Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
Man, I had one of those. And I hated every minute with it.
It was, by far, the slowest "modern" computer I ever used, and I legit do not miss the whole netbook thing with slow-ass atom CPUs and the world's slowest hard drives.
(They probably would have been far less awful with a more modern SSD option, but well, that wasn't a thing soooo....)
The 12" MacBook was more or less a revival of this, but with actually fairly good hardware vs the cheapest shit they could slap together.
One of those machines, but with an iPhone CPU (not even the full M1) would be killer. Outstanding battery life, more than enough horsepower to casually browse the web, and well I guess that's it. If only the modern web wasn't so hideously bloated.
I don't think you'd need to use an A-series SOC, considering the power usage of even a M4 is basically a rounding error - and they've already got M-series stuff running passively jammed into a tiny case anyways.
I'd be on something like that immediately, but I somehow doubt Apple will ever make a 12" Macbook ever again, given that the majority of people seem to like the 13" airs just fine.
Love to be wrong, though.
The M1 going full tilt will use 35+ watts, vs like the A15 which I think people guess is limited to around 7 watts. I have a 10th gen and it gets outstanding battery life doing basically anything. Meanwhile the M1 powered iPads can actually drain pretty quickly. The CPU is efficient compared to a core i9, but 30 watts in a tablet is a lot for their battery.
But the latest phone CPU constrained to say sub 10 watts would last an insane amount of time on even the smallest battery you'd put in a tablet/keyboard glued to a tablet running Mac OS. I get 10-15 hours of battery life on my M1 MBP, and most of the time I don't really need all that performance. If I could double that that would be insane.
Oh yeah? When I were a lad we didn't have netbooks with them fancy Atom chips with their la-de-da x86 ISAs.
We made do with the psion netbook.
(I didn't have one)
I still have one!
It's broken because it was designed by crazy people.
(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven't been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that's like 30 years old now.)
Hah! I didn't expect anyone to know the psion one!
I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.
The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.
I still have one, too! Found for $3 at a flea market because the HDD is going bad... and I can't find a ZIF adapter that recognizes anything I plug into it. HP = custom pinout on the ZIF ribbon?
I used one of these throughout uni. Was great for fitting on small "tables" in lecture halls and you could throw it in your bag without worrying about it. Speed was not its strength...
i looooved the netbooks. they were perfect for my use case
I had an Asus eeepc, forgot which one though. Had some shitty Nvidia card that was making the fan run non-stop in Linux. Had to completely shut it off with some strange command line magic.
they were really great for running kali on and crackin local wifi. i didnt pay for internet for years
Same, shame really, had tablets not decimated that market segment they probably would have been fantastic with modern hardware lol
I had one of the early EEE PCs that came with XP. However, I replaced the OS with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was really great.
Really wish netbooks would make a return.
I loved that formfactor
I had an HP mini 110, which was a windows 7 basic netbook. My girlfriend (now wife) bought it for me during our senior year of high school. It was my first Linux machine (Ubuntu 11.10 netbook remix) and introduced me to the joys of trying to get unsupported Broadcom network cards to function.
That laptop also carried me through my first two years of pre-med before transitioning to software engineering.
Unfortunately, one day it decided to just turn off and never come back. That was one of the jankiest machines I ever had, and may have been my favorite computer I ever owned. I took it everywhere with me for 3 years.