Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life.
The first programming job I was ever paid for, I did a large part of dialed in through a modem over landlines. Emacs was fantastic for that! (Because it's an OS masquerading as an editor.)
For the first year or so of my job, I actually used a chromebook to SSH into my work desktop to do work remotely. (I'm a Googler and they were pushing new hires to try the chromebook over the more traditional macbook/thinkpad.) It was fantastic! The chromebook itself basically does nothing so the battery life is absurd, 10-12 hours easy. The chromebook starts up really fast because, again, the machine itself does almost nothing. It's certainly nothing like the portability or the stupid long battery life of a TRS-80, but it's a step in that direction.
I later swapped to a macbook because the chromebook kept dying. In that 1 year period, I went through 3 chromebooks, which all ran into some kind of memory corruption or thermally-induced restart issue. It was the HP 13 inch chromebook, which I will be avoiding like the plague in the future. I still really like the chromebook battery life and the general "very lightweight portal to the internet" kind of paradigm, though.
What were you using for an SSH client? I just started to try using a Chromebook for everything and I really dislike the Google SSH client, but I could probably get used to it.
A kind neighbor gave one to my kids. It had no games, so they were not really interested. I thought it was great! Super long battery life, great wifi reception with the external antennae, very ruggedized. It had some fork of Fedora iirc. I kept it in the van. There was a lot of free wifi in those days. Plenty good to ssh to a screen session while out-and-about.
The OS has a lot of limitations on doing local development work, but if you're connecting to a remote server you get a great quality screen and remarkably long battery life. Apple lists "Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music."
Keyboard has its own battery (default connection is bluetooth, you can use a USB-C cable if that's not reliable enough). It's not clear to me if it can use its battery to charge the iPad or not. Either way, you can always carry a USB-C battery pack to extend the iPad's life even further.
I have an iPad mini with a Microsoft folding keyboard that I rather like. I guess I could buy a really stout Otter case with my iPad mini and refresh the battery (getting old) and it would serve fairly well in that role.
The thing about the Model 100, was it was pretty robust. Not mil-spec, but pretty darn good for a consumer device. I've read about it being used by researchers someplace like Antarctica. iPads are pretty good that way, but they do feel like a luxury device.
I'd like to see more "consumer-level stout" devices. Give me plastic: much more robustness without added weight, and let me just not worry about knocking the thing around.
I actually like the "put a case on it" approach for robustness. It lets the devices be smaller, while leaving the degree of protection and bulkiness up to individual users. Case in point, I have a very slim case on my iPhone SE and tend not to drop it, but a lot of people I know with larger phones put the 2-layer rubber + plastic Otter style cases on them because they get dropped a lot. Others have smaller or no cases, but use pop-sockets and finger loops stuck on the back to make them grippable.
Apple's phones have turned into absurdly priced luxury items, but the $800 starting price for an 11" iPad Pro feels pretty reasonable for what it is.
EDIT - admittedly the hardware is overkill for running terminal sessions, something more like a Chromebook would be a cheaper fit if the battery life and screen were of similar quality
I wouldn't call a 10 hours battery life as an "endless battery life". On my ASUS Transformer Book T100, which is a full Windows 10 device, I had a battery life of about 10 hours and I didn't called that endless yet.
There's got to be a way...Basically just a pure ssh client, thats all, no OS, nothing else, just ssh on whatever most minimal cpu can run it, a keyboard, and a screen.
I guess it isn't considered important because we all have phones most likely charged, but still, it would be nice
I used an Acer C720 Chromebook as a remote terminal for quite some time. Eventually, though, I could no longer resist the urge to put a full blown Linux distro on it though :)
> highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life
Most chromebooks fit this bill nicely. Pixelbook is fantastic if you also want a premium hardware experience and native ability to run a linux environment locally.
> Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life.
Chromebooks suck. Just buy a cheap Windows laptop (and most recent models are going for the Chromebook-like "ultrabook" form factor anyway, even at the low end) and put lightweight Linux on it. You don't really get better specs for the price if you go the Chromebook route, and the whole way they're setup makes them pointless toys.
(...No, I'm not going to look for the correct custom firmware for whatever my model of Chromebook happens to be, or put up with a machine that will wipe its storage unless I hit the right key combo as it boots! Again, that's hardly a marker of a professionally-built device!)
No, for the stated purpose (an "instant on" portable remote terminal with long battery life), a Chromebook is far superior to a cheap windows laptop. The Chromebook will go from out of the box to fully configured in about 5 minutes. The cheap windows laptop will still be installing linux, and you'll be bashing your head against the wall trying to get the wifi to work because it's a weird chinese copy of a no-name device that has no linux or other open-source drivers.
I got my mother-in-law a chromebook 2+ years ago. Haven't had a single support call since then, until she came round to stay and wanted to connect to our wifi to watch netflix.
This didn't happen with a cheap windows laptop, and likely wouldn't have happened with a roll-your-own linux laptop.
A chromebook isn't for me, or you, but it's great for parents/inlaws.
If you need to manage a fleet of machines for tech-challenged staff, Chromebooks using the Chrome management license is quite amazing, if imperfect in some ways.
Set Kiosk-mode for all the machines and if a user has a problem, close the lid and open again, its working again.
Need everyone to have a new tab in the browser? Update in the management and boom, everyone has it.
Of course, the usage case assumes the users will do everything on the cloud using Chrome but that's surprisingly usable these days for non-tech users.
The license is really cheap for non profits (like $30) but is about $150 for regular businesses. It seems like quite an add-on for a $300 Chromebook but it really turns end-user computing fleet management into almost a set-it-and-forget it appliance.
The first programming job I was ever paid for, I did a large part of dialed in through a modem over landlines. Emacs was fantastic for that! (Because it's an OS masquerading as an editor.)