What are some tech products that you want that you can't seem to find?
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Another option would be to get a RPi and throw a hat on it:
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If you don't need much power, you could probably look for something used and get a good deal on a 17" laptop.
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Sadly doesn't seem to be fanless, which imo is a really nice feature when you really dont need high performance. Not sure if in the real world you can find good deals o the snapdragon laptops, but list price is also quite high and that keyboard with touch function keys doesn't seem great either.
So in my book that's still no match for what a macbook air m1/2 offers, which by now are a few years old and can be found for decent prices.
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A standalone remote or phone app that connects to my car's entertainment system that can control the satellite radio without the need for a passenger to have to lean way forward to use the touchscreen all the time. I miss the days of screen controls next to the cup holders instead of everything going through the touch screen.
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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.
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I had looked at those, but the hat alone is over $70. Plus they need an RPi5, because earlier ones don't have a PCIe interface. For that much, I could get a Beelink or something similar.
The hat is a cool idea, though.
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A SEGA Dreamcast
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Right angle charging cord helps #1.
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I have a nothing phone 2a and it's just a circle on the screen, standalone. Idk if that's much better but it's smaller and not connected to the top.
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Ah, good point!
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Android (or at least my Galaxy) has a setting that lets you disable the portion of the screen where the notch is, which makes it essentially identical to a phone with no notch.
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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.
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A physical slide out keyboard case for iPhone.
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This is adjacent, but it's worth pointing out that framework has recently started selling risc-v motherboards for their laptops for adventurous folks.
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Along these lines, if anyone craving Altoids sours of yesteryear, cracker barrel actually sells the spiritual successor.
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Looks like its a developer option, "display cutout"
