On the Pleasure of Small Machines/Laptops

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For a while I had a mac book air and I used it for everything. I saw the mac book air as the machine to use for everything except for video editing. That’s what the mac book pro was for. Eventually I sold the Mac Book Air and then I took the MBP to an event and it was stolen and I found myself without a machine.

I regretted selling the mac book air then, because if I had kept the mac book air then I would not have taken the MBP and it would not have been stolen.

I have looked for cheap, low cost machines recently because I wanted to get a linux box to play with. As it is just to do some simple things I don’t need a top of the range machine. I came across the Acer Chromebook 311 so I decided to play with this machine.

So far I have tried chrome, gmail, the play store, and I took a few minutes to install atom.io, connect it to github and download a repository. I have not written code with this machine yet, but so far writing a blog post is fine. The machine is fast enough and the keyboard is comfortable.

The machine has twenty gigs of storage and it is connected to Google drive so I have plenty of storage. It has two USB c ports and two standard usb ports. These are one of each type on each side. Although internal storage is small it is easy to expand with external disks and drives.

In theory you can monitor aranet devices via the laptop but as my mobile phone and aranet devices are already paired it was buggy. If you pair them then I expect the interactivity to be flawless.

I chose this device for three reasons. The first is that it is the cheapest device they had. The second is that it was available the soonest. The third reason is that it is always good to have a light, portable machine, from which you can work and do things. This machine is easy to put in most bags, take to an event, use, and then return home. With a 15″ machine that is not possible. It gets heavy, fast. When my laptop was stolen a few years ago I had broken my own rule. Never take what you’re not ready to carry at all times, to a conference or event.

I am now at the end of this blog post and the keyboard was fine to type with. It’s quick and intuitive. No hunting and pecking, and few typos. This is a nice, and yet cheap machine. Better than the EEEpc and other options I played with in the past. This cheap machine is usable. I am happy with this purchase.