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"It's a real Mac" - I get that!

I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.

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I thought I was so clever for buying one of those things for like $190 and putting Lubuntu on it to make it usable. It worked - but the joke was still on me when it died a year later.

I put macOS on one of those, back in the good old hackintosh days. My wife used it as her daily driver for years.

Oh i had one of those! The acer aspire one d250, with 1gb ram and 160gb of spinning rust.

Once i got Debian, fluxbox and emacs on it i was able to do java development (with ant and the j2me toolkit).

It was no big issue at all really, once you got linux on it.

I must say, however: the web was much lighter back in the day and electron was still to be conceived. That’s very relevant.


I used have a netbook as a second personal device around 2013 and loved it. Very easy to carry around and work on the go, and it could do everything except development work (web browsing, Word, Excel). I actually miss the form factor.

This is pretty much a repackaged M1 air from 2020, so it’s a competent machine

It's a repackaged iPhone 16. Also a competent machine.



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