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Comment by WesolyKubeczek | Hacker News Reader

The memo initially said to design a 7" screen laptop, but the " character got lost in communication.

This is how this monstrosity was born.

Funny you should say that. I'm a blind screen reader user, and assumed this was some new 7-inch laptop. Since I don't need a huge screen, I'm always on the lookout for small, performant laptops. Seems this one is anything but. :) Glad I read the comments first.

One Mix Yoga 2S.

It's the smallest non-Atom, non-eMMC laptop. It's basically a 2018 Macbook Air folded in half both directions.

My god, the keyboard on that thing is hideous!

As I mention elsewhere, it's an emergency laptop for me. I am more or less constantly on pager duty but I only get paged like twice a year or so, thus the keyboard gets used perhaps two hours a year or less. It's good enough for that. Forcing me to slow down my typing in those situations is actually a boon.

For a blind user though, it could be a challenge, is all.

they have that too...

https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/

I'm curious how well the new Raspberry Pi 400 could be adapted as an effective screen-reader–optimized portable computer. No need to waste weight and battery power on the display.

A manager left a note for another manager to pay me .25 hours of overtime. I received 25 hours of OT pay. That's why you lead decimals with a zero. (I reported the discrepancy which is how I found out.)

I seem to remember about 10 years ago or so, when that kind of tiny 7-10" laptop was briefly popular. I don't know exactly how the marketing went, but I imagine it was positioned as "your on the go device for when your phone isn't enough." Or, maybe it was kind of like a "super PDA."

Who knows? I hated them. Never bought one.

I bought a Dell Mini 7 refurbished in high school to play with and it was an interesting device. I actually dusted it off just last week while talking to a coworker about how he got into iOS development on a hackintosh and I remembered that I had loaded OS X (now macOS) onto my Dell Mini. It still boots and is a trip to play with. My parents used it for a year or two to iChat video chat (this was before facetime) with me when I went to college (with a real Macbook).

I was in college around that time and I was very intrigued by the Dell Mini 7. I finally ended up with an HP Mini 1000, that ended up being a great little device too. I never did anything cool with it like make a Hackintosh, I just liked the nostalgia.

I had the Toshiba AC100 "smartbook", one of the first and few Android netbooks... Even after overclocking the shit out of its Tegra 2, it's still slow as hell, mostly because of the low RAM and slow internal storage and SD card controller (swap just doesn't cut it). But the keyboard was really nice.

Probably netbooks. I have a...I think 9.7" netbook from ASUS I bought for grad school that was quite frankly one of the best pieces of personal electronics I've ever purchased and served me for years.

It had a (for the time) a large 250GB hard drive, ran Windows 7 and pretty much everything you could think of available for Windows at the time (at least everything needed for a grad program). I ran Cygwin, putty, all of MS-Office, yED, did some Python stuff on it, some Protégé modeling, lots of research and websurfing. On downtime I watched movies, and played some light games on it.

720p screen, some USB ports, a usable keyboard, SD-card slot, VGA out, hard-line networking and wifi and decent battery life. It cost ~$350 and went around the world with me at least a dozen times as a photographer's computer -- still works just fine except the battery is fried. Dump the SD card from the camera into it and preview photos, do some minor editing and color correcting. It's not fast, but better than the camera and kept my entire kit down to a small sling bag so I could shoot on the go and keep my entire "studio" on me at all times.

My only complaint was I wish it had a bit more RAM and CPU power. But for something the size of a large paperback book it absolutely rocked.

Fun story, my wife launched her startup right after grad school and it was in a kind of testing phase. Things looked kind of settled for a while and we had a vacation overseas planned so we went. When we arrived she received an automated notice that her VMs were maxing out, which made no sense as nobody was really using the service. We brought that netbook with us to a coffee shop in Rome that had free wi-fi, downloaded the Google App Engine dev tools (including Eclipse!) and she was able to save her company right when it was picked up by some news agencies and was getting slammed with users, but needed more VMs allocated to scale out.

I've hoarded those computers and have 4 of them in the barn.

I loved my mini laptop in middle school. I could carry it around in my pockets and get a full computer.

Even I have a very lightweight 13" notebook, I searched something smaller and bought a 10" from Lenovo (with "just enough power for the moment"). It was the smallest I could find around here. I would liked even something more small, but couldn't find something around here sadly. Before 2000 I used an Psion 5. I was a cool thing.

There are some really small sub-netbooks around with features on par with bigger laptops, search for "GPD micro pc".

The original series of Macbook Airs seemed to be inspired be Netbooks as well.

It's a pity the small (10 and 11 inch) Macbooks seem to have gone.

I purchased a Chuwi minibook last year. I have a lot of complaints about the device but I don't think the form factor would be one of them (although the usefulness is very situational)

Anyone remember the Zeos Pocket PC? Had a usable, slightly-smaller keyboard. Ate AA batteries pretty fast, iirc.

http://oldcomputers.net/zeos-ppc.html

even before 'netbooks' existed there were much earlier attempts at very tiny laptops with 70-80% size keyboards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto

I had one of those! The Libretto 70CT shown in the Wikipedia photo. Loved that little thing, right up until the screen failed.

I think it sparked my love of tiny computers, which I have far too many of today.

I had an 8" or so laptop that was wonderful. Perfect size for travelling, and since it was a proper x86 running normal Windows it ran normal software and old games worked perfectly. Nowadays there isn't enough that my phone doesn't do to justify carrying a second device, but at the time it was brilliant.

I have a One Mix Yoga 2S from 2018 and it's amazing for the emergency laptop purposes. BC we used to go out and I needed to carry a backpack large enough for a 14" laptop because I am on call pretty much permanently (but then again it's like I get paged twice a year, tops) and now I can just carry https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn

Probably replaced by tablets with external keyboards?

So, kind of the reverse of the Stonehenge gag from This Is Spinal Tap.

Inspired by Jurassic Park’s tar spitting Dilophosaurus

Hydra would have been a better name.

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