The Best Size of a Laptop

…is 14”. It is the perfect balance between portability, weight, and screen real estate.

I’ve tried 13”, 14”, 15”, and 16”. 14” is where it’s at.

The MacBook air 11" in 2012 was my favorite laptop by far. Maxed out with an i7 and 8GB RAM it handled everything I needed to including multiple InteliJ projects. The resolution today seems obscenely low, but it was completely usable and the compactness was of great utility, practical for use while traveling.

I've bought tablets multiple times thinking it could replace it, it just isn't the same. It's a real shame that particular form factor has been lost, as we could probably easily have an m4 air in that size. I'd buy one in a heart beat now that Apple has remembered how to make good keyboards again.

Even though it was tiny,

I had a Lenovo S10 netbook too back in the day. I have fond memories of it, but I definitely don't 'miss that tiny size'. It was so tiny that they had to shrink the key size on the keyboard to make it fit, and the trackpad was also so tiny as to be barely usable.

Nowadays, I'd say 14" is the sweet spot. Compact enough to easily fit in a bag and be taken basically anywhere, without having to sacrifice much if anything in terms of functionality/capability.

With screen bezels reduced to almost nothing, a modern 14" is pretty comparable in size to a 12" model from yesteryear.

I really wish they would bring 12 inch MacBook with new M series chip and better keyboard! I’ve tried iPads to see I could get it to work for light browsing and writing when I’m out and about but they feel too limiting.

Regarding really tiny laptops - there actually are some on the market now. All chinese and based on the Pentium N100 or similar. There is the Chuwi Minibook X (10.51"), it gets quite good reviews, and two Topton devices (I think they are the original brand, of the Aliexpress models at least, but I might be wrong), a 7 inch device that looks a little bit like a miniature ThinkPad (model name might be L4) and a newer 8 inch laptop with a rotating screen (P8). If I got that right the Chuwi goes up to 12W, the others only to 6W, which should make a big difference for the processor. But it might be enough anyway for browsing, Youtube, some SSH when a server needs a restart and maybe even some very light coding?

Sadly all of them have spotty Linux support, and a Windows device is no use to me as a travel companion, for which they might be great solutions otherwise.

There is also the GPD Pocket 4 as a high class option, 8.8″, but that's too expensive for me for the few days a year the device might be in use. Similar for the One-Netbook 5, besides that being not in stock. Both of these look like the models the three above copy.

Old netbooks seem to be a no-go, they are all too chunky and weak and can't even play videos in proper resolutions (reviews of the time suggest that Intel managed to equip the later netbooks with a "better" processor that lacked hardware support for video decoding). MacBook Air 11" sounds like a good option at first, but with the huge bezels it's not actually that small, not smaller than a modern 13" Macbook Air, is it? And I'm unclear on how well the old Macbook would work with Linux now.

If I missed a great option, or one of the cheap ones is actually fine with Linux now - though the Chuwi gets new revisions regularly, so that's hard to guarantee - please let me know.

On the 10" size, I think few can beat the design of an IBM 701 [1] with its butterfly keyboard. I would be cool if this were to make a comeback: a 10" screen couple with a 12" keyboard. The Sony Vaio P laptops were also cool with their 8" wide screens, but their keyboards were somewhat cramped. [2].

At the 8" size category, a Pixel 9 Pro Fold coupled with a decent foldable keyboard, perhaps something like [3], is a killer combination. My personal favorite keyboard in the foldable category was the TextBlade [4], which, sadly, never materialized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_701

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Vaio_P_series

[3] https://www.amazon.com/ProtoArc-Ergonomic-Foldable-XK03-Blue...

[4] https://www.fastcompany.com/91249548/waytools-textblade-pock...

I have recently bought an Asus Zenbook 14 (inch) OLED with Intel 9 Ultra CPU and ARC graphics. It's the best laptop that I've ever had - fast, light and decent battery life (though I'm not so worried about that). And it was quite cheap - less than 900 GBP.

I agree 14" is the best size, unless you want a desktop replacement, to keep the wires out of the way, in which I would go for 16" or 17".

I miss my jornada so much. If only someone made an apple keyboard for iphones. All I need now is my home server

13 inch Mac book air.

After years of large MBp I switched to 15 inch MB air. Then the 13 inch. It’s moment of inertia is closer to the palm holding - i.e., it feels very light.

Screen is a bit tight. So all I do I crank up the size (setResX), put on pair of 0.5 readers and voila instant large screen. I can go all the way to 2560x and still read and work.

Tengentially: Since a lot of us are hybrid workers now, can't we have a better solution than having to constantly schlep our laptops to work and back? I want an easily pluggable SSD that doesn't dangle precariously out of the side of my laptop. Something like the old PCMCIA form factor. Then I could have a work laptop and a home laptop.

For me, laptop size is about the screen size that suits what I am doing. For software development I am happy with a 15" MacBook Pro.