Technology

Its very hard to beat the laptop form factor for productivity, but i wish there was more laptops out there with all the ports and hardware features i would like. too bad that some of them are only really available in obscure cyberdecks

I had one of the original netbooks (Asus EEEPC) back in the mid 2000s and I absolutely loved that thing. It was really great for bopping around college and travelling and such and had a killer battery life of like 8 or 10 hours or something like that. I used to run Win 7 dual booted with Ubuntu

For awhile now I've been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.

The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.

Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn't be well suited to full motion video, the user interface could be text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display static images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they'd probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep a device like that charged with a solar panel built into the case.

Such a device would have very little computing power compared to even a smartphone, but it could still be useful for a lot of things. Besides things like text editors or spreadsheets, you could replicate the functionality of the Wiki Reader and the Cybiko (imagine something like the Cybiko with LoRaWAN). You could maybe even keep a copy of Open Street Map on there, though I don't know how computationally expensive parsing its data format and displaying a map segment is.

There was a MacBook 12 inch like this that my business partner loved. It would last all day on a charge and he was building our app with it (Xcode and I think clang builds).

This was 10 years ago though.

Eight inches ought to be enough for anyone!

I can't imagine many people would find this a pleasant device to do any actual work on. Maybe writers on the go, as the author says, though with a dubious keyboard layout even that is questionable.

I remember my 9 inch "netbook." That thing was dope.

I'm down to see this form factor make a comeback, personally.

Urgh. Why do they always have to ramble about AI?

I remember having 10 inch netbook. It was okay for a while, but I would never want to go back to 10 inch display on a laptop. It's just horrible to use. 13 inches is ideal for me =)

My eeePC still works. Installed a touch screen. The battery and power adapter is long gone but it keeps on chugging with a random 12V power supply.

It looks pretty cute. But holy shit the mouse on that thing looks awful to use.

I used to travel a lot and didn't need a full sized laptop but did need something more powerful than a phone, this would have been perfect. I might get one anyways for transferring files on the go from my cameras.

I don't really see the point in low powered small devices like this, when something like an iPad/Galaxy Tab/eInk tablet is far better suited to the typical tasks you'd use them for.