My main workstation is an i5 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and 512 gigs of storage I dock with a 27 inch monitor. I'm fortunate enough to have this machine. It's easy to take home, but it's a pain to undock it just to take a machine over to the data center or drag to a meeting.
I've been using an old 13 inch MacBook Air that I think is 5 years old. 4 gigs of RAM and a C2D processor. It's ancient, but it runs ssh and a web browser amazingly well.
It's totally luxurious to have two laptops but when you have everything open on your main laptop its annoying to have to unplug everything and close everything.
Well the trusty ancient MacBook Air died, and I thought I was out of luck, but I was told I could spend about a grand to get a replacement secondary device. It's not on the computer replacement cycle like my normal MacBook Pro (which is replaced every 3 years) so this basically doesn't exist. Lucky me.
So I started looking at options. I could do a Surface Pro 4 with keyboard cover (it'd have to be a lower config). It's Windows which kind of makes me laugh but I'm semi considering it. Any thoughts on this? I'd have to depend on putty but it'd run Chrome or Firefox just fine. X11 kinda sucks on Windows. The config I would get probably isn't beefy enough to run VMs.
I could get an 11 inch MacBook Air with kind of shitty specs and hit that price point. Seems kind of silly to have two Macs.
It'd be nice to have a Linux machine but weirdly I can't find a cheap small, enterprise class laptop like an 11 inch MacBook Air. I suppose I could get the 11 MBA and put linux on it...
I could get a low end Dell XPS 13 and put Linux on it. Weirdly Dell doesn't seem to be selling the developer edition anymore. Our Developers at work tried to get these as their main workstation and Dell would not sell it to them. Dell would only sell a Windows version.
Most cheap PC laptops (that you'd find at Best Buy) are absolute crap so I don't want those. Yes they're like 499 but no they're not good machines.
An iPad and keyboard is not an option. I personally own an iPad and tried both ServerAuditor and iSSH on it, and I hate iOS. I want to be able to have a browser and ssh window open at the same time and can't do that on iOS very well. I want to be able to use a mouse. Can't do that either. Simple things like copying and pasting stuff from an email to an SSH window is torture. iOS is not an option.
I could maybe do a ChromeBook but they seem like they're cheaply made and I'm not sure I want to use something that is a hack to run Linux.
I'm basically looking for something small enough to carry around a lot. Don't really care about the operating system that much. It will be my secondary computer.
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