[drum55]

I miss my Sony Vaio P series which fitted in a similar sort of niche, the cellphone radio made it just by far the best laptop I've ever used. Modern laptops don't seem to have provision for a LTE/5G radio which always confuses me a bit, in this form factor it would be ideal. I'm surprised nobody has cloned this actually, with phone screens being the right aspect ratio it seems obvious.

https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/10/03/9f923860-4b47-11e4-b6...

[jauntywundrkind]

I got Vaio P many years after the fact and it was so neat. Alas, the PowerVR gpu Intel included on many of the chips there is quite quite problematic for anything but basic use. Although it just saw more work recently! https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-GMA500-Driver-In-2026

I think it was a year or two latter I got a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3, which was a great machine. Lovely 3:2 screen off the Surface Pro, again a pretty good Intel small-core set-up, decent ram, ok SSD, all so cheap. Great metal case. Lovely machine, at such a great price. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Chuwi-LapBook-12-3-Celeron-2K-...

[drum55]

I somehow managed to get it working in 2016 with a lot of hackery, I'd still have it as a usable device if the weird little pouch cells it had didn't die, repacking those batteries seemed like enough of a fire hazard I just didn't bother.

[DANmode]

Stuff like this that I’ve really enjoyed has gotten permanent AC or portable power.

[djfergus]

Wow. Have to respect someone spending time on the GMA500. It was terrible when new, I recall Ubuntu being barely able to render desktop without lag. Windows was better but still unpleasant. The vaio p’s odd screen aspect ratio was also a challenge.

I’d love to see someone retrofit a modern soc into the vaio p motherboard form factor. There were a few partial efforts on GitHub but seems like Sony’s miniaturisation skills remain undefeated.

[alexisread]

Not quite the same thing, but you can build a similar thing to run linux relatively easily, and the keyboards can be really good that way. You can swap out the SBC for one of your choice eg. https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-iota (why don't AMD do small SBCs?) and cut a space on the left/right hand side for a trackpoint/optical trackpad (operate from the side)

https://github.com/penk/penkesu

[nine_k]

Modern laptops either have an LTE modem integrated into the general wireless chip, or have a short m.2 slot for a modem card.

My T14 has even a dedicated slot for a SIM card.

[drum55]

I had a thinkpad at one point that had a slot, but because it wasn't optioned for it you had to patch the BIOS or it wouldn't boot with anything in the slot, it seemed so hostile as to be worthless.

[dlcarrier]

I'm on an X1 Yoga, and it has a SIM card slot and antennas, so it just requires an m.2 modem to get going.

At least with Lenovo laptops, that is very common. You con't need to order the laptop with a radio; it can be easily upgraded.

[Marsymars]

Probably a lot of people who care about this niche just get an iPad. (Which is what I've done - 5G iPad is great for travel - if I need something with a real OS, it waits until I'm home.)

[ai_fry_ur_brain]

Its also very useful to have an 5G connection for CGNAT for various reasons, for me its very useful for web scraping to avoid WAFs and rate limits. Currently you have to proxy through your phone, use a 5G base station (although these use static IPs often) or pay $6.00 a gb for mobile proxy bandwidth. Having a 5G connection on a laptop would be clutch, and is definately a priority of mine on my next laptop.

[Octoth0rpe]

we're probably only a year or two out from LTE/5g being an option on Apple laptops, and I can see a bunch of other manufacturers jumping in a year after that to claim parity.

(Note: My estimate on this is purely based on Apple implementing/expanding the use of their own cell modems, which also includes their wifi chip. It seems logical that they would quickly adopt the same chip for wifi in their laptops, thusly getting LTE/5g 'for free'. Definitely no insider knowledge on this)

[drum55]

There's actually a known prototype MacBook Pro from 2006 with a cellphone radio, and the release MacBook Pros from the time all have a weird looking area near the battery and RAM where the SIM slot was supposed to be, and some leftover parts for the goofy little extendable antenna on the screen. Hopefully they end up doing it.

https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-m...