Quick Start Ep 6: Assuming Direct Control

This machine is half of what convinced me to make this series.
 

00:00 Intro
02:05 Z600 overview
11:42 Unique Feature #1: Edgetouch
15:35 Unique Feature #2: Wireless Dock
18:40 Unique Feature #3: Wireless Charging
27:28 Latitude-ON Demo
31:20 L-ON's Dark Secret
33:03 L-ON Internals
37:17 L-ON's Failure And Success
41:10 L-ON Flash Demo
44:49 L-ON Flash's Dark Secret
46:18 L-ON Flash Vs. L-ON Prime
49:50 L-ON Reader Demo
53:53 Conclusion
55:45 Outro

[SuperDerek]

Born too early to explore the universe, born too late to explore the world, born just in time to enjoy Cathode Ray Dude. I'm good with this.

[DinosawrsAreAwesome]

Dell releasing the first ARM laptop wasn't something I expected from this series.

[joshm]

I like your subtle jabs at executives and bosses trying to look important. Says a lot about your work experience in the past. So happy you are free to choose your own path now!

[karolisr]

They should only make machines [bigger/smaller] than this never gets old. And we get both in one machine. Fantastic.

[LightTheUnicorn]

This series is covering some of the most genius, over engineered and yet utterly useless advances in laptop tech from the late 00s and early 10s. I'm absolutely loving every episode of this journey.

[pappp]

MontaVista was quietly a _huge_ deal in the Linux ecosystem because of how much general kernel work they did in the 2000s. Most of the preemptive SMP stuff that made Linux work well on small symmetric multiprocessor machines (eg. multicore processors) came from them (...and especially from their employee at the time Robert Love, who wrote an excellent book on kernel development, he was later the chief architect for desktop systems at SuSE for a while, and did a ton of the low-level Linux work before Android reached the market).

[moscom]

Yeah, modern Qi charging uses an in-band communication protocol. One of the neat advantages of having two magnetically coupled devices is that the device receiving power can push back a little bit by varying its power draw (put a resistor across the coil), and the transmitter can notice this. You can also modulate the pattern that you're pushing back in to send different messages, like "more power please" or "Yup I'm a Qi certified receiver, send juice please"

[JessicaFEREM]

real life can wait, CRD has uploaded a new video.
I seriously drop everything when you upload a new one.

[MakeItPerfectlyWrong]

CRD is my comfort creator. I love the way you talk about everything.

[monchiabbad]

The reader is the perfect companion for people flying to any destination remember in planes there used to be no network wireless or otherwise back then.

[atooyt]

i love these quick start videos showing off 00's trickery that seems surreal in today's tech... kinda like mrmobile reviewing old gimmick phones but even more obscure. never stop man

[deadreaver]

I worked at Best buy slinging these things to poor unsuspecting customers during this time period.

You've brought up so much nostalgia with these videos.

Cheers!

[lupinzar]

When the Raspberry Pi came out, I thought it would be cool to install one in a PC case along with the x86 board. But then I thought "what the hell would I do with it?" and moved on.

[nickwallette]

That wireless charging gimmick is a masterpiece in aggressively dumb design. WOW! That makes my day!

In a phone, it makes perfect sense. In a laptop, it makes absolutely no sense at all. If you're going to put it on a dock, where it will stay there, stationary, we already solved the problem of conveying charging current without cables. Prongs and contacts. If it's good enough for my Roomba, it's good enough for a laptop.

And the dock doesn't even do port-replicator stuff. For that, you need the wireless dock!

This thing is wireless for the sake of being wireless, and that's just ... * chef's kiss * Bravo, Dell. Truly an engineering marvel. As in, you will marvel at what the engineers were thinking.

[genethebean]

I couldn't get over the fact that spamming the arrow keys in Latitude ON would send the spotlight effect into an incredibly long loop around the screen. This is an incredibly reliable piece of software

[marklewus]

The reason for the U9400 was power and more important, thin & light package thermals. The U9400 was built on a 45nm process and had a TDP of 10w. Its Passmark score was a whopping 523, 1/2 of a Raspberry Pi 4. A modern Intel CPU of equivalent power consumption is the N97, built on 7nm. It has a TDP of 12w, and a Passmark score of 6000. It was *really* hard to do thin and light in 2010 :)

[the_beefy]

You gave USB-C docks a hard time, but I would contend that DisplayLink is a worse crime against users.

[the_beefy]

You've done such a great job picking out the bumper music played while these systems are booting up.

[thephoenixking]

This is one of my favoright series on YouTube right now, very well made and in depth.

[tOSdude]

A quick note that wireless USB was at least _available_ in 2010 on business class laptops, my Thinkpad x200 has a slot specifically for use with either wireless USB or a 4GB cache module for the hard drive (which would've been quite a trip, a bit like the short-lived 16GB Optane modules). I'm not sure if the peripherals existed at the time though.