Adventures with my laptops
I have had a liking for cheap, small laptops for years. They used to be called netbooks; they may also be dismissively called craptops. Unfortunately, that's not what I always wind up buying.
Here are notes on some laptops that I liked enough to buy, as reminders why I shouldn't have bought them.
- 2022 Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) M15
- intended to be a no-hassles quality workhorse. Not working out that way.
- 2021 Ollee snowbook
- decent keyboard and decent screen resolution; promising. Slow, but light for travel, and for typing.
- 2014 Asus F102BA
- lots of ports thanks to being designed in a transitional period, but, really, still a little too slow, with a keyboard that is a little too cramped, and a screen a little too small that could have been much bigger and would have still fitted into the case.
- 2009 Toshiba Satellite
- The last time I bought a quality workhorse should have been the last time I bought a quality workhorse.
- 2007 Apple MacBook
- My very first own laptop, after years of work IBM ThinkPads, and years of clunky Mac desktops.
Those old Atom netbooks running XP Home limited to 1024x600 displays by Intel
really were junk, and it's taken a few years for the category to improve to offer utility.
But Microsoft is still dictating what the market offers with Windows installed by setting pricing rules. Wasn't there some sort of antitrust against this sort of thing?
We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk
-- Steve Jobs, earnings call, 21 October 2008.