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Or, get a mass produced general purpose computer and never connect it to the internet.

Yes, you can certainly use an air gapped laptop as a dedicated hardware wallet.

But now you need to generate a public key to send to someone so you can receive coins. How are you sending that key to your friend? Are you going to read character by character and manually type up the string?

It's all tradeoffs.

For the public string? QR code

Right, so now you need an additional device on hand (your phone) to parse the QR code into a string. Or I guess you could activate your hot laptop's webcam, pick up your cold laptop, crank the brightness up, point it towards your webcam, and capture the QR like that.

Sounds kinda clunky.

You need an additional device on hand to use the hardware wallet too, so that's not an argument against an air-gapped general purpose computer instead of a hardware wallet.

Yeah, I'm not deep into this stuff, but I thought the role of the device is to hold the key for a wallet that you don't intend to transfer out of very often. This makes the trade-off (more hassle, more security) worth it. If you are using the key all the time I don't see the point, the storage device won't be the weak point in your setup anyway.

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