 |
| Aeron chair. Aeropress. EIZO monitors - http://www.eizo.com uTorrent, the older versions. Dead serious about this. One of the best designed and engineered pieces of software ever. Everything you need, where you expect it to be, doing exactly what it should be doing. |
| Earhoox. https://earhoox.com/ For whatever reason, all earphones fall out of my ears. Exercise, walking around the house, whatever - they just don't work for me. The Earhoox sort that 100%. Only issues: I had to use a nail-clipper to cut the rough mold edges. They do fall off the earbuds quite easily when e.g. in pockets. But if I lost them, I'd order another pair that day. |
| Cutco is crap. Part and parcel of using a knife is learning to sharpen one. Counter-example: Tojiro DP... Amazing knives for the price. |
| 3-4 years ago maybe? DC 33 I think is what I had. The little hose that connected to the bottom near the spinning brush wouldn't stay connected... I had to put duct tape on it... And one of the wheels came out of it's little "axel" and wouldn't stay in... had to super glue that. The canister button broke... had to use like a paper-clip to wiggle that open. And what I think was a major design flaw... When I turned it on, it took like 30 seconds to actually get any suction... when I contacted support on that they said it had to build up pressure. So I would turn the vacuum on, let it sit for a minute before I could use it. Total joke. I wasted time taking it to a repair shop that offered to replace the motor... for basically the cost of a new one. Dyson wouldn't cover it. Anyway they don't make that model any more... and if you're happy with what you got, I'm happy for you. I wasn't happy with what I got and Dyson made me take it back to Costco instead of offering to stand behind their product. I want to say it was something like $400... seems like for that price they should stand behind it. https://www.amazon.com/Dyson-DC33-Multi-Floor-Upright-Bagles... |
| Weber Kettle grill (love their smoker as well but points knocked off for cleanup). I have always found Microsoft keyboard and mice to be well designed. |
| Automatic mechanical watches. The idea that this tiny device is assembled entirely from macroscopic, tangible, "grokkable", mechanical components, will run "forever" with no direct conscious input of energy and tells you reasonably accurate time is pretty unique. Recent relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13459616 |
| Aesthetically pleasing: - The Palm Pre (1st edition). It is an absolutely amazing, brilliant piece of hardware (especially back in 2009) that fits just right in my hand like a pebble. The curved screen is brilliant to the eyes and to the touch. It also has an interface that is not cluttered and busy like shit in other mainstream OSes then, and now. But I mainly like things that are designed for ease of maintenance: - The iPhone 4s and iPhone 5. Like the iPhone or hate it, but the iPhone is a marvelous engineering feat. First, the amount of components it could hold. Second, how strong and robust it is for such a small body. Third, how easy it is to replace the most vulnerable component, the screen. - The iPod Nano 2nd Edition. It is such a timeless design that is extremely small and practical. It is really easy to open up the iPod Nano should you need to replace the battery, too. - Dell Chromebook 13 and Acer Chromebook 720: It took 8 screws to open them and get to the battery, CMOS, RAM, SSD, CPU, WLAN card. - Sony Walkmans. It was an eye-opening experience to see a player that is barely bigger than a tape, with features packed in it in the era of tapes, moving motors, pulleys, cogs and such. But my most admired understated design has to be the Thinkpad line. About 10 years ago, when computers were hot, clunky, and easy to break; I had a friend asking me to look at her coffee spilled Thinkpad T42 or T43 (I think). I just moved to the US for college for a month and had only a screwdriver toolset. Thankfully to its brilliant design [1], it only took a single screwdriver to lift the whole keyboard and touchpad up and get to everything, including the CPU. And the keyboard was spill resistant, so not that much liquid leaked either. I asked my roommate to take me to the nearest Radioshack to get a tube of heat spreader, and dried the whole thing with a hairdryer. It worked like new. I could still remember the horror of opening Dell D6x0 laptops at my college IT department. What a fucking joke of a design - there is nothing good I could say about those "business machines" on the inside. It got to the point that if anything went wrong with those computers, the IT department just called the "Dell guy" to go fix it. 5 years ago, I even bet my roommate to pour a cup of water on a running Thinkpad. It survived. And the Thinkpads now are barely different from the Thinkpads then and the Thinkpads from the beginning. It says something about the design, does it? 1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/IBM+ThinkPad+T42+Teardown/29... |
| I LOVED my Thinkpad 600. Such a great machine for its time. Modern Thinkpads are crap. I've had the W450, T450 and X1 Carbon. All of them look basic and had really bad screens. |
| I unfortunately dropped a T60 some time ago, on the right rear corner. The system board and everything were all fine... but the LCD copped it :( only displayed sad rainbows (IIRC). I'm not sure if I bent the heatsink slightly off as well; I tried to fix it but I may have made it worse. The thermal design on the T60 is a disaster: the part of the heatpipe that extends over the GPU has nowhere to bolt it down (see http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg - the rightmost part, see how there are no screws, it literally was not factored into the design, it's held down solely by the copper itself) and because my heatsink is fractionally misaligned, my GPU consistently idles at 75°C (!) and can reach 90°C (!!) if I actually try to do anything! |
| The side-stand of a motorcycle that swings backward to retract. Such a simple yet life saving design. For tech stuff, checkout Windows Surface Hub. |
| Hardware: Zojirushi mugs Creative zen mp3 players Staedtler writing utensils Software: Linux utils, particularly those born out of Bell Labs ggplot Keras |
| 2013 15-inch MBP served me very well. Was the laptop I was most happy with. |
But at my new office, we have a good old-fashioned water-cooler. Except that it's a newfangled water cooler with a redesigned interface between cooler and water jug. Now, instead of peeling a wax lid off the top of the jug and spilling a couple cups of water as you throw it on the cooler, you just pull off a sticker and sort of plug it into the water cooler. No more water spills.
It seems so simple and obvious. Yet how many Olympic-sized swimming pools full of water did we have to spill before someone designed it? I love it.
Here's the first video I could find that shows one of them in action (in 3D!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgS5VIwE1WA