AWACS

I recently left my job and had to buy a new laptop. I decided on an ASUS N53SV. ASUS, because it’s a great brand, the N53SV because it has the right specs. ASUS is a great brand because they use standard components in their systems and then integrate them using what I suspect may be some of the best QA processes in the industry.

The end result is a system that doesn’t require much in the way of specialized drivers and that you can expect to be supported for many years on many different OSes, with excellent build quality, at a very reasonable price. It also means you don’t get forced into whatever foolish “strategic objective” the company wants you to become a part of: no stupid proprietary connectors, no bloated software that wants to “add value” to your life.

Of course, not even ASUS, bless their souls, can escape the value-add trap. Computers have been completely commoditized and “it will do what we promise” is a much harder sell than “we promise everything!”.

This new system, for example, comes with a “quick boot” feature, which is useless, and a bunch of pre-installed software that tries to hook you into signing up for some of ASUS’ “cloud service” offerings.

It’s a complete waste of effort, time and money, and anyone can see that these add-ons have been poorly conceived, poorly tested, and don’t have any serious commitment behind them. They exist solely as the joyless expression of a misunderstood idea that has been marched to death.

Still, I had some fun removing all the extranaeous crap. Computers are so finished and complete these days that there is almost no satisfaction in setting up a new system anymore. You just turn it on, install some of the de-facto standard software like Photoshop and Office, set a new background image, and presto, you have a “computer”. Certainly, you can customize things, but in a few months time, the automated upgrades will break your customizations anyway, and it all starts to fall apart. In the end it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

I used to spend days, if not weeks, customizing my machines, and learned a lot about how they worked in the process. Now I just remove desktop icons and uninstall some programs - a kind of vestigial, mostly symbolic gesture, I guess.

But still, with each icon I removed, with each program I uninstalled, the machine felt a little bit lighter, a little less burdened. Layers and layers of management, marketing and logistics each add their own requirements to a product. As you peel off these layers, the thing itself is revealed: an improbably complicated, multi-billion component piece of consumer electronics, built at razor-thin margins, representing the effort of hundreds of thousands of people who studied and worked hard to bring it into the world.

As you remove all the aspirational crap and confused distractions, you begin to understand what drove these people. You can sense what they wanted this thing to be and catch a glimpse of what is still to come. It is like a mind-meld of nerds across time and space.

The new machine is called Arianwen, after Arianwen Brycheiniog, supposedly meaning “white, holy silver”.