Tag Archives: computer

News

Humble Pi: Raspberry Pi Takes Third-Biggest Slice of Computer Market

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While we specialize in consumer-level technology at iFixYouri, we’re also a bunch of tinkerers. Several of our staff count “soldering” as both a skill and hobby and we actively encourage people to learn exactly how things work. As such, iFixYouri firmly endorses DIY computing, and the Raspberry Pi is a great place to start learning. As it turns out, we’re not the only ones who think so. MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, recently announced that over 12.5 million of the units have been sold since the original Pi was launched in 2012. This makes the affordable little Linux boards the third highest-selling general-purpose computer behind Apple and Microsoft Windows PCs. The former third-place spot? The humble Commodore 64, a computer discontinued in 1994.

 

The sales breakdown, made soon after Pi Day (3/14, after the mathematical constant pi), is presented as (what else) a pie chart.

 

The largest slices of the delicious, Unix-flavored pie represent recent models of the Pi, indicating that sales have been gaining steam with the newer, cheaper models. The founder and CEO of the Raspberry Pi Trust, Eben Upton, revealed that the Zero W sold about 100,000 in its first four days.

 

Third place might not sound too impressive but consider that the bronze model had been held by a computer that stopped being produced back when Bill Clinton was president. In the intervening two-decades-plus, no other computer had sold anything close to the numbers required to bump against the two monoliths that are Apple and Microsoft.

 

12.5 million is especially impressive seeing that it was originally supposed to be between 10,000 and 20,000 boards for schools. Designed from the get-go as a basic, affordable computer intended for use in classrooms, the first Raspberry Pi, which retailed for around $30, differed little from current models. Unlike what you currently think of as a “computer,” the Raspberry Pi arrives without a tower, CD drive, keyboard, mouse, or even a power switch. All you get is bare chipboard and a power cable, with connectors on the board for display, input, and data transfer. Other than that, you’re on your own. Using free open-source software and thousands of hours of YouTube tutorials, one can learn exactly how computers work, no matter their age or prior expertise. It’s a neat little thing that iFixYouri employees love using to design gizmos; you can power robots, create home-assistance programs, anything you want with enough patience. Newer models are even cheaper and more feature-packed. The recently released Zero W model has wi-fi capability, Bluetooth, and 1Ghz of RAM for just ten dollars.

 

For the small British manufacturer, outselling the Commodore 64 is bittersweet and a huge occasion, and it cements the Raspberry Pi in the annals of computer history. “We did it together,” said Upton, “and it’s kind of wonderful.”

 

If you’d like to jump on the bandwagon and learn the computing arts, we recommend buying a Raspberry Pi and start learning. There’s a large, warm and welcoming community of techies who love teaching new acolytes about the craft, including all of us at iFixYouri. If you live near one of our 15 locations, keep an eye out: we’ll be offering classes soon, taught by senior iFixYouri technicians, and covering a wide range of computing and technology topics. A class utilizing Raspberry Pi and other micro-computers will definitely be on the curriculum. And, of course, if you break something as part of your learning process, iFixYouri is here to fix it.

laptops, News

Bought a Computer 10 Years Ago? Here’s 10 Bucks!

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If you bought a computer with a CD drive back when 50 Cent was a top-selling artist and Tobey Maguire was still Spider-Man, you have a Hamilton headed your way. The European Commission, which is responsible for proposing legislation and upholding the EU treaties, contacted 13 optical drive manufacturers about major antitrust violations back in 2012, and they’re beginning to file settlement. These companies, many of them major players in the tech industry, are being investigated for what the Commission terms “one of the most serious breaches of EU antitrust rules.” Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi-LG, and others are suspected of being involved in a bid-rigging cartel between 2003 and 2008. For those unfamiliar with competition law, we’ll break it down.

 

  1. A cartel is an agreement between competing firms to control prices.
  2. Bid-rigging is a conspiracy in which a cartel agrees about who will submit the winning bid when there is a call for bids.

 

In this case, whenever HP or Dell needs an optical disk drive for a new laptop or desktop, they initiate an auction in which the lowest bidder wins the contract to manufacture the component. Instead of competing with each other for the chance to end up with the tiniest of profit margins, these 13 companies would decide, ahead of time, which one would get the contract, and the other 12 would purposefully give weak bids. The 13th company gets to sell their optical disk drives to HP or Dell for a higher price than if they bid fairly.

 

Let’s get to the important part. A class-action lawsuit is being filed against these 13 companies. Four of the companies have settled so far, a total of $124.5 million. A large portion of the money will be distributed to consumers who bought a optical disk drive or a computer with an optical disk drive (ODD). If you’re one of them, you’re eligible for up to $10 per drive. It doesn’t seem like you need any proof of purchase; the settlement administrators are (for now) simply collecting names, email addresses, and the number of drives purchased. Here are the details:

 

  • You purchased a new computer with an internal ODD, a stand-alone ODD designed for internal use in a computer, or an ODD designed to be attached externally to a computer.
  • Your purchase was for personal use and not for resale.
  • You made your purchase between April 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008.
  • You made the purchase as a resident of Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, or Wisconsin.
  • Claim must be filed before July 1st, 2017.

 

laptops

Hard Disk? Solid State? A Guide to Hard Drives.

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The new MacBook Pro was announced in October to incredible media attention. Praise and derision from all sides became the norm, but one feature went completely uncommented. This line of professional-grade laptops is equipped with solid-state drives. It seems like recent history when solid-state drives (or SSDs) were treated with scorn, relegated to cheap electronics and knockoffs. Real technology, it was said, kept data on hard-disk drives (or HDD). But what’s the difference? And why are SSDs okay now?

SSD vs HDD, new and old technology
SSD vs HDD, new and old technology

First, I need to simplify things (to a horrifying extent, for some) by saying that data is stored as 1s and 0s. The first computers used punch cards to store data; think an index card with holes in it. A space with a hole was a 1, a space without a hole was a 0. Each space is called a “bit,” and if you have a card with, say, ten rows of eight spaces each, that card can store 80 bits. Eight bits make up one “byte” so you can also say it stores 10 bytes. Now, a byte isn’t much; to encode a letter of the alphabet takes 1 byte (a combination string of eight 0s or 1s) so the most data a 10-byte card could hold is the word “mozzarella” or “prosciutto” (I just ate Italian). As computing speeds got faster and faster, new forms of storage were needed, capable of holding many more 1s and 0s. Essentially, the 1s and 0s had to get smaller.

micro_sd_tab_card_2

Inside of a hard-disk drive (HDD) is, unsurprisingly, a hard disk. This disk is actually composed of extremely tiny magnetic spaces that can either have polarity in one direction or another. An arm moving over the disk as it spins reads the spaces as being in a certain direction (a 0) or another direction (a 1). By spinning the disk at a blindingly fast rate and moving the arm over it just as quickly, a hard-disk drive can read an impressive amount of data in less than a second. Modern HDDs found in most desktop computers are at least 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes).

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This has disadvantages, of course. To be as fast and accurate as possible, the head of the arm must be as close as possible to the surface of the disk. The heads of modern hard-disk drives can be 10nm from the surface, 1/750000 of the diameter of a human hair! In a desktop, this is okay. But in a portable device, like a laptop or iPod, this gets dangerous. A bump or drop while the disk is being read will push the arm into the spinning disk. At 7200 revolutions-per-minute, this can completely destroy the whole thing, causing you to lose all your data! There’s also an issue with max speed. The HDD speed is limited by the speed of the disk and the speed of the arm, both of which are limited by…well…physics. Spin too fast and the disc can literally melt due to friction.

Solid-state drives, on the other hand, have no moving parts. It’s the same technology used in thumb drives, but optimized to be much faster and hold vast amounts of data. The technology has been around for years, but has been prohibitively expensive until recently. SSDs are smaller, use less power, and can supply more data in less time than HDDs. You can drop one and it keeps chugging along. By mounting the SSD to the motherboard, load speeds practically disappear, allowing a computer to boot-up within seconds. This is called PCIe, and is featured on the new MacBook Pro. This has allowed solid-state drives, previously relegated to small electronics such as cellphones and MP3 players, to be featured as the main hard drive on powerful computers.

macbookprossd

For decades, hard-disk drives ruled the computer world, but it’s just updated dated technology. Heck, even the first few generations of iPod used hard-disk drives. Manufacturers tried to innovate by making smaller, faster drivers with more storage but the same limitations held them back. The move by large consumer-tech companies to feature SSDs will lead to the same innovation. We’re betting on seeing tiny terabyte chips in cellphones within a decade or so. If you’re interested in upgrading your computer to an SSD drive, contact your local iFixYouri or leave a comment below. Our technicians will be more than happy to help.