I got the blue HP stream 13 for about $200 and it's remarkably versatile. I was able to get Photoshop and Illustrator and Visual Studio Code running on it, which covers most of my needs for portable computing (only thing it doesn't cover is iOS mobile dev, but there's no cheap throwaway solution for that).<p>And its memory is all solid state, so I don't have to worry about screwing up hard drives when transporting it like has happened with every single past laptop computer.<p><a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472573,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472573,00.asp</a>
Chuwi Hi10, it's a touchscreen Windows 10 tablet with 2 usb ports, HDMI out, 4GB ram, 64GB storage, 64-bit Windows. Currently on sale for $170. Unfortunately I dropped mine and broke the touchscreen but I still use it on my TV.<p><a href="http://www.banggood.com/Chuwi-Hi10-64GB-Cherry-Trail-Z8300-Quad-Core-1_84-GHz-10_1-Inch-Window10-Tablet-p-1004298.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.banggood.com/Chuwi-Hi10-64GB-Cherry-Trail-Z8300-Q...</a>
I have an Acer Aspire 1810TZ (11.6" 768p, Pentium dual core, 4GB RAM, SSD) which still runs Debian and OpenBSD really well.<p>People love to hate on Acer laptops but this one proved to be extremely reliable.<p>I bought it 7 years ago for about £400. I have the impression netbooks / chromebooks these days don't offer much of an improvement over this little machine for the price.
Actual x86 computer:<p>dirt cheap Thinkpad/decommissioned business laptops from ebay<p>Microcontroller:<p>arduino clones<p>4 dollar cypress PSoC 4 kits
This $49 one is interesting: <a href="https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip" rel="nofollow">https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip</a>