Friday, February 21, 2014

Minimum Hardware Requirements

Zyx snuck into my apartment and was using my iPad today.
Consider the following:

  • Several different and unrelated posts on My Second Life this week continue on-going discussions from elsewhere on the Interwebs about how poorly Second Life functions on Macintosh computers compared to Windows computers.
  • My brother's iMac now sits near mine so I can watch DVDs while logged into SL because he finds it too outdated to effectively run Second Life.
  • We have three iPad Air tablets in our house, an iPod Touch, and an iPhone. These devices account for some 90% of our household data usage in any given time period.
  • Just today my brother noted on a social media outlet that if we didn't have Second Life accounts, we wouldn't need desktop computers in our house. That's funny as I've pointed out the same thing to several friends in-world on different occasions.
  • Recently I passed up a great deal on several image editing applications for my iMac because it occurred to me that if it weren't for SL I wouldn't really need them.

Still, with some regularity I price out a replacement for my late-2009 27" iMac and I have a couple different "standing" desks in my Amazon WishList should someone get the urge to replace the plastic fold-up thing I use now. And I always look at desk chairs in stores because if I don't get a new desk, replacing the old church function chair I sit on would be really sweet. All because of Second Life.

Do I need a desktop computer (or a laptop, for that matter)? I read news and comics on my iPad. The iPad and my iPod are my gaming machines (including Blocksworld from Linden Lab). Amazon Video? My iPad, of course. I use my iPad so much I'd like to have an iPad Mini, too, so I can have two screens.

The current generation of iPads could probably run a Second Life client though I imagine that there are rules and restrictions from The Lab that give app authors pause. Maybe our new Fearless Leader Ebbe (Altberg) Linden (Web) will look into the world's most popular tablet computers as a means to stabilize Second Life's population numbers. I'd almost settle for a client that could let me run Linden Realms on my iPad but the full SL experience would be better to have.

2 comments:

Orca said...

Baaah, humbug :(
Why should I ever feel the need to swap my nice and reasonably powerful desktop 'puter for an underpowered piece of travel consumer gadgetry?

Why should I stare at a mini screen when I have a 24" monitor?

Why should I give up my fancy keyboard for an onscreen touchy smeary compromise?

For the couple weeks of a year we're travelling abroad we have versatile laptops that can do everything.

Last, but not least, why should I restrict my software needs to a commercial closed source system like MacOS or Win? We run several customized Linuxes on all our hardware, have a plethora of thousands of programs and apps, are always up to date and do whatever we wanna do. All that for a fraction of the price we'd have to pay for Win/Apple based products. In fact we pay zero.

Uccie Poultry said...

All personal preference, I suppose. I seldom build any more so an tablet app would be nice for casual visits, but having both hardware options would be optional.