Hacker News Reader

Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

This feels like it's an unrealistic Christmas present list. By that I mean having a laptop with everything in this article would be absolutely amazing, but is it even possible to mass produce something like that, let alone even build the thing as a one-off?

What would a more realistic sysadmin notebook look like?

View on HN

The GPD MicroPC actually exists and is not too far off of this thing in terms of ports, sadly it lacks the trackpoint. Especially sad since GPD has already released a system with a trackpoint.

But the GPD Pocket have the trackpoint. There is also a Pocket 2 and a new one still on design.

Like a Macbook with a bag that has plenty of hubs and adapters and a Raspberry Pi in there just in case. Perhaps the middle ground would be a box with all the ports this design has that you can plug into a USB-C laptop or tablet.

The Surface has a "hub" but it's not nearly as powerful, and already in the $199 margin (Surface Dock).

I'd vote for getting a disposable laptop with good enough hardware to do most sysadmin things. A 2006/7/8 macbook isn't a bad choice IMO since it has all the standard ports. It supports two disk drives and the keyboard works OK.

If you poke around you can usually get one in the $20-40 range. No USB-C or large processing power, but if you're mostly networking into other computers it shouldn't really be a bottleneck, right?

I dunno. The market for something along these lines is probably as big as a substantial portion of the entire portable computer market was in, say, the late 90s. And it'd have basically no competition (at least at launch). Seems like it should be a viable product that could be brought to market at a non-insane price. Should.

Capitalism's weird. We end up with the most popular version of a thing being dirt cheap and common as air, and anything even slightly different or better being impossible to get or absurdly expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com