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Ultra Streamlined Laptop for Writing... Just Writing

In a day and age where toasters have smart screens with dozens of 'features', I'm starting to become a bit nauseated with all of the feature bloat exploding into our lives. I'm now, more than ever, a fan of focused single utility products that accomplish their task in an optimized and elegant way.

In the spirit of the above, I'd love to build one of the simplest laptops ever made. It does one thing and does it well : write. I've seen a few attempts at this but they seem to be focused on creating a novelty item that's an homage to the typewriter. I'm more envisioning if a macbook air and a kindle had a baby. E-ink screen, keyboard, no mouse, and not a single other function than a word processor that uploads to cloud storage when connected to wifi. You open it up and it's ready to write. No folders, no separate documents, just one connected document that's always ready. Rough ingredients could look like :

  • Raspberry Pi?
  • E-ink screen
  • Ultra premium keyboard
  • Aluminum cover

The reason I think it would have a successful niche market is because writing has never been more important, but the tools we use to write have never been less focused. If you have an idea to flesh out, a longer email to draft, or a paper to make headway on, there isn't a good option for a totally distraction free writing tool ( no software tools don't solve this ).

I'm not a hardware guys nor have I written OS level code before, so I'm likely in over my head, but I'll still take a shot at cobbling a rough prototype together late December.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read through this!

on September 23, 2020
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    Chromebooks come close and you can get one for very cheap.

    It takes such a device 8-10 seconds for a cold boot, a couple to wake up after sleeping. Then you open a Chrome tab, open a Google Docs document, and start typing. To shave a few seconds off, leave a Google Docs tab open and change the browser's settings to save the configuration of windows and tabs across sections.

    1. 1

      Yes that's a great tip. The chromebook is definitely close, and with that approach it's even closer.