
CUPP crams ARM inside of a MacBook Pro, makes it run Android with a button press - lotusleaf1987
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/14/cupp-crams-arm-inside-of-a-macbook-pro-makes-it-run-android-wit/
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clvv
I would prefer if they just make a ARM laptop. Seriously, why aren't there any
decent ARM laptops? I know there are a few ARM/MIPS laptops out there but they
are all either old(new platforms are much more powerful) or comes locked.

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Splines
_Seriously, why aren't there any decent ARM laptops?_

Because demand is extremely low? If it can't run a mass-market OS, anything
you make is going to be an extremely niche product.

I like the idea of an Android laptop, but I wonder how well off-the-shelf
Android applications would perform on a 16x9 landscape screen with a hardware
keyboard and a hard-to-use touch surface.

~~~
clvv
I think Android is more optimized for touch-screen devices but I was hoping
Chrome OS will bring more ARM laptops to the market. Now it seems like that's
not gonna happen, but Windows 8 being ARM compatible should bring more ARM
laptops to the market. Sadly that won't happen any time soon.

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pge
Dell tried this with the LatitudeON feature which shipped in several
variations on Latitude laptops. In their version, turning the ARM OS on
automatically hibernated the Windows OS. In any case, for some reason, it has
not caught on (Dell has also had trouble meeting shipping dates, as they are
using a custom Linux distro from DeviceVM, rather than using Android). I
almost bought a new Dell just for that feature, and in polling other business
users whose machines had the feature in one form or another, I have yet to
find someone actually using it. Poor marketing and perhaps targeted at the
wrong market. One challenge is whether to power up the hard drive. If you
leave it unpowered and just have the ARM and some RAM, you lose the ability to
access data on the hard drive, but powering up the hard drive increases the
power load materially.

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leon_
> In any case, for some reason, it has not caught on

It's Dell. How passionate are people about new features in Dell products? I
don't even know who Dell's CEO is. Dell is boring office stuff.

On the other hand, if Apple would have introduced such a feature we would be
hearing from it on TV news. And all tech bloggers would jerk in a circle, etc.

~~~
jawee
Hint: he founded the company and named it after himself.

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dstein
I fully expect Apple to begin doing this across their entire laptop line as a
precursor to a full migration to an ARM-based MacOS/iOS hybrid.

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pyre
Assuming that you're being serious, I doubt that they would make such a move.
While Apple markets their computers as being simple enough for anyone to use,
they have a large section of power users that use their laptops heavily for
things like Photoshop and video editing. I don't think that either of those
will be performant in the near-term on ARM.

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dstein
nVidia's Tegra 3 (due this year) is a quad-core ARM with a GPU capable of
accelerated 3D, HD resolution, and 13800 MIPS which I believe is faster than a
Core 2 Duo.

[http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/23/nvidia-
thinks...](http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/23/nvidia-thinks-world-
domination-tegra-2-3d-in-january2c-tegra-3-by-fall.aspx)

The 64-bit ARM chips will be better.

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etcet
Am I wrong in assuming that if you don't power down your x86 system then it
will still draw power when you toggle the switch? It seems more like a nice
solution for people who dual boot win/osx and linux.

I applaud the novel use of the optical drive space and I'm excited for the
time when hardware shrinks past the usable threshold and we can cram more
components in a 13" laptop form factor.

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pyre
What components though? I think that the reduction in size would be used to
make the form-factor even smaller (possibly just thinner/lighter if they
wanted to keep the screen size).

~~~
micampe
Batteries.

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jodrellblank
Why Android and not Arm desktop linux (assuming there are some)?

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nl
Because Android is more mature as a consumer operating system.

(Yeah, I know.. Unix is 30+ years old and Android is 3. But you can't get
Angry Birds for Linux, and the power management on Linux isn't great etc
etc..)

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thwarted
Android runs on Linux.

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nl
Do you seriously think that either I or the OP didnt realize that? The OP even
says "why not desktop linux"!

The question is why Android rather than Linux. Saying Android is Linux doesn't
explain anything at all.

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thwarted
I don't know, it's hard to say what you don't realize, but I'll expound upon
my comment. Do you really think the power management would be all that
different in a laptop (rather than a phone) running Android? They'd both be
using the Linux kernel, and people already complain about their Android phone
battery life (but people complain about _every_ phone's battery life). And if
one really wants to run Angry Birds on their Linux laptop (or any laptop that
the Android SDK runs on), it is entirely possible to wrap the emulator and/or
port Dalvik, to run Android apps as first class desktop app citizens. In fact,
I'm surprised no one has done this already.

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Groxx
And the arguments against getting rid of the optical bay just got more
interesting...

