Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.

Is this part of the elevator, or an advertising billboard installed in the elevator?

I went into a store that sells grills. They all had screens. On a fucking barbecue.

I just want a box that makes fire.

Overkill, yes but also almost surely just a standardized hardware set the company uses regardless of the specific advertising situation.

This set of hardware can run 99% of their client requirements and requires only a single hardware configuration to support. Maybe a couple generations of support as time goes on before older hardware is replaced.

Could this particular use case be handled by something as simple as a raspberry pi? Probably, but almost surely not everything the company that provides the hardware/service/support handles for clients.

We got so far into "hardware is cheap" / "developers are expensive" / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.

Honestly considering the age of this motherboard and cpu. This is legitimately cheaper than a raspberry pi now if you buy used and it’s a lot more powerful. I would also imagine that’ll it’ll be stuck in this elevator forever because why upgrade hardware when this nugget can still show ads completely disconnected from the elevator computer since it’s been doing since 2020. Maybe I would consider this absurd back during the end of Covid but not really that much now. Considering I can buy this for under a hundred dollars on eBay and you should probably be considering as well especially if you wanna run Linux on a cheap machine. Like yeah the ram is probably soldered onto the motherboard and it’s a laptop cpu with integrated graphics worse than that of the intel hd graphics 4000 in my 2012 MacBook. But like you can do a lot with this nugget.

"I lift things up and put them down."

Honestly speaking, using readily available hardware instead of specialty made to operate an elevator isn't a bad idea.

Is it inflation or 8GB of ram and x86-64 gaming capable CPUs in everything with buttons

Meanwhile my company keeps using NUCs to control 9 live video feeds per NUC. And when they inevitably keep crashing because of thermal throttling/dust build up after around a year, they just replace them.

There is 2 things to this, its cheaper to buy hardware like a raspberry pi or similar with 8gb of ram and use that to build the elevator. And it might genuinely easier to source the parts and future spare parts.

But as a developer I want to be snarky and say why does a elevator need 8GB, it should have 256MB and use 168 MB max where 100 MB is display graphics and music, 5 is the control system with 3 copies of the variable for redundancy and the rest is telemetry and a memory leak that eats 1MB every 2 weeks because someone is resizing the audio buffer for floor announcements everytime.

But its probably just a mini pc that's using 512Mb all in all running some linux distro. and the 8GB is just not being used.

So it's not AI data centers after all, elevators are driving the RAM shortage!!!1!

Low powered stuff probably requires more Dev or specialist software, with a off the shelf mini pc you can just put windows with kiosk mode on it. In terms of support time it's probably cheaper than cheaper hardware.

I wonder to how many more digital signs all over the world this applies to.

I've never been in an elevator with displays like this. I take the stairs on the rare occasion anymore that I'm in a large building.

I think I'd just lean against it, so no one need look at it. However, I'm assuming there's one on each wall, so maybe it's best just to stare at the doors as is tradition.

Billionaires keep finding every possible way, small and large, to be worse.

I feel seen

On the other hand, considering the cost of custom designing this elevator, building and installing it, the choice of hardware in this single place is rather neglectable.

Most elevator runs on Windows XP...

our HMO medical facilities has elevators with MSMs news, although there isnt any sound.

Is this one of the newer ones with facial tracking? Could that be the reason for the stupid amount of power for images and video?

Elevators are Determinite Finite Autonomas ffs. In my theoretical computer science course in college, I wrote a DFA program in python that would have fit on an Arduino.

To be fair- modern elevators in business soaked, ads are served constantly.. the 8gb makes sense. But the i5 is an over kill indeed. But at the same time it makes sense that the renderings need to be handled 🤷 Either way I firmly believe that no ads should be allowed in elevators. Especially if I know that any time that shit can breakdown and I’m plummeting to death with “.. now book your holiday with Jet 2 Holiday..” in the background..