- The Palm Pre (1st edition). It is an absolutely amazing, brilliant piece of hardware (especially back in 2009) that fits just right in my hand like a pebble. The curved screen is brilliant to the eyes and to the touch. It also has an interface that is not cluttered and busy like shit in other mainstream OSes then, and now.
But I mainly like things that are designed for ease of maintenance:
- The iPhone 4s and iPhone 5. Like the iPhone or hate it, but the iPhone is a marvelous engineering feat. First, the amount of components it could hold. Second, how strong and robust it is for such a small body. Third, how easy it is to replace the most vulnerable component, the screen.
- The iPod Nano 2nd Edition. It is such a timeless design that is extremely small and practical. It is really easy to open up the iPod Nano should you need to replace the battery, too.
- Dell Chromebook 13 and Acer Chromebook 720: It took 8 screws to open them and get to the battery, CMOS, RAM, SSD, CPU, WLAN card.
- Sony Walkmans. It was an eye-opening experience to see a player that is barely bigger than a tape, with features packed in it in the era of tapes, moving motors, pulleys, cogs and such.
But my most admired understated design has to be the Thinkpad line.
About 10 years ago, when computers were hot, clunky, and easy to break; I had a friend asking me to look at her coffee spilled Thinkpad T42 or T43 (I think). I just moved to the US for college for a month and had only a screwdriver toolset. Thankfully to its brilliant design [1], it only took a single screwdriver to lift the whole keyboard and touchpad up and get to everything, including the CPU. And the keyboard was spill resistant, so not that much liquid leaked either. I asked my roommate to take me to the nearest Radioshack to get a tube of heat spreader, and dried the whole thing with a hairdryer. It worked like new.
I could still remember the horror of opening Dell D6x0 laptops at my college IT department. What a fucking joke of a design - there is nothing good I could say about those "business machines" on the inside. It got to the point that if anything went wrong with those computers, the IT department just called the "Dell guy" to go fix it.
5 years ago, I even bet my roommate to pour a cup of water on a running Thinkpad. It survived.
And the Thinkpads now are barely different from the Thinkpads then and the Thinkpads from the beginning. It says something about the design, does it?
I'm not quite sure how to feel about my T43 now. I was given it by a friend a while ago as I can't get my hands on anything else right now, and... I'm starting to wonder if I'll be hugely disappointed when I can get something newer.
I must admit that it doesn't Chrome too well though. It copes but it swaps a LOT and I can literally see garbage-collection happening - typing or scrolling locks up for 300ms every ~10 seconds. And it can't do >360p video.
I can't recommend them enough to Web developers who want to build fast, responsive websites, however. :D (So many sites that cram 1080p MP4s into their page backgrounds.....)
Indeed! I had to struggle with a consumer hp dv65xx for a few years before I finally got my hand on a thinkpad. Opening it up was a nightmare, and I broke random plastic things everytime I opened it up.
I unfortunately dropped a T60 some time ago, on the right rear corner.
The system board and everything were all fine... but the LCD copped it :( only displayed sad rainbows (IIRC).
I'm not sure if I bent the heatsink slightly off as well;
I tried to fix it but I may have made it worse. The thermal design on the T60 is a disaster: the part of the heatpipe that extends over the GPU has nowhere to bolt it down (see http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg - the rightmost part, see how there are no screws, it literally was not factored into the design, it's held down solely by the copper itself) and because my heatsink is fractionally misaligned, my GPU consistently idles at 75°C (!) and can reach 90°C (!!) if I actually try to do anything!
The X240 (and probably X250/260, no way they changed much) is pretty easy to take apart. Just a few screws and there's just one board, with easy access to disk, RAM and mini-PCIe. I haven't seen the old ThinkPads in person, but I have seen e.g. big-ass HP Pavilions that look like a nightmare to disassemble.
- The Palm Pre (1st edition). It is an absolutely amazing, brilliant piece of hardware (especially back in 2009) that fits just right in my hand like a pebble. The curved screen is brilliant to the eyes and to the touch. It also has an interface that is not cluttered and busy like shit in other mainstream OSes then, and now.
But I mainly like things that are designed for ease of maintenance:
- The iPhone 4s and iPhone 5. Like the iPhone or hate it, but the iPhone is a marvelous engineering feat. First, the amount of components it could hold. Second, how strong and robust it is for such a small body. Third, how easy it is to replace the most vulnerable component, the screen.
- The iPod Nano 2nd Edition. It is such a timeless design that is extremely small and practical. It is really easy to open up the iPod Nano should you need to replace the battery, too.
- Dell Chromebook 13 and Acer Chromebook 720: It took 8 screws to open them and get to the battery, CMOS, RAM, SSD, CPU, WLAN card.
- Sony Walkmans. It was an eye-opening experience to see a player that is barely bigger than a tape, with features packed in it in the era of tapes, moving motors, pulleys, cogs and such.
But my most admired understated design has to be the Thinkpad line.
About 10 years ago, when computers were hot, clunky, and easy to break; I had a friend asking me to look at her coffee spilled Thinkpad T42 or T43 (I think). I just moved to the US for college for a month and had only a screwdriver toolset. Thankfully to its brilliant design [1], it only took a single screwdriver to lift the whole keyboard and touchpad up and get to everything, including the CPU. And the keyboard was spill resistant, so not that much liquid leaked either. I asked my roommate to take me to the nearest Radioshack to get a tube of heat spreader, and dried the whole thing with a hairdryer. It worked like new.
I could still remember the horror of opening Dell D6x0 laptops at my college IT department. What a fucking joke of a design - there is nothing good I could say about those "business machines" on the inside. It got to the point that if anything went wrong with those computers, the IT department just called the "Dell guy" to go fix it.
5 years ago, I even bet my roommate to pour a cup of water on a running Thinkpad. It survived.
And the Thinkpads now are barely different from the Thinkpads then and the Thinkpads from the beginning. It says something about the design, does it?
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/IBM+ThinkPad+T42+Teardown/29...