Laptops: A Romance
Sat 30 November 2024
As I wrote in yesterday's article, I have a soft spot in my heart for laptops. They exist in this incredibly sweet spot where convenience and agency/freedom converge in the very best way, possible. I bought my first laptop in 1995 with my very hard-earned money, but let's start just a little earlier:
My Laptops
1989 — Macintosh SE
My first laptop was decidedly not a laptop, per se. But what a lot of people don't realize about the classic all-in-one Macintoshes is that they were actually considered portable computers: You had the main unit which held the power supply, monitor (9" monochrome CRT), and the computer (CPU, RAM, ROM, Floppy drive(s) and on some models, hard disk), a keyboard, and mouse. The classic Macs required you to carry and plug in exactly two cables (power and keyboard) and a mouse. That was it. Apple even sold a canvas carrying case that held everything together nicely, and was padded.
While my Mac was stationary on my desk 99% of the time, I did lug it around occasionally. I took it with me to visit my aunt's house for a couple of weeks for the Christmas holiday around 1990, and I loved how easy it was to transport, even without the fancy canvas bag. I'd so love to be able to lug in a classic mac to a coffee shop, plug in, and start computing 1990-style like a true retrocomputing king, but alas, I gave away my old Mac a little over a decade ago. I remember setting it up in my aunt's office next to her 386 PC for a Christmas display: I did a color ASCII art Christmas Tree in GWBASIC on her 386, and a monochrome graphical Christmas Tree in HyperCard on my Mac. I also recall setting up my mac as a virtual fishbowl for a Noruz Sofreh a couple years later at my grandmother's house, using the fabled AfterDark screensaver as the goldfish.
1995 — Dell Latitude 433
The 433 was my first true laptop, and I got it at the Dell Factory Outlet in Austin after working my first real tech job (phone tech support) for a few months. It was one of the first, if not the first laptop Dell made after a hiatus of making laptops (since their 386 machines had a nasty habit of catching fire), and was a simple re-badge of a very popular AST model. It had a 9.7" grayscale passive-matrix LCD, 40 MB HDD and a 33 MHz 486 processor. The screen was pretty murky, but it got the job done, and it ran Windows 3.1 well. I carried it with joy to my college classes and remember experiencing my first ADHD hyperfocus where I sat down for hours at a friend's house and played with Visual Basic without any awareness of the time flying by. This was an old-style PC laptop, where the keyboard was flush to the front of the device, and there was dead space behind the keyboard. The trackball was tiny and on the front right side, and obviously not very enjoyable to use, but I didn't complain much. One of the big innovations that Apple brought to laptops was putting the dead space in front of the keyboard to serve as a wrist rest, and putting the pointing device in between where your thumbs go. This is how all laptops have been since the early 90s, and my Latitude was among the last of the clunky design.
1997 — Dell Latitude XPiCD
Two years later, I was working at Dell, and sunk some real change (again at the Dell Factory Outlet) on a very nice (at the time) machine: A Dell XPiCD with a glorious 800x600 full-color TFT (Active Matrix) LCD, a CD-ROM drive (ooo!), 2.1 GB Hard Disk, and a 166MHz Pentium MMX processor. This was a beautiful machine, and I wish I still had it. It ran Windows 95 most of the time, although I did briefly experiment with RedHat Linux 5.0 in 1997, but went back to Windows for three more years (as I couldn't get the full 800x600 video mode to work) until RedHat 6.2 came out in 2000, which worked perfectly (and I ran Linux on it full-time from that point on). This was my main computer until 2002, and my only laptop until 2008. For a 1990s machine, that's incredible longevity. It unfortunately was also given away when I gave away my Mac SE.
2008 — MacBook 4,1
Even though I hated the chiclet keyboard design (which infested nearly every laptop ever since), I had my eye on the iconic white plastic MacBook for a couple years. I finally felt like it was time to get one in April 2008, and my goodness, was it a pricey penny. Core 2 Duo ("Penryn"), 2 GiB RAM (upgraded to 4), 13.3" 1280x800 display, you know the drill. This was my main machine until late 2014, and I absolutely loved it. It was not a wise purchase by any stretch, only getting OS upgrades for three years, but I was proud to lug that plastic beastie around with me everywhere. This was, to me, the height of the Golden Era of Apple, and Mac OS X.
Sadly, the white plastic of this model was not particularly durable, and I ended up giving it to my cousin for an art lab around 2019. No major physical damage, but it was just in pretty poor shape, cosmetically, with the white plastic on the very top layer crumbling at the edges. It also had a bad incident with B.O. — I'm not sure, but someone with sweaty hands used it at some point when it was sitting out, and nothing could get rid of that smell. The plastic was incredibly porous.
2014 — MacBook Air 6,2
This was actually a gift from a family member when I was back in college in my 40s. It was a lot lighter than my 2008 MacBook, which was turning into a bit of a back-breaker, especially when I lugged the AC adapter along, as the battery wasn't quite up to snuff for a full day of computing at Uni. I really loved this machine, as it was arguably the nicest laptop I ever owned. It tragically met its end in the middle of 2019 in a tea-related accident. I ended up selling it for parts for a benjamin or two — a most ignoble end to a delightful machine.
2019 — Thinkpad X200t
In January 2019, I bought an old circa-2009 Thinkpad "just for writing." I had no intention of making it my main laptop. It was less than $100 with all of the random accessories I had to get for it. This clunky beauty was quickly named "falcon" after the Millennium Falcon, and I even got a lovely decal of the Millennium Falcon to stick on top of it. Like its namesake, it's old, kind of beat-up, but incredibly useful.
This machine was my "gateway drug" back into using Linux full-time. While I just intended to slap Linux onto it for writing, I became engrossed in using and learning about Linux, and have tried SO many different distros on it. You can read a little more about the history of this device here.
When my beloved MacBook Air died at the hands of a small cup of tea, this became my main computer for a while, and my main laptop for a number of years.
This old beast was already nine years old when I got it, and is nearly fifteen years old now, and is still used nearly every day for the purpose I intended it for: writing, and playing around with different FOSS operating systems.
2021 — Pinebook Pro
The Pinebook Pro is a very odd device. It's basically the internals of a 2017-era Chromebook dressed up as a dedicated Linux laptop. Its CPU is fairly underpowered (a little faster than a Raspberry Pi 4), the trackpad is atrocious, and the webcam is nearly useless. But the keyboard is nice to type on, the screen is a bright, beautiful 14" 1080p IPS panel, and it's crazy light.
I've used it nearly every day for the past three and a half years, and it's still one of my favorites, despite its quirks.
2024 — Thinkpad X260
This was my most recent laptop purchase, a 2016 model thinkpad. Looking back, I rather wish I had spent $20 more on one with a nicer screen (TN panels are very murky), but it definitely does the job. I started out playing with NetBSD on it, but at this point, it's running Debian and is my main laptop (when I'm not using my Pinebook Pro).
Category: Tech Tagged: ADHD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Life Linux Non-religious post Productivity Retrocomputing UNIX WritingMonth