Tag: ibm

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Is this the perfect laptop?

LG Gram 17

It’s not often that I encounter a piece of technology that invokes a need to write about it. Especially in the consumer space, as most technology is a bit more of this or a bit less of that, but otherwise, you find the same technologies perhaps cobbled together in a slightly different way. Too often to ensure that an advertiser gets a better cut.

But the LG Gram 17 laptop, the 2022 edition, is a step forward, in my view.

Backdrop

For the last 25 years or so, I’ve clung to the notion that IBM/Lenovo* laptops, spearheaded by the ThinkPad brand, were the best, and that it was not worth the effort of exploring elsewhere. A habit bolstered by lab tests in my old stamping ground, PC Magazine. And because researching a new laptop is not the work of an hour’s googling: it can take me weeks.

But the last three Lenovo laptops I’ve bought have been disappointments in different ways. My previous machine was a Yoga 730. Its battery life was miserably short, no matter how I configured it. Given that my need to schlep a laptop around the world on soul-crushing long-haul flights has diminished to zero, you might not imagine that short battery life was a problem. But it does still need to be mobile, even within the house, and the 730 couldn’t manage more than an hour or so before it started to demand power. And that’s because it was very noisy and ran hot. Where all that energy was going was inexplicable because even light web browsing could trigger a bout of 747-style roaring and a very hot lap.

Before that was another Yoga which essentially fell apart, the back coming off the screen. Then the display itself started coming loose while the keyboard was thin and unpleasant. It ended up with gaffer tape around its edges in a bid to keep it in one piece. After less than three years use, it was dumped.

And the one before that? I can hardly remember it but it didn’t inspire.

No more Lenovo

I was glad to see the backs of them. Unless you actually need the reversible laptop feature, it’s an unnecessary expense and complication, in my experience; I found I didn’t use it to anything like the extent I expected to.

Of course, my 10-year-old ThinkPad – a bog-standard laptop – is still going strong but looks and feels its age: the screen is low-res by comparison to today’s machines, and modern software near brings it to its knees. So I upgraded it to Linux Mint and don’t let modern software near it, apart my Firefox browser. And it works fine in that limited role (despite the glitchy graphics chip for which I should have returned it inside its warranty period all those years ago). It wasn’t cheap when I bought it but then neither were the Yogas: both cost four-figure sums.

So I’ve finally learnt the lesson of clinging too long to a brand that I trusted but no longer do. When specifying a replacement, I wanted a bigger screen than the standard 15-inch diagonal to allow me to work with a pair of browser windows, or a browser and something else. And I wanted a bit of style and light weight because, even using it mainly within the home, weight is an issue. Have you sat with a laptop actually on your lap for any length of time? A 4Kg behemoth gets heavy quickly. I also didn’t want to pay the earth.

Looking for laptops

So on researching the 17-inch laptop market, because that’s about as big as laptop displays get, I found that there are two distinct segments. Most are gaming laptops: they are big, heavy and expensive, and include a hefty dollop of ugliness for free. I do a little light gaming but most modern laptops can handle that. So no thanks.

Then there are premium 17-inch laptops made by the likes of Dell. Very nice but very expensive: well over £2,000. Fine if the company is paying the bill but I’m not in that fortunate position.

LG Gram impressions

Then I stumbled across the LG Gram, which seemed a bit too good to be true. In most walks of life, anything that seems so usually is. But after weeks of prevarication and more research, I realised it was in a class of its own. I took the plunge.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. You can easily find technical specifications elsewhere so here I just want to focus on the user experience.

It’s slim and light, feeling far lighter at around 1.3Kg than a machine this size ought to do, and certainly significantly lighter than the 15-inch Yoga 730. The keyboard is large with full-sized keys and sufficient depth to type comfortably; I’m a heavy typist. The display is bright and reproduces colours well, making photo editing a joy.

Audio is pretty good – for a laptop. My expectations were not high as you can’t assume that flat speakers crammed into a thin plastic box will sound anything hifi, and of course they don’t, but it’s not bad, considering.

It connects with everything I need it to connect to as well so there’s no shortfall there, and the camera is HD so Zoom calls look good. Or rather, I look as good as I ever will (no laughing at the back, please!).

And it handles my gaming needs with aplomb: the fans deliver a bit of white noise but nothing like the Yoga 730’s racket. And it not only does it not get hot, battery life, which is plenty long enough, seems hardly affected.

Perfect?

In summary, it’s the first laptop I’ve bought and used in at least 10 years that I’m entirely happy with. After three months of ownership and use, I’m still finding it a joy to use. It wasn’t the cheapest machine out there but if you can stretch to the £1,300 I paid for it (deals do come up from time to time), you’re unlikely to be disappointed unless you have heavy-duty requirements. Recommended.

* IBM sold its hardware division to Lenovo in 2005

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Happy birthday Simon the smartphone

IBM Simon
IBM Simon

Today, 23 November 2012, is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first smartphone. The IBM Simon was a handheld cellular phone and PDA that ended up selling some 50,000 units. This was impressive as, at the time, publicly available cellular networks were a rarity.

In fact, at the London launch of the device, I remember wondering how many people would buy one given the high costs of both a subscription and the phone. In the USA, BellSouth Cellular initially offered the Simon for US$899 with a two-year service contract or US$1099 without a contract.

As well as a touch screen, the widget included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, electronic note pad, handwritten annotations, and standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards.

Measuring 203mm by 63.5mm by 38mm, it had a massive 35mm by 115mm monochrome touch screen and weighed a stonking 510g, but was only on the market for about six months. The UK never saw it commercially available.

So while it never really took off, this was largely down to timing: it was ahead of its time and it was soon overtaken by smaller, less well-featured devices that were more affordable.

But when you contemplate which shiny shiny is your next object of desire, think about the Simon, and remember, Apple didn’t invent the smartphone: IBM did.

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Cloud means gloom for hardware vendors – or does it?

Maintaining a good relationship with hardware vendors is an essential element of any cloud or service provider’s daily process. The problem is that, if some recent gloomy predictions come true, there will be fewer of them. That’s the line from Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, among others, according to this piece on ZDNet. But is it true?
Vogels reckons that, as enterprises aim to reduce capital expenditure by buying in an increasing number of services, hardware vendors will suffer a squeeze in sales, and so revenues.

The rest of this article can be found here.

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Why is finding the right keyboard impossible?

In a world where every product you could possibly think of wanting is made, and a huge number of orders of magnitude more products exist that shouldn’t be made at all, why is it impossible for me to find the keyboard I want?

When I started using PCs, the IBM PC and AT keyboards had function keys on the left-hand side, the keyswitches were loud and mechanical, and took a fair amount of force to depress. We cared a lot about keyboards in the days before graphical user interfaces were invented because they were the user interface.

I liked those keyboards. In the intervening 25 years have come a whole variety of input devices but I’ve remained wedded to the Northgate Omnikey keyboard I bought back in 1988. I must have written millions of words on that 23-year-old keyboard and nothing has ever gone wrong. I can disassemble it to clean it every now and again, but it’s had no other maintenance. It’s a marvellous piece of kit.

Incidentally, Northgate as a company is now, sadly, long gone, but you can still buy very similar keyboards from Creative Vision Technologies.

But I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to give up the loud forceful and clicky keyboard for a quieter device with keys that are easier to press and which, after a heavy day’s typing, don’t make my hands feel like they been through an assault course. But I’m not ready to give up the F keys down the left-hand side of the keyboard.

I use the keyboard a lot, even though I could use a mouse. It takes me a few milliseconds hit Ctrl-S or Alt-F4 to save a file or close a program, compared to the seconds it takes to move my hand over to the mouse, schlepp the cursor to the right icon and click it. It’s what my hands are used to doing.

And you need only one hand to do it when the the F keys are in the right place: on the left. Try Alt-F4 with the F keys on the top of the main keyboard layout and it feels really clunky and awkward — the result being that very few people ever use those keys.

So why can’t I find a quiet, easy-action keyboard with F keys on the left? Advice gratefully received….

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Oracle buys Sun — but who really wins?

The big news this week this is undoubtedly the $7.4 billion purchase of the troubled server company Sun Microsystems by database specialist Oracle. But, given the very different nature of the two companies, will it work?

Well-known in the industry for being the favourite of developers and geeks, and among its customers for its high-powered, reliable but expensive systems, Sun has nonetheless suffered financially since the implosion of the dotcom bubble. Its accounts have bled red for years, and selling the company seems for eons — that’s eons in IT years — to have been the only way out.

Just two weeks ago, IBM made overtures to buy the company. This author among others could see that there would be some synergies, although I struggled to see how Big Blue would swallow Sun’s server range, given that it has a well-established and rational product portfolio already. IBM and Sun would have fitted together mainly on the software side, where the acquisition of Solaris, a major platform in the database world, along with Java and many open source technologies including OpenOffice, would have sat comfortably alongside IBM’s espousal of open source, and its conversion from hardware to software and services company.

It wasn’t to be. Sun demanded too much of IBM — more here — and the deal fell through. We wondered at the time how Sun could have let it happen, and accused the Silicon Valley stalwart of greed and complacency.

What we didn’t know was that it had another suitor in the wings, one willing to pay Sun’s pretty substantial asking price.

Early post-purchase signs are good. Most analysts and observers see more positives than negatives emerging from the deal. Oracle is a software company first and foremost, while Sun’s revenues stem mostly from hardware.

What’s more, Sun’s Solaris is a major platform for Oracle’s eponymous database, which means that Oracle can now offer the whole stack, from raw iron upwards, and so is in a better position to offer more tightly integrated solutions. As the company’s acquisition statement said: “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system — applications to disk — where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves”.

Some systems integrators may suffer as a result, but that’ll be some way down the line, after two or three product refresh cycles.

The deal has even got some of the opposition thinking. As Colin Barker reports from an HP product launch in Berlin (which I was unable to make, sadly): “HP executives thought that the news was interesting and it was not difficult to see their internal calculators trying to work out any options the move would give them.”

So far so fitted.

But big questions remain to be answered. Sun has always been a fairly open company, and has always seen itself and wanted to be seen as part of a wider community. When open source came along, Sun gradually adopted it and, with no little external persuasion it seemed at the time, even made some of its own, expensively developed technology open source.

In complete contrast, Oracle has rarely if ever done that — apart perhaps from its development of its own version of Red Hat Linux, which the market has largely ignored. Oracle’s proprietary approach and eagerness to squeeze every last dollar out of its large enterprise customers is the stuff of legend.

This is unlikely to change, especially now that it can lock down those customers to a tightly integrated hardware platform. The reactions of those customers, of the competition, many of whom are in alliances with either or both the parties to the acquisition, and of the channel remain to be seen.

There will be layoffs too, given the economic situation, and the more obvious lack of need for duplicated sales, marketing or HR departments, for example. One analyst is reported to have predicted up to 10,000 job losses. I would expect the culture shock to squeeze quite a few through the out door.

But if you’re a customer, you might prefer not be locked in. If you’re a hardware partner of Oracle’s, you’re likely to be re-thinking that deal, big time. HP is in that boat, given that it’s co-developed servers for Oracle, in the database company’s first venture into hardware, back in 2008. And if you either work for Sun or are one of the developer community in Sun’s orbit, you might well find yourself wondering where to go next, whether voluntarily or not.

My take is that most customers will stay put. It’s not the time to start launching into expensive new IT roll-outs. That’s not to say that those with an aversion to single-supplier deals won’t bail as soon as possible.

However, the pressure on the competition in the current climate is likely to result in more mergers and acquisitions, and a jungle populated by fewer but bigger beasts.

But who and which? Here are some questions: will IBM swallow EMC? Will Cisco buy Brocade? And could Microsoft finally buy Yahoo!? And how many more yachts will this deal enable Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to buy?

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Where does the Sun-IBM deal failure leave Sun?

So Sun Microsystems turned down IBM’s offer to buy it — even though Big Blue’s $7 billion buy-out bid was twice the valuation of the troubled Silicon Valley stalwart.

We read on Bloomberg that the sticking point was a clause in the contracts of top Sun execs. The news service reports that: “chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz and chairman Scott McNealy have contracts that mean they would receive three times their annual pay, including salary and bonus, should Sun be acquired.”

IBM reportedly didn’t think too much of that stipulation and would not honour it — even though its acquisition of the fourth-placed server vendor would have boosted its position against number one vendor HP.

We also read that “Sun’s board contended IBM wanted too much control over Sun’s projects and employees before the deal closed”, which is hardly surprising: coughing up $7 billion has a way of concentrating the mind.

And especially when it appears that some super-rich employees wanted to grow even richer than they already are. Top Sun execs get paid in millions of dollars: Bloomberg reports that Schwartz’s salary was $1 million last year and his target bonus was twice that amount. And company founder McNealy was awarded $6.45 million in compensation last year, including $1 million in cash for his “service as an employee of Sun”.

But in this day and age, exactly how much money does one already super-rich individual truly need?

There’s another factor. Even before the recession, Sun consistently failed to show a profit so IBM would be bonkers not to want to manage Sun closely. And Sun looks to be heading for its biggest loss since 2003.

Following its rejection of IBM, Sun’s share price dipped 23 percent, its biggest fall since 2002, according to Bloomberg.

So what are we to learn from this? Chatter among techies in the industry demonstrates tremendous loyalty to Sun and its technology. However, a company selling semi-proprietary kit — yes, I know that Solaris is now open, and that it uses Intel processors and so on, but that’s not where the bulk of its sales are — was always going to struggle now that hardware is commoditised and standardised.

Analysts agree.

“Sun can survive as an independent company, but the longer the recession goes on, the more likely it is the value of the franchise begins to fade,” said one.

“Sun made a horrible mistake. Wall Street analysts probably optimistically expect their revenue to decrease year-over-year for the next several years — they should have just taken that money and ran,” said another.

Is this the beginning of the end for Sun? Industry observers — including this one — have called this before and been wrong. Largely down to the company’s huge cash cache, Sun has continued to trade even as its accounts bleed red.

What’s different this time is that Sun’s top execs seem to have forgotten that we’re in the middle of a recession. It might be because Silicon Valley has its own mental micro-climate. I was there a couple of months back, talking to venture capitalists and heads of startups looking for funding, and the untrammelled optimism was palpable: I almost started sweeping it up off the floor.

But in the real world, there’s near-universal anger and disappointment at the shenanigans of the stupendously well-paid at the heads of companies. Keen to be seen as corporately and financially responsible, IBM is likely to have been sensitive to the appearance of funding what looks like plain greed.

Neither of the two parties has commented on their falling out. But if Sun is to survive, you’d have to hope that hubris doesn’t get in the way of deals with any future suitors.

If there are any.