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MiniPCs, portable monitors?
Hello, it’s midnight where I am and I fell into a rabbit hole of MiniPCs and portable monitors.
I work from home with the occasional max once a month summon to office. I travel a lot and I ended up wondering if a MiniPC like Geekom would be for me.
I currently have a ThinkPad but I have an external keyboard, mouse, monitor, speaker and webcam at home. I only ever use the actual laptop parts when I am on a train or traveling. Which is also a pity because the laptop is heavy for me.
Anyway, does anyone travel with a MiniPC / monitor combo? I would love to hear your experiences and advice and maybe some obvious and not-so-obvious pros and cons that you can share.
I work in IT, and have plenty of miniPCs in deployment. They have their use cases, but IMO if a laptop is heavy for you, you aren't going to be happier or lighter in burden with a miniPC/monitor combo, especially if you also have to carry all the assorted cabling/power bricks.
There are, however, lots of ultralight laptops that are great, and that is the direction I'd look in to.
Now that you've mentioned it I think part of the problem with me is that I bring the laptop + external keyboard/mouse combo + the assorted cable and bricks.
Ultralight laptops are indeed great and I had one before this current one. One part broke and it was almost impossible to have it repaired so I was hoping to have something easily repairable. And that's part of the dilemma. And I understand that there may not be one thing that checks all the boxes.
For the too heavy problem, maybe the solution is to just go to the gym more often lol.
In any case, thank you for the insight! Brought a lot of things into perspective.
Maybe you would be interested in a surface pro style device? I have had one in the past, and I convinced my mom to get one. They are pretty fantastic. If I wasn’t all in on macOS, I would probably have one still. If you are going to be using an external keyboard and mouse anyway, you don’t have to have the extra space/weight/etc for the keyboard attached to the screen.
I just want to toss the info here even if it may not be useful for you specifically.
There are many LCDs for Raspberry Pi that use HDMI input and run off of 5V USB. Some of them even have touchscreen.
Eve if it may not be for you and your usecase, these can easily be as second monitors to, well, monitor PC temperatures, disk space, fan speeds, whatever even on desktop PC. Streamers can probably use them for monitoring their own streams or have OBS running on them. They cost from like 20€ to maybe even 200€ depending on if they are small/big, touschscreen, encased or bare...
Does your office offer you all the accessories you'll need to run that computer? Because otherwise it seems like things would be much more complex, bulky, and less reliable as a result. A laptop seems like the most obvious answer to me.
What kind of work do you do on your laptop? If it's not "specialized" work, you might do better with a tablet like an iPad better than you'd think.
It's mostly programming. I also thought that I could eventually add external GPUs if my work takes me to the AI part of programming.
External GPUs aren't worth the headache. ML engineers usually use their laptop to ssh into a real Linux server with GPUs and CUDA and all that.
I used to use a Mac Mini as my to-go computer. I would pack computer, mouse, power cord, keyboard in my bag. I had monitors at each of the places I tended to go - home, my office, and a clients. I had the luxury of having six decent monitors available - client provided the two for working in their office, and I had a bunch of at-the-time decent samsung monitors. It was about as good as could be for the setup of taking a small computer as the primary work machine. I did that for about 5 years.
It wasn't great. I find a laptop to be better, almost entirely because it is both lighter and more flexible. If you have a mini PC you can't work in a coffee shop or easily change locations; you are bound to specific spots. The portable mini PC had the drawbacks of both laptops and desktops without much of the commensurate benefits of either.
That said, it wasn't awful or anything, just slightly more cumbersome than it could have been. I never attempted a portable monitor, though.
Thanks for the input!
Yeah. I guess I would have to evaluate how much I use the laptop out of the usual locations: office / home. I rarely use it on a coffee shop or anything. The most public place I ever use it is on the train, which would have a power supply anyway.
I don't know where you are in the world but I've been on trains in a lot of places and can't say I've been able to trust their plug sockets to be reliable enough to rely on anywhere.
For ultralight travel, I recently picked up a used Panasonic Let's Note for around 75 usd. It's got a 7th gen intel & 8GB ram, and 256gb ssd. For my purposes, remoting/sshing into more powerful machines, web browsing, and writing, it's been fantastic.
It&s a 12-inch laptop, so very packable, and I just weighed it - only 825 grams. I will probably pick up another one at some point.