First Portless Ultrabook
craob.com
craob.com
The headline seems custom designed to anger the Hacker News crowd. Wouldn’t a real product advertise it’s thinness or lightness rather than it’s lack of ports?
There's not even a pre-order button... seems more like a university art project than even a company looking to pre-validate demand.
> The wireless charger features a wide variety of ports including USB-C, USB-A, thunderbolt, an SD card slot and a headphone jack.
Thunderbolt? Please. This feels like the tell, that this is fantasy only. Anything up to this I would have given the benefit of a doubt to, said maybe this could be done for real. Saying "Thunderbolt" demolished my suspension of disbelief.
That said, I absolutely think this is generally a fairly possible idea, & a good one at that. I agreed with @kube-sys when they discussed the idea of a connectorless device 3 days ago[1]:
> We’re already well on our way to removing connectors and using Qi/WiFi/Bluetooth. I bet we’ll see phones without connectors soon.
Long term, I would love for wigig[2] to finally happen. Thunderbolt might even be possible over it. Alas, adoption has been godforsakenly bad for this great 60GHz ultra-wide-band tech, and seemingly getting worse. If you do want to have wireless thunderbolt, wigig is probably how it happens. There's not many parts available to work with, but there are some. A new generation, 802.11ay, was released July 2021, the first major update since 2010, so maybe we'll see a return of interest/products. Perhaps. (Has anyone seen the new pre-draft Qualcomm 802.11ay chipset from 2018[3]?) I feel like they'll price themselves out of the market, most likely, again.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133745
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiGig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay
[3] https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/16/qualcomm-offers-first-802...
The other issue is Windows. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. Ubuntu should be the default these days.
But, really nice all the same.
I have had nothing but abysmal experiences with ubuntu on desktops and laptops over the years. It's a combination of the general jankiness of desktop linux and their poor design choices. If Windows is lipstick on a pig, Ubuntu is a dress and a leopard skin print handbag... on the pig. The pig doesn't understand what's happening and it's even more annoyed.
There are many material reasons as to why (conventional) desktop linux has never managed to make even the smallest dent in market share. IMO and IME, failing to get above 5% of desktop users has nothing to do with the Windows licensing monopoly.
That said, I do think they should offer a license-less version of the laptop - allowing people to maintain a free and libre stack is incredibly important and an effort that I support.
e: i have expressed my issues with desktop linux before and people always ask for examples, as if i was doing something wrong or incompetently setting up my machine. My go to example is this: I installed 20.04 towards the end of 2020. I installed the nvidia graphics driver using ubuntu's built in driver manager. Rebooted. Installed all updates. Rebooted. The machine immediately locked up after starting the kernel, and was wedged so severely that I couldn't even get recovery mode to start (immediate crash). I actually contain the basic skillset to get a boot console out on serial but... why put the effort in?
Whose fault was it? I don't know, but I expect the basic QA such that when I use the built in tools to do minimal and routine configuration to my computer, it doesn't destroy my installation. This is probably the funniest example of my desktop linux woes, but it is a long list and the majority of examples are, in my opinion, extremely unreasonable for even technical users to deal with.
I resent Microsoft for releasing that software when I was in college because it was adopted so quickly I was forced to use it rather than a unix based system, and that did real damage to by professional development. As an OS, Windows 98 was incredibly bad software, crashing constantly with technicians reduced to what can only be termed 'strategies of superstition' to repair the never ending stream of downed machines. It was a total nightmare for everyone involved and Microsoft proved why to never, never, never, never use their product again.