Agree. Any hobby can become superficial content for Instagram, especially if your only or main source of information is online channels. But real communities exist, and you need to be in the real world to experience them firsthand.

I'd be very interested in reading about the kinds of hardware projects you're doing with esp32s and your printer!

For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.

Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.

Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.

Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.

They're interactive art projects!

I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.

More of a fun Maker project for sure

The ideal "cyberdeck" form factor is just a regular laptop. So to the extent that a macbook pro counts as a cyberdeck, yes.

The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.

no, they're plastic crap for kickstarter photos. not designed for human hands.

They once existed (see Sony Vaio P 2nd gen; coolest thing in the universe) but modern OEMs no longer have such taste.

If you already have the electrodes installed in your brain you can use stimulation circuitry from the courtocal labs cl1 to get a bidirectional bci.

https://corticallabs.com/cl1

Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.