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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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."

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

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