a lot of low-margin stuff basically has not gotten any better in 5 years because it somehow became canonically good enough, so now if you want something cheaper and better you have to get the last year’s version on craigslist
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@AutomaticTiger if you need to just give a name, Aerons are near-universal and use very few plastic parts so they aren’t prone to (maddening) squeaks as they age*. They’re also one of the only chairs you find parts for, so refurbishing one or maintaining yours over a decade plus is very doable. It’s not uncommon to see Aerons from the 90s still in good shape with just a cleaning and a new pneumatic cylinder.
As for size, they come in A/B/C for the seat/back sizing and adjust on seat height, tilt tension, tilt limiting, lumbar support tension, arm height, and armrest rotation.
Your gift-giver should be able to find one in that estimated budget for $300-$500 from a used office furniture store.
I am having trouble calling to mind your proportions and posture, but the Sayl is nice for under $200 used but only if the seat pan (24" x 16") fits you. The silicone “suspension” back is great.
* I have a used Embody manufactured in 2010 and I have twice now disassembled it in a hyperfocused fit to apply the finest lubricants to its dozens of infernal plastic-on-plastic joints.
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What would you kind people recommend for a media pc processor (or general build) nowdays? My current 15 year old Athlon 64 4200 is chocking pretty definitively on most recent encodes. Many thanks!
coming in late to the convo here but +1 for herman miller chairs. I have an aeron I got for 300$ in fantastic condition, i used t have back pains with my old chair and this one has really cleared them all up. they’re pretty easy to find on craigslist from office surplus sales. parts are pretty easy to find too, though i’ve not needed to fix anything on mine yet.
Anybody care to wager when Zen 3s and/or 3xxx series cards will actually be available?
got a 3080 fe just now off best buy
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So dem ARM Macbooks. Is it all you expected Felix?
Initial consensus seems to be forming that the new Macbook Air looks sweet and the 13" Pro is as underwhelming as usual
that they managed to make ACTIVE COOLING the distinguishing factor between the two is absolutely diabolical, I need to see how that holds up in real world conditions, and that they’re back to maxing at 16GB of memory (with grosser margins than ever on that memory) suggests an architecture limitation I wasn’t expecting, but otherwise these are about as good as I expected, which is to say, way better than x86 even if it is early days. benchmarks have it looking like a 10w 3700X which is right on expectations.
apparently the Pro also has LPDDR5 which is kind of interesting, it’s funny that being the first to ship a huge generational improvement doesn’t even get talked about because apple hates acknowledging ram.
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So, a world where Apple’s ARM-derived architecture starts moving past x86…does it augur ARM desktop & server eclipsing x86? Or x86 chip developers changing their design to be more like Apple, forcing their pipes wider and wider?
I think they can coexist for quite some time – the 5900X is still close to twice as powerful as this thing, even if it does have 10x the power envelope, and Intel/AMD are heavily invested in x86, whereas even Google and the others attempting to follow Apple’s lead and get ahead of Qualcomm’s ARM designs are a ways off the prize.
it seems conclusively true that x86 will never again be competitive where power consumption is a concern, which means servers and laptops, but ironically less so desktops and game consoles. I don’t know who starts feeling the pain first there; I don’t think x86 designs can become that much more like Apple’s ARM designs than they are now (it’s not like Ryzen 3 didn’t double down on cache), but we’ll see what happens once ARM servers become more popular (which they will) and Apple ditches Intel in the Mac Pro.
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servers are also fertile ground insofar as they don’t really need legacy compatibility the same way as mobile platforms don’t and Apple platforms don’t, and arm compiler environments are pretty much at parity with x86, so Apple shipping a consumer dev platform that winds up being used to write code that mostly ends up on Linux is going to have exactly the same industry-leading effects as it has since they’ve been on x86.
thankfully it is not my job to buy servers so this is all pretty armchair
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I told you they weren’t going to lower the prices on these things. margins all day for apple, they don’t give a fuck about anything else.
basically, AMD’s market is going to be left almost entirely alone, but Intel is fucked
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Not that conclusive IMO. The doubled headline battery life number Apple is touting are surely in large part from the Big.Little architecture, with the little cores kicking in on light or background workloads (e.g. during a 5-second wait while the cursor is blinking on a form field, or while a hardware-accelerated video is playing and there’s no user input). On servers this major CPU feature is pretty pointless and the most power-efficient thing is simply to run the big cores at full throttle 24/7 regardless.
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BTW I know from personal experience on mobile apps that getting the appropriate workloads on the big and little cores at exactly the right times is a huge pain. There are clear cases where you know for sure you want big or little, but also a vast gray area where the system can’t really tell. In practice most phones either bias towards overusing the big or little cores, depending on whether their user experience brand is more about speed or battery life. Over time the core selection policies have gotten more nuanced, but I wouldn’t call the problem solved and it probably gets even more tricky on laptop workloads.
Bad user experience from little core overuse is typically not captured in benchmarks because of course at a minimum the big core spinup policy will include benchmark workloads. One thing to look out for in the ARM Macbook Air reviews is whether reviewers complain about inexplicable little lags they didn’t experience before – that would be a sign that this is happening.
Whether people end up loving or hating it in practice, I think now that Big.Little architecture has entered the world of computer enthusiasts you can expect to hear a lot more about it.
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eagerly anticipating the hellworld of BigLittle x86/ARM mashups that take over the market
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otoh, you just can stay on the Mad Max86 Fury Road and be a witness, you know…
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Yo the number of Reddit posts I saw asking what $300 monitor* to buy with their $400-$500 console was absurd. I am totally baffled by people dropping a grand to play a PS5 at a desk with variable refresh rate. Build a PC! It’s a great time to do so!
* this question is very very complicated because it gets into which have hdmi 2.1, then which accept which refresh rate over it, then whether the console will output native res, blah blah blah but why
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