Re: ARM dreams of being in a laptop?
I'm amazed I didn't know of the A4. Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention it, or not obviously.
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A4.html
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Laptop/
Has no-one made a Raspberry Pi into a "laptop"? I found that the barrier to using an ARM tablet with a decent USB keyboard, USB hub, mouse etc as a "laptop" is the abysmally unfinished nature of Android and fact it's optimised for a small screen. Sometimes you can have two windows, some applications can print (the Brother print driver seems to work without the cloud), some applications support external storage. You need a third party file manager. A decent keyboard with AltGr, \ beside Z and non-USA English support and mapping needs a third party program.
Even my ancient Sony Ericsson phone had HDMI, USB2Go etc and with Android 4.x sort of worked with an HD screen, USB HDD, mouse and keyboard.
The cheap Tablet hardware is out there to make an ARM Laptop, but now LESS useful as makers drop separate charger port, 3.5mm jack, HDMI connector, SD card slot etc. Also unless you can root it an put on Linux, the Android OS is too consumption & phone orientated to use as a laptop. Hence Chrome, but if I got a free Chrome thing, It would be given away if I couldn't put Linux on instead. Chrome purely exists as Google Services client, though some offline use possible.
The problem is that even Linux Laptop usage is still a minority sport helped by WINE. Sadly for people creating content, both x86 and Windows have dominated for too long. Apple can easiest do an ARM laptop, because they have a history of dropping CPUs (68000 family, Power PC, 32bit x86), they seem to be going 64bit only on the x86-64 cpu with blocking even 32bit applications.
IBM PC and Windows 9x (rather than multiplatform NT from 3.1 to 5.x --Win2K,XP Server 2003) have really held back the industry.