Some of us (I assume OP is one of them) think that since your screen won't be large anyway, there is little point to having a screen bigger than your preferred keyboard size.

And since your battery won't be large enough to support compiling LLVM in reasonable time anyway, it's better to just get used to do CPU-heavy stuff by ssh-ing to a rackmount somewhere use the laptop for terminal-ish tasks.

But whose preferred keyboard size is this design?

I think the old Fujitsu Lifebooks with the ~16:9 screen size and the nearly full sized keys is probably about the size you want on one of these things.

If I'm standing in front of a rack, plugged into another box—which is the primary purpose of this little guy—I'm gonna be holding it with one hand and typing with the other.

In that scenario, I'd rather have a keyboard of this size than a full-size one.

Not quite my cup of tea, but I've watched people reach for their Psion PDAs all the time, even when they had large keyboards within reach.

Evidently some people can become friends with some very small keyboards.

I think the Sony VAIO P series would be a great admin notebook.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Vaio_P_series

They really do fit in a jeans pocket. It was really nice to take on vacation as an emergency computer. I wound up printing a proof of car insurance document from it. It had a problem with the mouse pointer cable getting loose though.

If your goal is a portable SSH client, even an original iPad mini with a bluetooth keyboard would be a better option than this thing.

Did you read the text? The goal is not a portable SSH client, but a sort of traveling admin's Swiss army knife device, hence relatively small size (but large enough to host a keyboard), and a lot of ports. Isn't it obvious that iPad cannot conform to the requirements?

Did you read the post I replied to?

> And since your battery won't be large enough to support compiling LLVM in reasonable time anyway, it's better to just get used to do CPU-heavy stuff by ssh-ing to a rackmount somewhere use the laptop for terminal-ish tasks.

Nothing about that comment says anything to support your arbitrary narrowing of the device purpose.

Well, it does, and my comment does start with IF your goal is....

If your goal IS NOT that, then clearly what I suggested isn't going to be applicable is it?

Indeed, it did seem totally inapplicable to the thread.

I wrote that. And the reason that I didn't go into connectivity/port issues is that they have almost nothing to do with battery lifetime. I saw no reason to digress into those topics.

I've been using iSH on the iPhone for my portable SSH client, it works pretty great for server maintenance even with the on-screen keyboard.

https://github.com/tbodt/ish

I use Prompt these days, but iSSH's Remote Desktop client was super useful back when I was doing admin work and didn't have the luxury of never needing to work on a Windows server!

As I recall, I also used its X server for remote display from an OpenGenera instance running on a Tru64 VM, back when I was still indulging my hobby for Lisp system archaeology, and network problems were stopping me displaying to the VM host's X server. Good times...

iphone lacks vital hardware, it has no keyboard.

lacking a keyboard is abysmal productivity vs being able to type and do key combinations.

try using stuff like vim/emacs or byobu/screen on an iphone, try to select and middle click to copy/paste, or any of the key combination we use all the time in the shell.

no keyboard = no go.

uhnn no?

Where is the serial ports etc

What is the purpose of a serial port, If your goal is a portable SSH client?

Plenty of enterprise grade hardware (I'm looking at Cisco) provide telnet access over a serial interface - which is dead handy when the thing is running but stops responding to SSH connections.

I guess it depends on how often you need to use the notebook standing besides some server while carrying the notebook in your hand. Or just move it around; take it out of the bag and put it back again..every day, sometimes multiple times.. Weight can start being annoying at some point.

FHD A5 screen size would not be eligible to me

This size and resolution Works for my smartphone well enough. And I don't think such a notebook is meant as a developers permanent workstation. Likely more a mobile terminal for the job on site or some short change on the go. For those things it's should be good enough.

> which is about half a letter

What oddly specific unit of measurement is this?

It's specific (US Letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size) ) - half of which is reasonaby close to A5, but I'm not sure why the "odd" qualifier.

I guess odd because it’s really only used in North America. I’ve never seen a piece of letter sized paper although I’ve heard of it (first after deciphering the weird PC LOAD LETTER error on HP laser printers which is extra confusing if you don’t realise that letter is a paper size).

Suddenly, after 25 years, that message makes sense! Thank you!

PC is Paper Cartridge, iirc.

It is almost the same as A4 paper.

And yet different enough to sometimes cause issues when they get mixed and matched (e.g. A4 document on Letter printer, or vice versa).

It's almost like a misaligned a4

Ah!

Unless you know about the particulars of US paper sizes, it sounds like they mean 'half the length of a letter that you might write to someone' which does sound odd. What letter? What about? My letters may be one paragraph or three pages.

One could also interpret it as referring to a letter of the alphabet, just to add to the confusion.

"US letter size" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size)

Letters are usually written on A4, if you fold that in half you get A5.

My mind also immediately went to the Homer.

the x250 is a really bad design, thinkpad after the x230 are getting worse to bad.