group in Shanghai developing video technologies for the rest of the world.

I also use a hybrid PC that has been running Windows XP SP3 24/7 for about 15 years. It has never blue-screened or crashed and runs continuously unless I take it down to muck about with new hardware or bounce it for new software installations or upgrades. XP is still the best O/S currently available and is run by 25% of all computers worldwide in the corporate (ugh!) sphere.

Another PC runs Debian Linux and uses a virtual machine to run Red Hat, SuSE, and other linux flavors.

Others are usually off and stuck in the back somewhere.

Two laptops - a Dell and a Toshiba. Both 64-bit, 17.3" monitors, internal storage of 1 TB, 8 and 16 GB ram, and extended 12-cell batteries.

For main tablets and phones,

• Google Nexus 10 rooted and running a custom AOKP version of Android Lollipop v5.0.1x,
  
• Google Nexus 7 rooted and running CyanogenMod 11.x nightlies,
  
• Verizon Ellipsis 7 (for the 4GL connection) rooted and running ParanoidAndroid,
  
• Samsung Galaxy 5S rooted and running CyanogenMod 11.x over Lollipop,
  
• Galaxy S4 converted into a prepaid burner phone, rooted, and running Carbon ROM . This uses Safestrap to give me 4 separate custom O/S installations and I am constantly trying new O/Ss in the other three slots.
  
• 2 Kindle Touch readers (one reserved solely for technical manuals and reference).

Different custom ROMS flashed on each except the Ellipsis. The custom O/Ss and ROMS on my phones and tablets tend to change periodically as I need to test new ones.

Geez Louise, I think I just won Nerd of the Week - but most of this is for work. I'd cut back to one each, desktop, laptop, smartphone, 7" and 10" tablets, and a Kindle. My life sometimes seems buried under USB charger cables [grin].

 

[Bad Wolf]

I used to own a desktop and a laptop, but they both got old an quit working. Now I'm using an iPad that used to be great but now it's a bit slow and annoying.

Suggestion: replace the iPad with the latest Google Nexus 10. Like every other Apple product, you can find a superior replacement at a lower cost in the Android world. The Nexus 10 has higher 2560x1600 Gorilla Glass screen (1080p and 1440p are both letterboxed!!! and 4320p shows down-converted, but not badly enough to lose much of the extra resolution). Higher res, ability to root and take total control of your kernel (removing sypware and bloatware for starters), lower price, wide choice of custom O/Ss, ROMS and launchers - what's not to like?

 

[The Penguin]

Suggestion: replace the iPad with the latest Google Nexus 10. Like every other Apple product, you can find a superior replacement at a lower cost in the Android world.

I would use to speak this way, but as me being a software developer, people have different preference and needs. Something that you like someone else might not like.

 

[The Penguin]

Bad Wolf I see you love your technolgy.

 

[StephF]

I'm now playing with the Arduino

 

[Bad Wolf]

I would use to speak this way, but as me being a software developer, people have different preference and needs. Something that you like someone else might not like.

I recognize that the Mac desktop is a very good choice for people who want to use a computer, but stay totally isolated from having to learn how one actually works. I recommend it to friends looking for precisely that. However, in this case, the poster was complaining about his/her iPad and I was offering an alternative.

Part of the advantage of having an experienced tech wizard on the forum is that somebody like me can offer informed advice and back it up with real-world facts. Apple has a devoted following - the rest of us call it the iCult - that has been built up over the years, particularly by the late Steve Jobs. Once he had somebody in his fold as an iCultist, he was able to sell second-tier technology for a huge markup (Job's rule was that there always be a minimum of a 50% profit margin - which is obscenely high). But, Jobs was not above peddling obsolete technology as the hottest new thing - and lying about the technology a given device implemented. For example, the iPhone 4 and 4S were both hyped as having a 1 GHz processor and yet having superior battery life to Androids with 1 GHz processors. True as far as it went, however (and this is a huge however with raisins and cinnamon on it!), he achieved this battery life by "underclocking" the 1 GHz processor to run 20% slower - at 800 MHz. Imagine if a car company was advertising an 8-cylinder car that got the same gas mileage as other brands' 6-cylinder cars. So you pay the extra for the more powerful engine and never are told that the way they got an 8-cylinder engine to get gas mileage comparable to a 6 was that they were secretly selling the car with 2 cylinders disconnected. So, in reality, you were running on 6 cylinders while you paid extra for (what you thought was) a gas-saving 8. All of Jobs' snake oil is a bait and switch.

Andy Hertzfeld was a close friend and schoolmate of mine who dropped out of college to join Apple in the pre-Mac days. He was the primary designer of the original Lisa/Mac desktop in the mid 1980s. He was the number 3 person at Apple in those days. He even used to double date with Jobs when Jobs was going out with Joan Baez (folksinger of the era). By 1986, Andy was so sick of Jobs' crooked and underhanded sales machinations that he quit Apple and has never touched an iProduct since. He had his own company for years and now works for Google. One story Andy told me at a convention in 1991 was about an early design meeting for the Mac (actually, Jobs stole virtually the entire Mac desktop from an earlier prototype he saw 5 years earlier at Xerox PARC - Palo Alto Research Center). The design team were debating to go with a 2-button mouse or a Sun-style 3-button mouse. Jobs overruled them and went with the 1-button mouse. His reason was that he was aiming the Mac at a completely non-tech audience, the sort of people who, Jobs joked, couldn't be depended on to tell left from right. Jobs always had that contempt for his own customers.

Another example. The iPhone 6 Plus is - finally - the first iPhone to be able to record and play back full 1080p resolution HDTV video. The iPhone 6 can't even do it (it is restricted to 720p). My last generation Samsung Galaxy S4 was 1080p capable, as was my Droid RAZR MAXX before that and my Droid BIONIC before that. All of these are one to three generations out of date, but Apple is just barely beginning to incorporate the features. Though I use an S5, I still use my S4. The S4 has a quad-core processor running at 2.5 GHz compared to the iPhone 6 Plus's duo-core clocked at 1.9 GHz. The S4 has twice the RAM of the Plus (the S5 has three times the RAM). My wife's Galaxy S3 - now several generations old - has better specs in every category and stronger capabilities than the brand new iPhone 6 - and it is somewhere around 3 years old.

However, the real kicker is that Apple keeps its source code secret and proprietary - where Android is open-source - and Apple phones can not be "rooted," which gives the user access to the kernel level directories where both spyware and bloatware are located. So, by rooting an Android, you can remove the spyware that is reporting every keystroke and every incoming text and email to your provider. You can also recover precious internal storage by removeing bloatware (and precious performance improvements by not having bloatware running in background). Yo can tune your processors to run faster if needed (lowering battery life) or slower (increasing battery life).

The only phones on the market that prevent you from blocking their spyware and from removing their bloatware are the iPhones. The Apple Store's software is also so full of security holes that you have to "jailbreak" your phone so you can load safer and more dependable software form non-Apple sources. Forbes did a study of over 1,000 official and non-official apps for the iPhone and found that Apple Store apps were many times more likely to leak your data and your location than the supposedly illegal third-party apps.

Lastly, when new versions of Android are made available, they are pushed out OTA (over the air) to upgrade your existing Android phones. With Apple, you have to buy a new model to get significant operating system upgrades. My S4 started out with Android Gingerbread (v 4.2), upgraded itself through 4.3 and a variety of KitKat versions (up through 4.4.4) and finally to Lollipop (Android 5.0). All without costing me a cent or requiring a phone upgrade.

If I can do ANYTHING to enlighten iPhone users to how they are being shortchanged, both in cost and capabilities, I will do so. Personal choice is all well and good - and I respect a person's right to choose. But, it should be an INFORMED choice.

 

[ThatSkyWing]

Suggestion: replace the iPad with the latest Google Nexus 10. Like every other Apple product, you can find a superior replacement at a lower cost in the Android world. The Nexus 10 has higher 2560x1600 Gorilla Glass screen (1080p and 1440p are both letterboxed!!! and 4320p shows down-converted, but not badly enough to lose much of the extra resolution). Higher res, ability to root and take total control of your kernel (removing sypware and bloatware for starters), lower price, wide choice of custom O/Ss, ROMS and launchers - what's not to like?

Nice suggestion, but this iPad I got for free, and it's actually my mom's, not mine. XD

 

[The Penguin]

Bad Wolf

I hear what you're saying. I prefer PC's over Mac and I prefer Android over iOS. But I don't want this tread to be about a person using Apple technology should switch to something else as this is not what this thread is about that I have created.

 

[zurb]

Hmm, the only reason I struggle to do OTA updates on iPhone/iPad is because I tend to fill up the memory so there's no space to download the update.

While I'm not a huge fan of the iPhone (I could give you a long list of things I don't like), it is nice that it simply works. As opposed to my wife's brand new Samsung which restarted randomly every ten minutes or so. It was a few months before the next firmware fixed it.

Not wanting to start a debate, but sometimes you need to consider more than raw hardware specs!

 

[The Penguin]

Not wanting to start a debate, but sometimes you need to consider more than raw hardware specs!

very good point

 

[zurb]

Back on topic, I'm a very happy owner of a Toshiba Qosmio X870 laptop. Added a second SSD, upgraded to 16GB RAM, Win 8.1 Pro.
Actually, I bought it back in November, but its taken me this long to start moving over my files from my 8.5 year old Toshiba Tecra. Still one or two final tidy up jobs to finish when I have time.