iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones – they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile.

– TeMPOraL on HN

Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows RT, thankfully that was a disaster. Certainly that’s one of the bad points about iOS and Android they are so locked down that you have to jump through hoops if you wanted to use them as a work machine. You have almost no access to the file system and you have to pay iPad pro levels of money to get the novelty of having windows side-by-side.

Netbooks are ridiculously useful, I used to have a 15 minute bus ride to work with a 12″ Asus EEE and would manage to fill that 15 minutes with active development time every day. The work I did on that bus became the frontend for what now 10 years later is a $50m company. On the other end of the scale I spent weeks with my then 7 year-old nephew creating stop-motion animations using the same netbook.

For my current job I bought myself a $350 refurbished Thinkpad (T430, 8GB RAM, SSD, core i5), this brings me in all my income. You can compare that to people that pay $1000 for an iPhone X because they get bored of their iPhone 8.

The possible drawback is that a Thinkpad doesn’t have a touchscreen. But with my experiment of buying a laptop with a touch screen I found I pretty much never wanted to use the touch screen, it’s a slower interface than keyboard and mouse. You want the screen in front of you at arms length but then you have to reach with your arm to touch the screen.

I bought exactly the same spec Thinkpad for my 5 year old daughter. The Thinkpad T-series are great because you can pour a litre of liquid over them without problem [0] plus they’re built like a brick, so basically perfect for kids. My daughter immediately covered the grey brick with shiny stickers and gave it a name, ‘Fiona’. In theory Fiona has the full capability to do everything my daughter will ever need for the rest of her school years; I don’t imagine a massive shift away from laptops in schools for the next 15 years. Further to that Fiona’s got Ubuntu installed and I can then install Sugar [1] on top (the same software used for One Laptop Per Child [4]).

I can now teach her over the years what it means to have real freedom with your software and hardware.

P.S. I posted an original version of this on HN [3]