What are some tech products that you want that you can't seem to find?
What are some tech products that you want that you can't seem to find?
Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can't find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
I want an open source cellular baseband chip. That's the chip that acts as a networking connection to cell phone towers. Not only would the drivers be open, but the hardware as well. It might be a little larger than most, as I would want it to be possible for users to dismantle it (destructively, of course) and verify against tampering.
Bunnie Huang's Precursor was a good start, but it lacks networking (as far as I know)
(Are crowdsourcing links allowed? I'm not going to link to the crowdsupply page, just in case, but it is more informative)
A IP68 e-ink Linux phone with both wireless charging and induction charging (to charge other devices), no cameras at all, solar panel on the back, usb-4 and headphone jack, 1TB storage , 15'000 mAh battery, two separate WiFi cards (to allow simultaneous hotspot and client use), and finally a radio transiever for both short range comms and long range AM and FM radio.
Technically possible with current technology, but as far as I can tell, completely unavailable in the consumer market.
Price, size and weight are irrelevant for all usecasses of such a product, as far as I'm concerned.
I want a Japanese ketai phone with android 10+, easily rootable, AND HAS A DAMN TOUCH CRUISER. They day Sharp decided to stop making flip phones with touch cruiser is the day innovation truly died.
Or an e-ink flip phone, that would be pretty cool.
I'll join the ranks asking for a perfect phone.
Mine would have:
- Unlocked bootloader
- All week battery (or at least 3 days) I don't care if it's super thick.
- User replaceable battery
- Headphone jack
- Very high specs (like at least 16 GB RAM and 1TB storage)
- SD card slot
- Probably more I'm not thinking of right now.
A small android smartphone with good software support
Folding screen eReader....it would be extremely niche, but I want it
Recently heard about RePebble, so my complaining about smart watches may have to end
Phones with smaller screens
I want physical media that is not sold on optical disks. Sell me content on SD cards for example.
A proper non-Apple Macbook Air equivalent. Because imo for the average user that just browses the internet and does some light office work it seems perfect. And with that I mean:
- fanless
- good screen preferably 3:2 or 16:10
- long battery life
- unlike the air expandable storage and ideally non soldered ram
- solid build quality
- priced at maybe 600-800€?
- doesn't have to have the greatest performance
Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.
I'd really love to find a new radio for my car that: 1) can serve as a monitor for my back-up camera, and 2) isn't a fucking touch screen.
There are models that are one or the other, but I haven't found anything that's both. The closest I've found is a compromise - a touchscreen that also has a few tactile controls. But I don't want to have to rely on any touch screen when I'm driving. I simply don't feel compelled enough to spend $400+ for a frustrating half-measure.
As I'm getting more and more into keyboards, I've realised I dont want a laptop anymore.
I want a powerful phone (16GB RAM, 8-cores) that I can:
- a) use as a phone (smallish, please)
- b) use as a dockable workstation
That is, I can come home from work, slide my phone into a USB-C dock and start typing away on my Linux desktop with my fancy keyboard
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I'm currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I'm not a billboard. I'm not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked "hey, what laptop is that" than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don't come at me with stickers.
A smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know I’ll have to charge it more often or it’ll be thicker. I’m willing to make that trade-off.
And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I don’t give a shit. I use my phone for reading text, listening to music, and taking pictures. Just make the fucking camera top of the line and let me use my good headphones. If it’s several millimeters thicker, so be it.
Water bottle that auto seals and is easy to clean.
Camera-less small phone with a keyboard and an IR blaster
A Steam Deck with stock pricing in Mexico.
I need an ecmascript library that demuxes mpeg when fed individual frames. Every lib just wants to take in a whole file or URL to a stream. I need to filter the websocket sending the data so I need to feed individual frames to the lib. I'm only finding commonjs libs that do this
A power efficient e-ink laptop.
A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don't care how chonky it is.
A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.
Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It's not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.
Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.
A Clockwork uConsole device that's a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they're alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn't mind a laptop in this format.
I'd like some PC support for HDMI CEC
My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.
My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what's hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.
I'm aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I've been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.
Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.
I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it's not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.
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Fractal Design's Pop cases have a 5.25" bay. It's hidden behind a pop-off panel at the bottom, in the power supply basement.
- remember netbooks? yeah so i would love a 10"-ish laptop (with current hardware) for taking notes etc.
why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.
- also a smartphone that reacts quickly to user input with an OS that doesn't look like the love child of windows mobile (remember that?) and the first iphones. looking at you iOS18 settings menu (among others)
A laptop with trackpad buttons
Lenovo is the only one I can find, and they're above the pad for the nub
A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230
Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can't be that crazy of a product. There's already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.
A phone with a 5-5.5" screen. I'd be fine with a midrange chipset and camera. The Zenfone 10 was the last one that even came closer but they would only support it for two years and locked the bootloader (and lied about the unlock service eventually coming back online).
Magnetic audio cable break-aways
Remember when MP3 players were a thing? Well I still listen to mp3 files, but I can't put them on my smartphone because manufacturers artificially reduce storage size on phones to force people to use cloud services, and the available mp3 players that accept microSD cards are remarkably bad in many ways. It makes me pessimistic about tech in general, there is no sense of humanism or building progress, that in the future the products will be easier or better. Based on current trends, it seems like in the future the tech will just be more exploitative and consumers are just captive at this point.
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
Edit: Actually, there are some decent options for Snapdragon 7/8 refurbs on Amazon. Mass market brands can be so hit or miss by model, so this’ll take some research, but it looks like there are 20-30 results to consider.
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that's a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it's always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it's even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I'd even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the 'usable with one hand' criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I'd also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that's a pretty niche thing to be after.
A device I'd really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that's something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.
Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d'etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.
You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you'd always have a backup ready that you could swap in.
Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn't need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.
This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn't have to worry about network connectivity. You'd still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.
A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom. This makes using the phone easier when it is being charged. Also, recessed camera lenses. Why do they have to stick out? When placing the phone on a surface, the camera lens cover will get scratches over time. If the phone was just one milimeter thicker, the cameras on the back wouldn't stick out and one wouldn't need a phone case, that adds to thickness anyway. It also would be nice if phone manufacturors would still have smaller screen sizes (max. 6") in their portfolio, as it is inconvenient to carry a larger phone in a pocket.
A standalone remote or phone app that connects to my car's entertainment system that can control the satellite radio without the need for a passenger to have to lean way forward to use the touchscreen all the time. I miss the days of screen controls next to the cup holders instead of everything going through the touch screen.
dick sucking robot
Depends what you call tech. I've been looking for a salt nic vape (say 10 watts) in the 1 ohm range with a easily replaceable battery for the last year. Bonus points if it doesn't leak to hell and gone. Haven't had a whole lot of luck with that so far.
Pretty much any portable device with a standard type, user replaceable battery. God bless Ryobi and the other power tool companies for building weird but useful tools beyond power drills. All with replaceable batteries.
At one point I was looking for any type robust portable storage media that had reasonable storage capacity and good shelf life (2+ years), and was large enough to actually write on a label what was on it. So far the closest I've seen since 2005 have been the portable SSDs and the newish USB m.2 enclosures but that's still not quite what I'm looking for. Too large and non-standardized. Gave up on it several years ago and built a publicly accessible Nextcloud server. Yes I'm an old fart, dislike cloud storage and miss the floppy, Zip and Mini-Disk storage formats. I currently have a dozen mystery jump drives sitting on my desk in a 3d printed rack with only the vaguest clue whats on any of them. Most of them so small you can't even put a key tag on them. I hate it.
A reliable multi port (4 or more) USB-C charger that can output 65+ watts on all of its ports at the same time.
A reliable source for 100w USB-c 3.x PD cables that don't cost an arm and a leg. Anker makes good PD cables but tops out at USB 2.whatever.
Pretty sure more would come to mind if I sat and though about it for a while, but I've got to head to work now.
I don't know if it's possible but it feels like a cheap box for (sata) hard drives would be super useful for people having a bunch of old drives. The only ones I can find are top of the line expensive NAS or DAS stuff for say 2 to 4 large drives, not my 7 drives from 500GB to 2TB...
I use a 5€ sata-usb connector but it's not very practical, a usb hub + 7 of these connectors would cost like 40€ ... Not reliable or anything but it would just need a box!
You can easily get a case with an optical drive slot if you just get an older case. You can fit an older case with more modern components just fine. My current PC case is from 2017 and has an optical drive slot (which is fitted with an optical drive—though I'm afraid I've not used it in years...)
As for laptops with ports, they're out there but you may have to either get an older one or pay more money annoyingly. I wish it was standard for laptops to have ethernet ports. My modern, fairly mainstream trend-following laptop has all the other ports I need (USB obviously, HDMI, and 3.5mm headphone jack).
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Phone with dual sim card slots and a sdcard, plus pop-out camera (my present phone has all of that except the second simcard, and I refuse to replace this phone!) ** Charging port on top ** Slightly thicker to fit a larger battery - and possibly slightly better optics for the main camera.
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Computer mouse about 15% larger than the "large" mouses they presently sell.
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Detachable 10-key that's mirrored for easy left hand use.
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In general, small electronic devices should have more than one button for interaction. It's easier to remember 3 different buttons than 3 different Morse codes to achieve the three different functions.
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An app like Shazam but that shows me : this is the song you played and these are the songs it reminds you of because the melody is from here and the vocals melody is from here etc. I am mad that every other song reminds me of another but I cannot check which one it is.
A SEGA Dreamcast
A decent brand of tws with multiple lights to indicate the amount of charge left. Also bigger battery.
All the branded stuff have single led with different colours to indicate charge percentage and also if paired or not.
I don't want to remember fcking rainbow to know all the features.
Reliable software. It's a thing of the past.
This one I just found last week. I’ve been trying to get my tv on my vpn without having to flash my router with openwrt. It’s a samsung running tizen so not customizable unlike an android tv. I discovered the GL.Inet Mango and Shadow mini routers that come with openwrt pre-installed. Now I have my tv and older devices that don’t support my vpn client connected to it. I can also take it along with me when traveling to use when on hotel or public wifi.
Something that’ll let me plug a raspberry pi’s micro hdmi output into either: the usb-c input OR mini hdmi input on an (already-powered) external monitor. If anyone has success stories, I’d appreciate it.
A two monitor vga kvm switch
A wall ac that fits a sears sleeve or floor ac that uses a 220v plug, or an indoor swamp cooler that refrigerates the water, or an indoor ac that vents heat up since I don’t spend much time on the ceiling.
