It was almost a hardware-hackers’ dream come true.
Okay, the price wasn’t down there with Raspberry Pi stuff, but get this: for less than $200 you could buy a notebook computer with a quad-core processor, a 14-inch full HD screen (1920×1060), HDMI out, USB 3.0 (one, plus two 2.0), and 4GM of RAM upgradable to 16GB. Nominally the catch was the storage, this was in the “Chromebook” category (even though it was running Windows 10, not Chrome OS) so.. they crippled the storage capacity. Big time. There was only a sad, slow little 32GB M.2 eMMC board running through an adapter to make it look like a real SSD… but if you opened the case, there was a vacant space for a hard drive or SSD, only lacking a cable and caddy, and another empty space sized for an optical drive (but with no case opening) that could easily hold a SSD and an optical-to-SATA adapter taken from an $8 caddy, giving you any amount of fast storage you cared to pay for. It was made by Hewlett-Packard (HP), and it had the lovely and memorable name of 14-on013nr. It was a bargain, and with a little work and a little money you could hot-rod this sleeper into a very usable general-purpose notebook for a fraction of the typical prices of anything comparable. Also in the nice-to-have category, it has dual-band (AC) Wifi, Bluetooth 4.2, real trackpad buttons, a physical Ethernet jack, a camera, both HDMI and VGA out (there are still a lot of “legacy” wall displays and projectors out there with only VGA), a removable battery (so you can carry more than one). It weighs under 4 lbs and has a relatively lightweight charger. In short, this one model got a LOT right for a very portable machine, the most essential of the new without discarding the best of older models.
So they killed it.
Of course.
Everyone pretty much knew they would.
Why is that? Why do we take it for granted that any loophole that provides exceptional value to consumers in computers will be stopped?
After all, in a saner world or in saner times if a company had a product with virtues that its customers recognized and shortcomings they figured out how to circumvent, a product that got a lot of buzz and took off in sales, that company would be pleased and go to some lengths to keep producing that product. After all, they set the initial price at a level that they themselves chose for their profits. They’d make money, their suppliers would make money, they’d make customers happy and get more of them. Everyone would be happy, and that’s how the world gets better, a little bit at a time.
In a world without enough REAL competition, though, a world that’s dominated by management with 19th-Century mindsets, the immediate reaction is that the customers are getting away with something, getting more than they paid for, and it must be stopped. And it was. After all, they can’t sell more expensive computers if everyone starts modding the cheap ones and getting better results, can they?
You can rarely* find an HP 14-an013nr for love nor money anymore, because every single one available has been snatched, including refurbs. Of course they killed production, on the theory that if they don’t give you what you want at an attractive price point, you’ll just be forced to pay them more. And that, more than anything I can say, is clear and incontrovertible evidence that they have succeeded in limiting your choices. They are confident that you have no choice but to buy whatever they offer, which means that they know that no competition is going to offer a lot more for less, even though their actions have clearly revealed that the profit margin is there to do so.
Have you gotten the feeling that the entire consumer computer market has been almost unchanging for many years? You’re not the only one. Typical screen resolutions have been going downhill, typical keyboards have gotten worse, and the designers are very, very determined to turn your personal computer into an entertainment, socializing and most importantly(!) a shopping tool, something with which to consume and not, NOT something with which to produce anything. You don’t need a good keyboard for text messages or to click on “Add to Cart”.
A couple of years ago when I was putting together a “Frankenpad” (a Lenovo Thinkpad made from parts) I bought an unused 1920×1200 LCD screen over eBay for less than $40. Now that same unit is going for hundreds, because you can’t get those resolutions any more. You can get at most 1920×1020 on the top-of-the-line models unless you want to pay hundreds extra for 4K. That’s right, available screen resolutions have gone down while prices have gone up.
Most of them you can’t work on, mod or upgrade anyway, they have soldered-in processors and RAM, proprietary anything-they-can-economically-get-away-with, and “white lists” in the firmware to restrict the components that they can even boot with. As with so many things, “ownership” means almost nothing anymore, there still are many things you’re not allowed to do with your own “property”.
People are walking through their local electronics, computer or “office” stores and asking themselves, if I can get a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a quad-core processor, Ethernet, four USB jacks, HDMI out and Wifi and Bluetooth built in that runs Linux and full office suites and plays movies for $35, why do half-decent notebook computers still, well into the 21st Century, START at around $500 and go up rapidly from there?
Everywhere you turn, above the Raspberry Pi level, they’re killing upgradeability, quality and features and raising prices, all while bemoaning their fast-diminishing sales. What you get in exchange is faster processors and memory, all of the advantage of which is eaten up by bloatware like Windows 10, and which doesn’t make nearly as much difference as changing storage speeds from HD to SSD on an older machine. If you’re running Linux on an SSD already, you’d probably much rather spend for a better screen and keyboard than ever-obsolescing processors.
No wonder nobody cares anymore. They get much more value from their heavily-subsidized “phones” than they get from any consumer-level computers.
I don’t know, I don’t have a prescription for all this, I’m just disgusted. I’ll be damned if I’m paying top dollar for the latest Windows or “Gaming” boxes filled with bloatware, adware and spyware. I have been, and will be, dealing with salvage, surplus and built-from-parts until the industry deigns to give us some value and options at the lower end, starts to progress again in value and price and not just supposedly-faster processors, or some real, actual competition shows up to do so.
— Robert the Wombat
PS – If you’re going to go hunting for an HP 14-on013nr yourself, BE CAREFUL and BE AWARE that the majority of places you can search for something like that (especially vendor sites) will return whatever they have that is closest… so you may well end up looking at a visually-identical 14-an012nr or an011nr or an010nr instead and not even realize it. These are not the one you want, they have lower resolution screens, slower processors, and are not nearly as upgradeable. If it doesn’t have a “13” in the middle, it’s not right. Always check before you start to get enthusiastic about price. As a double-check, make sure the screen is listed as 1920×1080.
*for those really interested, yeah, I’ve found one source for “refurbs” that used to have maybe five retail-purchase outlets and sold by the hundreds, now it’s down to one, in dribs and drabs, a few here, a few there. Sometimes there are none available for weeks at a time or more. No, I’m not giving it up yet, I think I’ll need two more myself before I’m through.