> Reducing power draw becomes increasingly harder as you go down the scale.
Surely the state of the art is orders of magnitude better than in 1983? Or rather late 1970's because much of the computer was using tech that was already aging.
If it could run for a year off a pair of AA batteries that you can buy in literally any country in the world, who needs more battery power or weight? Or are you saying a cheap modern low-power CPU + ePaper display gets you there?
More compute and RAM comes for free, but it certainly isn't necessary. That exact machine with a USB-C port for network or external storage would still be useful today.
The last time I was looking into this, one of the more difficult parts was the keyboard. Wired keyboards seem to assume abundant power and often consume 0.25 watts at idle. Low energy bluetooth keyboards are designed with power consumption in mind and use significantly less than that. But it would be insane to install a bluetooth keyboard into a slab computer...
Surely the state of the art is orders of magnitude better than in 1983? Or rather late 1970's because much of the computer was using tech that was already aging.
If it could run for a year off a pair of AA batteries that you can buy in literally any country in the world, who needs more battery power or weight? Or are you saying a cheap modern low-power CPU + ePaper display gets you there?
More compute and RAM comes for free, but it certainly isn't necessary. That exact machine with a USB-C port for network or external storage would still be useful today.
The last time I was looking into this, one of the more difficult parts was the keyboard. Wired keyboards seem to assume abundant power and often consume 0.25 watts at idle. Low energy bluetooth keyboards are designed with power consumption in mind and use significantly less than that. But it would be insane to install a bluetooth keyboard into a slab computer...