17 years ago, Steve Jobs stood on stage with a manila envelope in his hand and pulled out a laptop. At that time, mini-laptops called netbook were very popular, and the first Macbook Air had far superior features in every way.
I had a Lenovo IdeaPad S10e. If I remember correctly, the screen resolution was 1378x768, but it was good enough for me. It fit in my small bag, it was light, and I could open it up and even use it on the food tray on my long bus rides.
Now we have stronger CPUs, faster read and write speeds on storages, thinner bezels, longer-lasting batteries, etc. But I always missed that tiny size. I don’t care about extra wide displays, I don’t care about mechanical keyboards, I don’t want to see more things on my desk than a tiny laptop. Maybe a phone and a wired headphone like Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro, and of course a good internet connection could be enough for me to do all my work.
I have always dreamed of laptops as clients for remote workstations. 17 years ago, uninterrupted Internet connectivity was a distant dream. But now we are very close. I also think that instead of carrying around powerful machines for AI all the time, we will need more self-hosted servers at home. A monster machine in our homes and a tiny laptop that connects to it..
I already wrote a blog post about my setup, but I tried using a tablet instead of a laptop. Unfortunately, the results were disappointing. Of course it is important for a laptop to have good specifications, but in my opinion the best laptop could be an A4-sized Macbook Air.
Or a Macbook Mini..
Thanks to Santiago for being the inspiration for this blog post.