[jmward01]

I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.

[nine_k]

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.

Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using).

Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.

[jpk]

> Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank.

This depends pretty heavily on your threat model. You're right that a device like this is exceedingly unlikely to get exploited by attackers casting a wide net against common vulnerabilities. But an attacker targeting you-in-particular would love to learn you've put ancient hardware and/or software on the network.

[bluGill]

Even if there are a lot of exploits on my Amiga (I don't own one, but work with me...), my value is likely low enough that it wouldn't be worth the cost to hack just me. If I was (or become) a major figure politically, militarily, or rich (maybe my 401k is that large - if you can get at it) it would be worth attacking me, but otherwise there are just not enough Amiga owners out there. Also you can expect someone with an Amiga is somewhat more likely than average to be protected - ransomware data and they restore from backups instead of pay. As such the value is exploiting Amiga is likely not high enough to be worth the cost.

[jpk]

Your entire comment is threat modeling, which is great! But it demonstrates my point: using an old, insecure thing is sometimes obscure enough to fly under the radar of one class of threats, but presents a juicy attack surface for another class of threats. And one's own personal risk for any given class of threats will vary depending on one's circumstances. So the parent comment's unqualified statement of, "security is not a consideration for such devices," isn't quite right.

[trollbridge]

The unique thing about an IBM PC compatible like this is that it has an absolutely massive library of software that will continue to work and be "supported".

[ericjenott]

You've touched on one of my favorite things about using this. There's so much software easily available for it that I could never even try it all even in 10 lifetimes. And it's easy to store too. For example, lets say the average program is 1MB. Then a tiny 128GB SD card could store somewhat more than 100,000 programs. Still not enough? This thing supports at least up to 512GB SD cards, which could hold something close to 500,000 1MB programs. I haven't tried 1TB yet. You can also store dozens of spare SD cards in the CPU compartment, so you can easily have more storage space and more software than you could ever use.

[ForOldHack]

i.e. The first picture you see of the machine is running Microsoft Flight Simulator. The First. They knew this was the standard for compatibility.

My question would be Jet by Sublogic, and ... most unfortunately Xenix x86. Which leads me to believe that... you need a very low power cMos CPU, to have that battery life.

There are 12Mhz Harris cMos 286s but they are collector items, and the next step is 486slcs, which may run Xenix 386 w/ TCP/IP stack, rather well.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1994/ERL-94-65....

[trollbridge]

It’s an ESP32. You can emulate any system you want.

Part of the point though is that emulating an original PC takes very little power. A 286 doesn’t get you much (who on earth wants to run a 286 OS)?

I could see a case for a 386/486 for running old DOS apps just so you have extra memory, but you could also simply port DOSBox-X to the ESP32 and do things that way.

[lawlessone]

yeah, yesterday we had a post where someone was running fully up to date linux on a Nintendo Wii

[idiotsecant]

There are a lot of 'forever devices' currently touching money in major financial institutions.

[bigfatkitten]

I spent a good chunk of my career in banking. I had many conversations to the effect of “see that RS/6000 in the corner of the network diagram? It processes $45bn in payments every day.”

[indycliff]

did you work at Chase too

[gtirloni]

Yea, and armies of engineers supporting them.

[bigfatkitten]

More often in my experience, it’s one or two greybeards who have been there for 30 years, and are the only two people still in the workforce (or still alive) who understand how it works.

[kstrauser]

That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.

[tlhunter]

In case you haven't seen this: https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-devterm

[redundantly]

This is not a suitable modern equivalent to the TRS-80 Model 100. It is much smaller and so uncomfortable to use. The arrow keys and trackball are well below subpar, and the software support isn't great.

[kstrauser]

Ouch. I'd had my eye on those before but hadn't heard reviews one way or the other. Those would be bummers.

[kstrauser]

I've drooled over those a few times. All of their models are out of stock right now, though, which makes me wonder if they're still making them.

[RodgerTheGreat]

How about the ZeroWriter Ink? https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink

The focus on the bundled firmware is word processing, but it's open-source and built around the popular ESP32 microcontroller family.

[kstrauser]

Wow, I love the looks of that. I have a Freewrite Alpha that's very similar at first glance, but it has a tiny LCD screen and isn't open source.

[multjoy]

And if you fancy making your own…

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

[carlosjobim]

> Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.

They rather put their phones in a drawer because the battery isn't good anymore.

[Retric]

I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done.

Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.

[binarymax]

Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates.

It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.

[EvanAnderson]

Same with my wife's original iPhone SE. The hardware is doing fine but she's being forced to "upgrade" because of software. It's galling.

[randmeerkat]

> A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.

I think you’re cool!

[simondotau]

“Galling” and yet the iPhone SE had legendary long software support, more than any phone which came before. Seven years might not seem remarkable now but back in 2017 it was rare for Android phones to get more than two years of software support, and often that was mostly security patches, plus one major OS upgrade if you were lucky.

[thesuitonym]

This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.

[cestith]

This has not been my experience with Motorola, unless you’re talking about OS major versions. With my last couple of phones I got several point versions and security patches for 3 or so years. It’s not my experience so far with my OnePlus phone either. Certainly I’ve seen phones that never updated from launch day, too, but I don’t think only Google and Samsung do updates.

[swiftcoder]

My less-techy relatives are routinely forced to upgrade because all of their apps drop support for their hardware.

I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.

My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.

[MiddleEndian]

I dumped my last phone, the Palm PVG100, because unwanted software updates made it too slow and ate up its battery life too quickly. It's too bad the PVG100 has the best form factor of any phone I've owned.

[tomcam]

Who… who was doing the updates?

[MiddleEndian]

The Google Play Store presumably lol (or however Google pushes updates onto Android devices)

I certainly never manually updated anything. Obviously certain services like Lyft or messaging apps are unlikely to work without updates, but there was no reason to change and slow down my texting or email apps, they've done the same shit since forever.

[tomrod]

Software and battery, I reckon, are the mobile phone arena's area for disruption.

[patapong]

I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.

Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?

[creshal]

> Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?

They got eaten by tablets. We used to have netbooks and subnotebooks, but they were too weak for mainline Windows after XP (perfectly adequate with Linux, tho), and there wasn't a clear path forward for them.

These days, iPads and Android convertibles with keyboard covers are reasonably okay for the use case, if you don't need full lap-top ergonomics (they definitely benefit from a proper table).

ARM-based laptops (Apple and otherwise) are slooowly closing that gap again, but you're "only" looking at ~20 hours battery life, last I checked. Which is still better than the last batch of subnotebooks ca. 2010, which needed like 3lbs of batteries to reach that same endurance with a dual-core 1GHz Core Duo and less RAM than your average modern tablet.

[Atheb]

Not a perfect solution but I've used an ipad with a magic keyboard for this exact purpose when travelling.

[KennyBlanken]

You don't need 50hr of battery life. If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind. Laptops these days use less than 10W in light usage and will run off anything with a USB power port.

This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...

[bigfatkitten]

> If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind.

Unless you're not, because you're using an LTE modem, or inflight wifi on an aircraft without in-seat power, or any of a number of other real world scenarios.

[hliyan]

On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

[creshal]

> whatever happened to netbooks?

Windows Vista and Windows 7 happened to them, and Android/iOS tablets happened to their target demographics.

And notebooks got much lighter and smaller on average, compared to the netbook era. You used to need a 14" or 15" notebook with an inch worth of screen bezel to get a "full-powered" CPU and enough RAM to have a reasonable desktop experience, plus an unwieldy docking station to have enough ports to wire it up to a work place; netbooks were tempting companions to that.

Today you can get a full desktop experience (and even some fairly high end graphics capabilities) with a 13" laptop that's smaller than 11" subnotebooks and ligher than most netbooks used to be, and can fit a full keyboard.

E.g., a modern Asus PX13 is about the size of an 11" Asus eeePC, and just as heavy… but it comes with a 24-core Ryzen CPU, 32 GiB RAM, and an RTX 4070. If I'm on the move, I can just take that, instead of buying a companion device, and if I'm in the office, I can connect it to multiple daisy-chained monitors with connected peripherals using a single USB-C cable. Other Windows vendors have similar offerings.

And that's just looking at direct equivalents; completely ignoring the Apple-sized ARM elephant in the room. The M series CPUs are nuts in terms of performance, but the battery life is comparable to netbooks.

> Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

For a while companies made ChromeOS tablets to fill the gap between notebooks and Android tablets, but the higher end Android tablets these days have cannibalized that market too. And "higher end" is relative; netbook prices (400-ish dollars) get you fairly capable 10"-ish tablets from multiple vendors, complete with precision stylus and keyboard/touchpad cover. That's big enough to get netbook-tier keyboards (which were never great, let's be honest), but small enough to fit in cargo pants pockets (very handy for air travel), and the battery life is measured in days.

[criddell]

What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device (not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one.

The closest things I've seen are the AlphaSmart Dana (discontinued), Apple eMate (discontinued) and the Freewrite line of devices.

I've thought about trying to make one myself from an Raspberry Pi, but those are not very low power and they seem to be tied to Linux (or at least I'm not aware of alternative operating systems).

[dflock]

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

[criddell]

That's pretty neat. It doesn't seem to hit the days or months of use on AA batteries constraint. That said, I didn't consider the ESP32 line of SBCs and now I'm looking into low power variants so thanks for pointing this out.

[Liftyee]

If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.

[criddell]

Those look great!

[RainyDayTmrw]

The industry got a lot better at making laptops thinner and screens bigger. Users liked thinner laptops with bigger screens.

[xaldir]

For a time it was a new market, full of potential growth. Then it got mature, every one who wanted one had one and given the nature of the device (low cost/low performance) it wouldn't need to be renewed for some time. Some manufacturers went upmarket (bigger and more powerful devices for more money) blurring the line with their entry level laptops. It wasn't a recognisable market segment any more. At some point, the market must have both shrunk too much and merged into other segments for anyone to care. Mobile devices ate their lunch too I guess.

[voidUpdate]

They're on eBay with absolutely cooked batteries lol. I bought an eepc for myself a while back, and a similar netbook recently for my partner, and while the batteries don't work very well, the netbooks themselves work alright with a lightweight Linux on them. I don't even bother with a desktop environment on mine.

I'm pretty sure the battery packs in both of them are just some 18650 in a trench coat, so at some point I'll probably attempt to replace them and hope I don't start a fire

[Cthulhu_]

You can still get netbooks or "small laptops" with 10-12" screens from Asus, Lenovo, etc. But they're not very good, definitely aimed at a budget market.

The next best thing is e.g. the Surface Laptop Go with 12.4" screens. Any higher and you have e.g. the Macbook Air.

But as another commenter pointed out, a tablet with stand / keyboard is likely the best alternative nowadays.

[bigfatkitten]

I had a Dell Latitude 2120 netbook for many years and I miss it. Small, decent display, good battery life, built like a bank vault. There’s nothing out there anymore with all of those properties.

[FranOntanaya]

It's tablet cases with bluetooth keyboard now.

[numpad0]

Killed UMPC, then killed by iPhone/iPad.

[ct0]

There are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.

[jmward01]

I'd love something ipad size with an attached keyboard/trackpad that did the very basics of compute but on a more modern stack. I think the biggest thing that would hold me back would likely be the slow refresh rate/no color in the display. I bet a setup like that with solar so is trickle charged could be built and have an effectively unlimited runtime. I wonder when high refresh rate/color e-ink like displays will finally make it?

[chii]

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality.

like paper? :D

[carlosjobim]

Ideal for any kind of outside jobs, including for taking restaurant orders on a sunny patio.

With a stylus and hand writing recognition, the waiter wouldn't have to walk through a selection tree, but instead simply write the order like it was a traditional piece of paper.

[themanofpow]

There is a community of people that have been making "writer-decks". It might be similar to what you are describing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/

[adolph]

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality

Just jailbreak your eink Kindle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969

[chneu]

Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.