When I was but a wee little Wirehead, I got myself a 486 laptop for high school to take notes on.
Yes, a 486. I was in the high school class of 1997 and it wasn’t normal for kids to have a laptop at that point in time. Now, I hear, all the kids have one.
The thing is, a 486 has quite enough processing power to keep up with what I was doing — taking notes in uEmacs.
The 486 died in college, at which point I picked up a Sony laptop to replace it. Eventually the Sony laptop’s hinge broke and I kinda realized I wasn’t using the laptop anyway. And ever since 2001, I’ve had a laptop provided from work, but I’m not very keen on doing my personal stuff on a work laptop.
I’ve had the longstanding fantasy of having a laptop-ish form factored computer that had a battery life measured in days, was compact, and was cheap. I almost have that with my Motorola Q. Many blog postings of mine are composed on it. But the keyboard’s not too big and it’s probably going to kill my thumbs one day.
For some reason, the idea of going to Golden Gate Park to write the Great American Novel and not having to buy ten battery packs or use a very long extension cord appeals to me.
So it was with great interest that I read about the Asus Eee, which gets awful close — it only has 3 hours or so of battery life.
The 4 gigs of flash disk doesn’t really disturb me in any real way, because I do the bulk of my intellectual efforts either via the web or on my desktop, so the intended use cases would be:
- Edit my web content stuff (wikis, blogs, etc)
- SSH over to my server to hack
- Surf the web and generally waste time
Of course, at this very moment, I have other, better things to spend money on and can make do with my Motorola Q for the time being. But I can still have geek lust, can’t I?