Broken Laptop

I guess this is Murphy’s law: things break exactly when they are needed. So did my laptop in the middle of a 2-week Europe-China-Korea trip. Days during such trips are fully packed and it is not really feasible to visit a repair shop (even if they could help). A phone serves as a good backup these days (staying connected) and I also carry an iPad with me which helps even more as a backup device. 

But the iPad, despite the hype, is still far from being annually comfortable content creation device. Writing an article or designing a slide deck is so much more efficient on a regular computer with a keyboard, a mouse with a proper cursor, and a file system. 

So I’ve been thinking about potential backup solution: a small headless PC with a Bluetooth keyboard which could use the iPad as the primary display. Moving / synchronizing data is less and less of an issue these days as most of it sits in a cloud anyway  It is mostly about having a „desktop” (as opposed to „mobile”) environment / experience which is more effective to do professional work  

The LattePanda Delta with a passive heatsink case looks likens good candidate. There may be some corner case issues like the login screen but they are probably solvable, with help of an temporary monitor or a TV. It also provides video over USB-C and take power over that same connector, so in may cases could just work as a small „brick” (no pun intended) connected to a USB-C monitor.