For the first time in years, considering buying a new laptop. Of my 3 Dell mini 9's, one has a charge controller issue, one has a broken touchpad, and one is in fine shape but would need to be attacked with a drill to replace its small SSD with my big SSD. (Also that last one is my Windows porter machine, ugh.)

So, do I buy yet another Mini 9, which might last me a couple more years, or do I finally move on?

So far the best contenders seem to be the 11 inch Vaio Pro (but it has a possibly noisy fan), the 11 inch Macbook air (but it has a fan, supports Apple, and apparently I would have to build a frankenstein of a 12 volt power supply using the cable from an AC adapter due to their crazy DRM chip in the power plug). Is there no sane small laptop anymore with no fan and a SSD? Why are the only ones that don't look like junk from vendors I would really prefer to never do business with?

I continue to be interested in the ARM Samsung Chromebook despite it always feeling cheap when I hold one. But it looks like getting it to a decent state would requite taking it apart, modifying the hardware (removing some crazy metal write-protect ring) to allow replacing u-boot, and quite a lot of software tinkering. One of the Linux laptop vendors should go to the bother of working out the details of all that and assembly line-ing the production of de-googled samsung netbooks. We'd buy them in droves, honest..

Maybe best to buy another mini 9 and hope the situation improves in a few years. Like I've been doing for years and years.. Sigh.