Apple recently released a new laptop, the Neo, at the surprisingly low price of $599 ($499 if you are a student) and it is, by most accounts, a wonderful machine. If I was in the market for a new laptop, I would be giving serious consideration to getting a Neo, but I'm the guy who types most of his pages on old typewriters, takes pictures of those pages and blasts them out to the internet. Yes, I do have a laptop that works just fine, an old Chromebook that I bought for $35 from eBay that I have running the Raspberry Pi desktop on top of a Debian Linux operating system. I was a nerd before most folks knew what nerds were, so I don't need Apple or AI doing my thinking for me.
But Apple's Neo got me thinking about a tool I used to have, a unique laptop that was also called the Neo. I had one when we lived in Eugene, but I got rid of it in the great purge before we moved to Superior. But it a handy little device and I realized I kind of missed it, so I found another one on eBay and bought it. I'm typing on it now.
The AlphaSmart Neo weighs two pound and runs for months on 3 AA batteries. It has a simple monochrome LCD screen and a pretty comfortable keyboard. It is basically designed to create and edit text and that's it. No web browsing, email, or other distractions. You can have eight different text files active and swap between them quickly with a single keystroke. It does have a built-in spell check that you can add words to and a thesaurus function that I pretty much don't use.
But the neat trick that the Neo does is that when I connect it to my phone or computer via a USB cable, the other device sees the Neo as a keyboard. It is far easier to type on the Neo than it is on my phone. Mostly what I do is compose a document on my Neo, spell check it and fiddle with it until I like it. Then on my computer or phone I open up whatever app is going to receive the document and hit the SEND key on the Neo. The Neo then blasts the whole document across the wire and the app just thinks I'm a darn fast typer.
I do have a Linux app that lets me send files back to the Neo if needed, but mostly I use the Neo for text creation. I don't have to bother with an AC adapter for it because the batteries last virtually forever. The screen is actually great outdoors, easier to see in sunlight than any modern color screen.
I'll still keep typing on my typewriters, I think the printed page discipline is good for me and I get to play around with my stamps, but I'm rolling the Neo into my writing routines. The Neo is definitely handy for creating longer texts.
I've been called a Luddite, but my skepticism of technology comes from a pretty decent understanding of technology and using the tools that work best for me. I guess you could say I'm a NeoLuddite.
