Weird Laptops are Coming – CES 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Weird Laptops are Coming – CES 2023

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21 pointsxbmcuser17 comments

In case you don't want to watch the video, here's the "weird" laptops:

1. Laptop with rotatable display, eink one side, oled the other. This one actually qualifies as "weird" I guess.

2. Laptop with a foldable display

3. Laptop with two displays instead of a keyboard. Looks pretty good actually, I would consider it as a mobile workstation if the specs are good enough.

And some other totally normal laptops.

I'll bet the battery life is terrible with two screens, it would be amazing for working from a plug or big external battery though. The eink one seems very practical to me.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-... says: "Just don’t expect Kindle battery life out of a laptop like this since you’ve got the overhead of running Windows on its 13th Gen Intel processor (and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage) rather than a simple e-reader chip. Lenovo’s estimating up to 21 hours of battery life from its 56Wh battery using the E Ink screen, and it isn’t providing context about what kind of content can run for 21 hours at a time."

Can we not just finally have a normal, boring, standard eink laptop? I've been waiting years for this, but all we got are broken promises, over-engineered weirdnesses like this one and dozens of tablets. I might buy this rotatable one just for that purpose, even though I don't care for the OLED side...

An e-ink laptop would not be consumer friendly due to einks low refresh rate unless it was running a significant amount of custom software and the demand wouldn’t be there for a business to make it worth it.

I also love eink. Maybe if there was a FOSS OS built around eink?

Do you need a whole OS, or just a specialized WM/Display manager? I assume a text based interface(e.g. console) world be the simplest to support?

Surely, it wouldn’t need a whole OS, but it would need a specialized layer running over the top and that that point it might as well be a forked OS with the layer on top.

Maybe the video didn't mention it but there is also a new laptop with a 3D display that doesn't require glasses.

The e-ink display on the laptop is quite cool. I could use that for writing simple notes and likely save a ton of battery.

I wonder how the latency is? I've been resisting buying an eink notebook because I think the best latency you can get now is around 30ms, which combined with the distance between pen tip and screen will give quite a visible delay.

I guess it's personal how annoying that would be, but for myself I'm waiting for sub 16ms delay.

12 Hz refresh rate on the eInk display. ( So ~ 80ms or so refresh )

COLOUR eInk BTW - not just black and white | shades of grey!

It’s enough for reading books… but might be too hard for terminal editing?

The "weird laptop" has a two sided screen panel - regular high res | high refresh thin film screen on one side that eats battery life - the flip side is the low power low refresh ePaper screen for reading documents, etc.

It's worth pointing out, I guess, the existence of heavy computer users that aren't programmers or gamers .. lawyers, doctors, engineers, clerks, etc that spend the bulk of their screen time viewing documents | records | etc.

What will be interesting is adoption and market penetration - cute as a concept, but will it sell?

It took more than a minute tell me that there's a laptop with both an OLED display and an e-ink display.

Is there a writeup of these laptops somewhere? I just don't have the patience for video.

That 2 screen yoga looks interesting. You get a lot of desktop space and lots of configuration options.

Dropping the wireless keyboard onto the "bottom" and having the remaining accessible screen turn into a touchpad was pretty cool.

I just want an updated x60. No stupid trackpad wasting space.

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