My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the compute

My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year. After listening to her describe the conditions and her needs, I suggested a few changes: transition to lower wattage mobile equipment, integrate redundant, portable power, and more effective use of solar. This boiled down to Chromebooks, portable APs, and certain smartphones, marine and other LA batteries, and lots of lithium USB power packs. In return, she shipped me her old Mac hardware, which I opened up and emptied of all dust, sand, and scorpions before diagnosing most as damaged from overheating. It was awful how poorly those glossy screens held up to environmental abrasion, and the one unit that survived, the smell still hasn't left completely. The Chromebooks (K1 based), which held charge on testing for 8-10 hours under heavy use, are light yet durable, have no moving internal (or servicable) parts, are or can be sealed against the environment, and are passively cooled. They also run the full Docs suite offline, take excellent dictation for transcription, can remote into her other computers, and they look nice. The model was just under $300 and had a 1080 screen, better than decent speakers, and most importantly, it plays x264 video so she can catch up on her shows. My only concerns were for the lack of non-removable batteries and the very narrow cylindrical DC plugs the chargers use, but battery diagnostics have been great, and since they never all have to be charged at the same time, about half of the chargers can break (though none have, yet) and not cause any issue. I don't know how most people on HN live, if they have good electricity, air conditioning or potable running water, whether they own vehicles that they can drive to pick up and haul perishable groceries around in, or if they can cheaply or quickly replace equipment that dies sooner than it should, warranty or no, within their countries. But for anyone who doesn't have all of those things, I'd say Chromebooks would be an exceedingly appropriate choice.