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
Same had a little acer mini laptop in early 2000s I used it for notes, office apps, etc during college and between the battery life and how much more portable it was than the giant laptop I had at the time it was great, it ran BSD without any fuss too.
There’s some talk somewhere else yesterday about how PC/laptop sales are tanking. It’s mostly because people don’t want “AI” computer.
Out of all the things in the past 20 years I miss - it was my netbook. It was amazing in college for me too.
Some say tablets killed the netbook, but there have been so many failed tablets that are not “iPad.” It’s a real gap in form factor and need
I loved my EEEPC. I used while study abroad before smartphones were common. It was great to carry on me at all times. If I needed directions or to check on a website I would sit at a café / restaurant / bar to have a coffee / wine / beer to grab the wifi. It was great and small enough that I could carry it open if needed. I loved it. I thought it was the future until the iPad took over
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.
If you have to carry a separate keyboard, it defeats the purpose of an 8" laptop…
I haaaate typing on a laptop, layout not withstanding.
Well, I carry a keyboard with my 17" laptop. Carrying a keyboard with a 8" laptop is that much easier.
Eight inches ought to be enough for anyone!
It was enough for yo mom ohhhhhhhh!
j/k
did her twice, huh?
I remember my 9 inch “netbook.” That thing was dope.
I’m down to see this form factor make a comeback, personally.
ASUS still makes netbooks.
I bought a little $200 model a few years ago. It weighs 9 oz.
I’m strongly hoping that the framework 12’’ becomes widely successful so that the format keeps being relevant.
Yeah, my favourite ever laptop. Would love to see the netbook return. Cheap and cheerful. Chromebooks just not the same
Chromebooks suck the nut, netbooks all the way
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.
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
Urgh. Why do they always have to ramble about AI?
I appreciated it, since he didn’t do a legit stress test. Running a local llm is intensive on the hardware, and if it performs well on that, it’ll likely perform well on most standard, non-useless tasks. So, I see that part as a makeshift stress test.
Right but all it’s testing is the hardware. The hardware would be the same if it was running Windows.
That’s all I want a stress test to test…
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 =)
Well, at least it’s 1920x1200 resolution. The old 10" netbooks mostly had 1024x600 which was terrible even by standards from 15 years ago.
I’ve got this little tablet…you know how so many people turn an iPad into a crappy laptop by adding a keyboard cover to it? Well Lenovo turned a laptop into a crappy iPad by making the hinge a floppy skin flap with a magnetic pogo pin connector. I intended it as a little computer I can use in the wood shop, I wanted something fanless and preferably with a removable keyboard so it wouldn’t be destroyed by sawdust that can run FreeCAD natively.
I’m not sure Linux is ready for tablets. FreeCAD is not ready for tablets or laptops, holy fuck it’s unusable without a 5 button mouse and a spaceball. I may have to distro hop a little on the thing because it likes to wake up with the keyboard attached, not recognize the keyboard, and stay permanently in portrait mode. So wake up the computer, rip the keyboard off, wait a second, reattach.
It’s kind of fuckpuke, tbh.
10 inch screen size isn’t a problem though. For a general laptop I’d want to go 13 inches but for something I’m mostly going to use as a tablet and then occasionally as a laptop 10 will do.
The library near me has a bunch of 3D printers people can rent time on, or maybe it’s based on filament used I’m not sure I’ve never actually used them.
At one point they had some surface tablets connected up to them so people could review their 3D prints or something, (again not my area of expertise), but apparently it was enough of an issue they eventually got rid of them and just replaced them with some desktops. It seems that the 3D design software just isn’t built for touch screen primary interfaces. They’ll work up to a point but then you’ll come up against something that you have to use a mouse and keyboard for and be stuck, so then you have to go get a mouse and keyboard.
I bet those tablets had their slicer software on them.
A 3D printer is a CNC machine, it doesn’t understand 3D model files, you have to give it a series of gantry movement instructions, usually in G-code format. G-code has to be written for the individual printer it’s being run on, because some of them consider the bottom left edge of the bed to be the origin, some the bottom right, some the center, you need to know the nozzle size, things like that. So you typically slice your model right before printing. And yeah I’m not really aware of any tablet friendly slicer software.
It sounds like the idea is to bring in your ready to print files and load them up and just use the Surface to review and send it to the printer via the slicer? A surface would be fine for that, especially since they support keyboards and mice.
14 here. Lenovo T-series life.
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.
“Upon picking it up, you can feel the metal chassis has a surprising amount of weight to it.”
A surprising amount of weight is exactly what I do not want to feel when picking up a micro laptop.
That being said, it’s just a little under the weight of the new 12“ surface pro. Pretty much any bag I have could easily fit a 12" laptop but I imagine it would be hard to get Linux to work well with the surface - especially the touch screen. Not to mention a pretty big price difference.
Either way, it’s nice to see more options for small laptops! Maybe in a few years someone will start making small phones again.
but I imagine it would be hard to get Linux to work well with the surface - especially the touch screen.
There’s a dedicated Linux kernel for Surface devices. Surfaces are your best bet for installing Linux out of any of the Windows tablets.
Neat. Like the other poster said I also have an old surface 4 I think that could really use a new life.
Thank you for this! My husband has an old surface and it’s getting slow as shit. Didn’t think there was a way to get Linux on it. Cheers!
I ended up falling into using a surface for my travel and it’s been surprisingly good. I have surface pro 7+, and it’s small enough to use on an airplane seat, has good battery life, a great screen, and can do some limited gaming. With an upgraded drive (1TB for $100) for movies and low end games it’s a great little computer. They also run for 200-400 dollars on eBay.
I use a Lenovo nano and haven’t looked back to my surface days. Has a touch screen and I really like it. Sounds like used surface market is good, but prices for new ones tend to be quite high. The 12 inch sounds really interesting to me though
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.
I had one of those but the tiny keyboard used to drive me nuts it was literally unusable.
Plus it was horrifically slow for everything. Even when new.
I had a 9" HP mini 2140– the keyboard was surprisingly good given its size.
It’s just a shame the build quality matched the price and they fell apart in short order.
But can it play doom 3?
It can play 20 separate instances of Doom 2.
It can play doom 40?
What they kind of eyes do you people have? I mean, my phone screen is smaller but I’m not doing stuff I would normally do on a desktop or full size laptop.
I had better than 20x20 vision when they gave us eye-tests in high school and I’ve often gotten, “Holy shit, you can read that from here?” I always chose screen space over font-size even on small laptops but I recently had to dial it back a notch for the first time. The optometrists come for us all, eventually.
My vision still seems fine but it takes longer to adjust and focus. Like I have a digital clock I used to glance at to check the time and now I have to squint for a few seconds and wait. It’s sort of like a phone camera auto-focus where it sorts things out but it used to be immediate.
That keyboard layout gave me a stroke. I’d rather relocate Enter than the apostrophe. I suppose that could be remapped…
It looks pretty cute. But holy shit the mouse on that thing looks awful to use.
