Admit it. You are Derek Zoolander, and you are addicted to tiny tech gear. It's minimalistic, it's cool, and its helps you keep your life free of clutter. Big things require big furniture to accommodate them. They impose on your decor, they weigh down your laptop bag, and they waste more electricity, to boot.
I've been shrinking my gadgets for ages. I replaced a tower PC with a Shuttle shoebox (which can accommodate a powerful Nvidia 8800 GTX video card with only about 3mm to spare). I swapped out a meaty Macbook Pro for a subnotebook (The Fujitsu T2010, a $1,500 amazement packed with crazy features like a Wacom Cintiq convertible tablet display). I finally disposed of a gigantic HP laser printer that was good for more than a decade, replacing it with Brother's wee HL2070N.
But I've found there are some places you just can't compromise, no matter how cool it looks next to your fake styrofoam Modigliani. Here's where you need to leave some space for things other than yourself.
Desktop Speakers
Miniature desktop speakers might look great on the box, but the ones with good reviews typically come with a subwoofer the size of a mini-fridge. Gimmicky speakers like those vibrating sounders sound awful. Apple's
24" iMacs are a good indicator of what you can accomplish with decent mini-speakers: they're O.K., but a league below the real deal.
Unless you're prepared to live life through headphones, deal with it:
you need proper, well-juiced speakers with properly-engineered enclosures. I've got on my desk two ugly, space-filling, fat-bottomed
Stereophiles from M-Audio, and after a couple of years of making do with some little 5-watt wimps from Logitech, they were a revelation.
Don't you even think about Bose. Don't you dare.
Pocket-Sized Storage
Miniaturization is so sexy it makes even the driest technologies interesting. Ultra-fast flash gets buyers of high-end laptops plopping almost a grand on a mere 64GB of space. One-inch spinners can't be manufactured fast enough to keep the makers of MP3 players happy. No hipster is happy without a 2.5" portable stashed in his hemp-fiber laptop bag.
But you know what? I want my storage brought to me by the letters T and B. That means big 3.5" internals and external drives that come with power bricks.
Besides, the latest generation of 2.5" portable drives come with USB
y-cables because SATA wants the juice from two ports to stay awake.
Some computers will supply overcurrent and get them running on a single port (The MacBook Air is one example, thanks to its need to power an external optical drive through the bus), but that sucks.
Miniature Keyboards
As a lifelong lover of tiny computers, be they Psion organizers, HPCs, smartphones or modern ultramobiles like the OQO model 02 and Sony Vaio
UX, I can admit defeat. Their keyboards are just no good if you're pumping out thousands of words a day. Though it's often because an artist was permitted to design them, even mini-models with properly-engineered 'boards (like the U810) are hard to get work done on. Apple's MacBook Air, widely expected to be a subnotebook, turned out to be a full-size (but very thin) laptop, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs explicitly identifying keyboard size as a reason to miniaturize on one axis only.
Until they start building portables with Chording keyboards or other weird alternatives, there'll always be a barrier that marks the minimum a functional QWERTY can go.
Windows on Small Displays
We use small LCD displays all the time, and they work great: in cellphones, music players, GPS navigators and other app-specific devices. The problem isn't so much the displays themselves, but the fact that major operating systems just aren't made to fit 200 DPI. A corollary to the keyboard problem in the increasingly popular ultramobile and subnotebook markets, teeny high-res screens will be the bread and butter for next-gen optometrists.
Leave the fonts small, and eye strain becomes your new friend. Make them big, and the operating system becomes nearly useless, because large fonts are still an afterthought, even in Windows Vista, with the rest of the desktop's widgetry going all wonky to accommodate them.
Websites get messed up and dialog boxes break. Error messages become occluded by the bounds of their own alert popups.
Microsoft won't tailor its operating system to mobile computing until someone else is successful doing so and it can zune it. Resolution independence is the Duke Nukem Forever of window manager design. In the meantime, my eyes bleed.
Puny Graphics Tablets
Sorry, 4x6" won't cut it. It never did. Wacom's smallest models
(3.7"x5.8", baby!), are good for nothing beyond the most basic work. If you want to do this job right, you need the proper tool for it—the 6x8"
BlueTooth Graphire looks nice, but you really want an Intuos the size of a professional chef's cutting board—especially with screen resolutions heading ever higher.
Tell us your attempted-miniaturization mishaps in the comments!
