One of the things that has existed pretty inconsistently over the past five to twenty or so years is the idea of inexpensive laptops that you mostly use either as a part of an ecosystem or as a complementary system to a big and powerful desktop in your office or at your home. Back when I bought superslab, I briefly considered getting a beefy desktop (the original Nehalem i7s had just started shipping in a few systems that I thought were very reasonable) alongside some kind of netbook or very inexpensive business laptop.
At the time, I didn't end up doing that, because I knew I would have to compromise a lot more on the laptop end of things than I wanted to. Additionally, wireless connectivity wasn't nearly as good as it is today, and services like Dropbox and OneDrive (then: SkyDrive) were essentially in their primordial phase. Google Drive as a file syncing service didn't even exist yet.
If I had, the setup I would likely have gone for was a Dell XPS 435, which had a then-new Nelahem Core i7 CPU on an x58 chipset, a modest graphics card, and 3, 6, or 12 gigabytes of RAM. I would probably have gone for 6. On the portable side, I would likely have gone for either a Dell Inspiron 12 or a Dell Vostro/Latitude 13. The trouble was that these systems were very costly. For the level of performance, you could get out of an Inspiron 12 (which used 1.8-inch spinning hard disks, and Z500-series Intel Atom CPUs) the cost ($600 or so) wasn't worth it, especially given the utterly average battery life. Better netbooks (10-inch systems with bigger batteries and N2000-series CPUs) wouldn't show up for another year or so.
Perhaps this is just a representation of my own aesthetic preferences, but I usually have a good idea of which particular system I'd go get if that situation came up, except that I don't really know where I'd go today. Perhaps, given that it didn't happen before, I didn't really know where I'd have gone either, should something have made this model necessary.
Instead, I had and used a powerful laptop as my primary computer (and really, my only computer for much of the time.) I was fine enough with the form factor, and I massively over-bought, creating a system that was suitable and powerful enough for almost eight years. The biggest reason it's now up for replacement is that I dropped it and the screen basically shattered.
It's easy to find good looking premium and powerful laptops today, it appears harder to find something that looks well-built but isn't necessarily a powerhouse. To make things more complicated, while it doesn't have to be a "powerhouse" I'd like it to be a little speedy -- basically, use SATA or NVMe/PCIe storage instead of eMMC. Maybe this is because almost anything on sale today is a powerhouse compared to what I've got. Even my relatively powerful desktop is actually five years old, and can be out performed by certain workstation and gaming-focused laptops you can get today. There's a big rift between netbooks and powerful laptops (both UltraBooks and gaming/workstation types of systems) today but there's a similar rift between even today's netbooks and some of the old systems I've been using.
From a pure horsepower standpoint, having a desktop doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me. I don't have a need for desktop virtualization at home any longer, and I don't have a bunch of tasks that I'm doing regularly that need things like, an overnight rendering cycle. So at this point, the main reason to have a desktop is so that I can run a few gigs of web tabs without having to close them or worry about weird rendering issues when I leave. It may be as effective to do these tasks on a remote desktop session and then use whatever laptop or tablet I want as an endpoint.
I have a Surface 3, which I think is probably one of the best options for inexpensive portable computers that are reasonably powerful and fast, but cheap-adjacent and also very portable. The biggest problem with the Surface 3 is probably its eMMC storage, which absolutely lets down the relatively sprightly Intel Atom X7-Z8700 processor. It works, but you can tell there are times when the storage is struggling to launch an application or do some disk intensive task, such as a big game that must load environments.
The other trouble with the Surface 3 is that it only has one USB port, and that charging is inconsistent at best. I have probably put $100 or so at least into new charging bricks and cords, due to problems with Microsoft's Micro-USB port holding the cables in place, and with longer cables not carrying enough current to charge it in reasonable time. With a low current charger and a long cable, it will charge, but only if it's off or in standby mode, and it won't charge completely overnight.
The real place to look for new companion devices, especially if small size and big battery life is important, is probably in the netbook/budget category. Unfortunately for me, these machines generally ship with processors that are similar to the one in the Surface 3, and they have half the memory and a quarter of the storage.
The 2/32 configuration is probably not as problematic as I want to think it is, especially with more than one USB 3.0 port, to make file transfers easier.
The trouble is determining what will be done on a portable computer. The Surface 3 could easily run my photography tasks, except the USB port issue. I either need to get a USB hard disk with a card reader or a USB hub built in, or perhaps a MicroSD card slot extender, so I can use a full size SD card from my camera in the slot.
There are Core M laptops as well, but most of what's available is big enough to run a "normal" 15-watt Core i3 or i5, and the Core M laptops usually don't have battery life that's anything special. Not all of the PC Core M laptops have nice extras like USB Type C ports for Power Delivery, which would make them trivially compatible with large battery packs.
There's a small glut of Core M tablets showing up, but they take the Surface's problem up to eleven: they have only one USB Type C port, and not all of them make more sense as products and as computers than the Surface Pro 3 or 4, which make the USB situation a little better by having a power adapter strong enough to run an unpowered hub with both a card reader and a bus powered hard disk, something the Surface 3 can not do, even though it probably has enough horsepower do to several of the tasks I'd like, along with some of my light gaming.
The Lenovo ThinkPad 13 is intriguing. It's a little more expensive, and the processor is probably over-kill for what I need to do, but it claims good battery life and will run off of a USB Type C port for interesting charging and power delivery options, as well as future connectivity to hubs and docking types of devices. It's just nice to have the option. For the price, with the additional maintainability from it being a ThinkPad, and for the upgrade options, including an M.2 slot for an SSD, socketed RAM, and a SATA storage bay, it's something that could last a long time, a lot longer than netbooks typically do.
I will have and use the Surface 3. I'm not presently using it for a whole lot more than I ever did with my Surface RT, which is fine, because those tasks are really the core of my home productive life, relevant when I needed to leave my office at work, and anything more than those things probably requires a lot more computer anyway.