On thinking machines

Something I've been thinking a lot about is, what makes a computer useful for thinking? Specifically, I want a machine that is set up to write exploratory code¹ and write in my notebook. Some characteristics of a good thinking machine are that it should

1. Have a decent battery life. I'd say at least 4 hours, but really, 8-12 hours is the sweet spot.
2. Be quite portable. I really like my old Lenovo N100 (though it fails on the next point), but ideally for a laptop it would be a 12.5-14" screen. I want to throw it in a small bag (e.g. a Mk VII gas mask bag²) and not worry about it.
3. It must be easy to type on. I liked my old Acer C720 (which I ran NixOS on), but the keyboard being a Chromebook keyboard was garbage. Likewise, the N100's keyboard was cramped. The Thinkpads generally have the best portable keyboard experience.
4. It must be relatively durable. It's meant to be taken into the world and used, so it should stand up to some real-world use. Call it street computability, if you will.
5. For right now, at least, I want to do emacs and common lisp on this machine. This puts a qualitative limit on the systems that can be used. While I would love a uLisp handheld (e.g. built on the PicoCalc³), that's not realistic right now.
6. It should be inexpensive: this system is an additional system on top of my "EDC" system. I'm not willing to pay more than about $300 based on current finances for this.
7. It's an ancilliary system, so it needs to quiet: there should be only enough software on there to write code, docs, and notes; and also to publish said writing. We'll call this attribute focus. It really means, this system is well-suited to being focused only on these tasks. There shouldn't be notifications or pings or what have you.

With this in mind, let's consider some examples:

• titan is my 14" Macbook Pro. It is an incredible machine, with 128G of memory and 8T of SSD. However, the battery is only about 4 hours and was incredibly expensive for a laptop⁴. It's an Apple system, tied into the same account as my phone, and is incredibly noisy. There are tools for this, but it's easy to miss.
• I've been looking at the Framework 12. I can't speak to the battery life per-se, but the life on my old Framework 13 was somewhere in the 4-8h range. The keyboard was acceptable, nothing remarkable, and it was durable. It was fairly expensive, though.
• imladris is my Thinkpad X1. The specs are something like 512G of disk and 16G of memory and an i7, and the battery life is long enough that I'm surprised when it runs out. It cost me $319.71 for this machine.
• hosaka is my uConsole. It has 4GB of memory, an SD card (16GB right now, but to be upgraded), an A06 processor. It's not performant, but at least half, if not most, of my org notes have been written on this. It has tailscale installed, so I use a database installed on a LAN machine (an Intel NUC). Once I upgrade, I'll have a 256G SD. Right now, the 16GB drive is fine. I got it for free through a friend swap⁵, It's $195 right now on Clockwork Pi's site, though.

Let's score them on our systems, with 0 being no, 1 being maybe, and 2 being a yes. A score of zero in any category will effectively disqualify a machine for consideration.

System	Batt	Portability	KBD	Durability	Perf.	Cost	Focus	Score
titan	0	2	1	1	2	0	0	4
FW12	1	2	1	2	2	0	2	10
imladris	2	1	2	2	2	2	2	13
hosaka	2	2	1	2	2	2	2	13

The clear winners heere are imladris and hosaka are the clear winners. Which… echoes my experience. A perfect score is probably impossible, as can be seen in the difference between the two: the uConsole is far more portable at the expense of a less pleasant (but perfectly usable) keyboard.

I'll say, roughly speaking, it's a 50-40-10 split (hosaka, imladris, titan) between contributing to my org site. I've gotten a ton of mileage from hosaka; it's pretty much my companion computer at this point. Sometimes the extra real estate (screen and keyboard) of imladris is worth it.