I think it seems like a cool idea, 17" at 4:3 ratio is alot of screen real estate, at a 12.5" 16:9 footprint.
Lot of negativity in this comment section, personally not something I'm that interested in, but I am interested in people experimenting with the form factor.
Nice 4:3 ratio. This essentially doubles as a full screen you can put anywhere with a keyboard always at hand. That's how I use my laptop 99.9% of the time.
The microsoft book is already better than a regular clamshell in my eyes for versatility, but If you ignore the price for a moment (which brings the book to ridicolous costs), IMHO this design beats a clamshell design in versatility a 1000 times over, and the detachable screen design as well.
... you need to manually fix it for Windows? Does it ship with Linux or something?
Edit: Great read - and your
your enthusiasm for the device is getting me interested in it, but what an incredible software shit show. Imagine spending millions on hardware R&D only to release a product that's unusable due to terrible software. Why do manufacturers keep doing this?
> Edit: Great read - and your your enthusiasm for the device is getting me interested in it
Just get one - it's hard to live without it now!!
> but what an incredible software shit show.
Microsoft didn't deliver the OS they were supposed to (bad) but Windows 11 is everything and more (good)
Intel... well, it's Intel. If you go into plane mode before suspend and play with the device manager to restart the device when the driver crashes or use one of my approaches or scripts, it works great!
I also avoided the Lenovo because of the many, especially software, 1st gen rough edges, but the (Surface Neo) form factor is very appealing. Part of that form factor is the included magnetic wireless keyboard. We actually had touch-enabled dual-screen keyboardless clamshells before.
Just for comparison, this 17.3" 4:3 is the same height as 21.1" 16:9, and it has 185 DPI. If it was a bit larger and slightly higher DPI, I’d consider it as a main monitor for a desktop build. I’m still waiting for an OLED monitor in the 24-27" range with 200+ DPI.
I have a 4K screen with Windows 10. Some apps look great, some have really blurry text, some have really tiny UIs (or a comical mix of tiny and normal sized). This last category includes much of Windows' own UI...
I meant that 4:3 17" is substantially more than a 16:9 17" monitor.
4:3 vs 16:9 for the same diagonal (17") results in 12% more area. a 16" MBP is already large, and is only 16:10, so 17" 4:3 is comparable to like 18/19" of work space in 16:9/10 world.
I’m unlikely to buy a foldable laptop, but a foldable monitor while traveling sounds kinda nice. I’m working from a hotel right now, so I can easily imagine it. Folding flat would offer protection from scratches in a bag/backpack and take less space. Would be hard pressed to fit a 17” portable monitor in my bag, but if it folds in half that’s more tenable!
Slightly incidental, but after years of working out of hotel rooms, I’ve found that a 15.6” 4K portable display placed on a small tripod (Arca-Swiss mount) sitting directly above the main display of my 14” Macbook has been the perfect travel setup. It’s a dual-display setup, portable (similar area to the computer itself), similar desktop area and font resolution to the native panel, and prevents you from craning your neck.
. Portable 4k screen (the glare in the photo is not really visible in front).
. Custom mount for the laptop and a
. Wireless thinkpad keyboard with a trackpoint (which I love).
The cabling management has improved now, but this setup gives plenty of screen real estate, both displays are touch, and in comparison with a tablet where the applications context is lost the majority of time, here I can be more productive and is a joy to work with it.
I've done a similar setup, but for a minimalist mount, used two 12in rulers, and gaff tape to make a hinge, a strap connecting the other ends, and a stop on one of them. So a heavy thinkpad sits on the desk ruler, leaning back against the other and the strap, with the bottom keyboard edge sitting between strap and stop. It's fragile, and I fear someday there will be a bump, crash, and sadness, but it's light, compact, and easily recreated.
Sure, I have an Innocn PU15-PRE. Just to reiterate that a 15.6” 4K is definitely the way to go. I also tried 14” 4K and 1440p panels but - on account of the way scaling and font rendering works in MacOS - they’re a big step down. Even moreso if you’re doing anything graphically intensive - you’ll want to use non-native scaling on a 14” 4K which is expensive for the GPU. The 15.6” panel doesn’t have this problem because the “effective 1080p resolution” divides cleanly into the native 4K panel resolution.
I tried it - it’s okay, but a bit flaky - especially disconnect/re-connect. While it does _improve_ font rendering on sub-Retina displays, it’s still nowhere near as nice as font rendered on a display recognised as Retina-capable by MacOS - which any 4K display is. It’s particularly noticeable in the setup described above, as your eyes are constantly moving between the in-built Retina display and your external display.
It might be a good solution if you already have an, eg, 1440p display and want better font rendering, but if you’re putting together a setup from scratch, MacOS just works hassle-free with 4K displays. You’ve got to stare at these things for hours every day, so.
But limits the output to 60hz and I get random flickering when reconnecting 60% of the time. However the devs of that app have been super active and it has improved a lot in just a few months so I’m sure it’s temporary.
Yep, this is at eye height. For me this solution is better than using a laptop raiser because: you get two displays instead of one, and in a setup no wider than a laptop, and you don’t need to pack an external keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad. Plus a tripod and portable display packs way better than most laptop raisers I’ve seen.
The upper display becomes your main display, the lower one your secondary. You still have to look down sometimes at the secondary but that is vastly better than craning your neck the whole time.
Edit: [Pic](https://imgur.com/a/sdLmYJG). Bad photo but you get the idea. In reality, both those panels are perfectly angled for viewing when I’m sitting down in front of them, with no overlap.
That’s great that you guys are into this. I feel like I cracked the code with this one. I told my irl friends and they just shrugged.
Sibling, stoked to hear that! Enjoy glorious pain-free travel productivity.
I often use it at home, too - just to get out of the home office from time to time. Can work from the kitchen table without compromise. Takes less than a minute to set up.
You could also move the camera to film the reflection from the 45 degree glass, if you’re looking for a home office teleprompter solution and not a live presentation version.
Yeah, it's not actually for a teleprompter - I'm using it as my zero-parallax video conferencing solution with a Canon R5 as my webcam. I'm currently using an 11" iPad Pro using the excellent Duet Display software which does the horizontal flip [1] and it works great for that. I'd like the display to be larger though, but that requires upgrading the teleprompter too and I've been toying with that hence my question about monitors that can do the horizontal flip. But I think I'm just going to mirror a 24" monitor underneath my videoconferencing setup so that I can better see presentations during meetings.
...you're using a four thousand dollar (not including lens) mirrorless camera as your webcam for videoconferencing services that are typically barely a few megabits per second?
Yep. But I also use it as a stills camera and a video camera. And you should see the lens that I have mounted to it :) But that's not what I do for a living. Because of that, the camera would otherwise sit on a shelf, unused. I use it for many hours each day and it makes me happy to use it. The only gear that I bought that I wouldn't otherwise have owned is a $250 teleprompter, oh and the Camlink 4K for the HDMI->USB and probably a few other things, but you get the idea. Most of these mirrorless cameras sit around unused all day long. Kind of like your car when you're parked at work.
I'm using a very similar setup for when I want to work away from my 27" 4K display but still need a second screen to be productive (e.g. doing almost anything coding-related). Like the previous poster, I set it up with the external screen directly above my laptop screen which for me is much more comfortable than trying to put it beside the laptop, and ends up at a perfect eye level.
This is really neat and I want to find a similar solution. My concern is how long it takes to set things up - does it get tiring to always set up the tripod and mount together before adding on the screen? I wonder if anything exists with just a mount that attaches directly to the monitor (like Vesa but no screws).
And how is the durability of your portable display? I got one and used it for a year but keeping it in a carryon bag in airplanes eventually messed up the display from being pressed and bumped around.
It’s a bit cumbersome but it probably takes nor more than a minute or two to get set up if I have it all broken down. The Tripod folds up small enough that I can leave the “tablet mount” part connected to it and throw the whole thing in my bag. Then setup is just extending the tripod, clamping in the display, and connecting the cable.
It’s great, isn’t it? Can’t imagine working any other way now when I’m away from my desk.
I recently added keyboard shortcuts (using BetterTouchTool) on my left hand for moving the mouse cursor up and down between the centre of each display, as vertical mouse movements seem to be more tiresome than horizontal on account of the lie of your arm (less of an issue with the built-in trackpad).
I have two Asus ZenScreen Go MB16AHP. Comes with built in battery and a bunch of other great features.
For me, both of them stopped charging and refused to work right after warranty ran out. Now they are sitting on my shelf waiting to be cannibalized.
I very much enjoyed these screens. They were response, relatively light, fit into the bag, and with their own battery, I could chug along for hours without issue. Oh the joys of getting ready for meetings in airport lounges!
So, Asus portable monitors for me were great design, not so good implementation.
A US-friendly link to a similar product is https://amzn.com/dp/B09H6QV53R (I searched "arca-swiss tablet mount 300mm" to find it; there are others that only go to 230mm width for folks interested in this with smaller portable monitors).
Personally I am currently experimenting with a Lenovo ThinkVision M14[0] perched (a little precariously) atop a Roost V3 Laptop Stand[1], which is a lower-quality but lighter, more minimal setup than what you describe.
When I'm on Zoom call, which is often, I can move the laptop onto the stand for a better camera angle and put the external monitor beneath.
I'm not doing graphics work and I find the 60Hz, 1920x1080, usbc-on-both-sides monitor sufficient for my purposes (much, much better than an old asus one which was 30Hz or less, and laggy).
Not nearly 17", but I've found my iPad Pro makes a reasonable second monitor when traveling. It isn't really large enough to want to do work on it - I keep those windows on the main laptop monitor - but it works as a place to drop email/Slack/misc other things.
I advocate this as well. It’s superior in almost all ways to the portable screens of which I’ve tried many, and you also have an iPad, ideally with cellular chip. :-) On many short trips you can leave the actual laptop at home.
FWIW, when I used the Asus portable monitors they came with a folio case that covered the screen when it was in a big and was used to stand the display up at different angles
Agreed, that’s what makes this kind of interesting personally. I tend to prefer smaller devices for travel, being able to get both that and more screen real estate would be pretty cool.
The responses to this are more interesting than the device itself. It's innovative, it's done by a brand that has a reasonable reputation for reliability and for standing behind their products and it may well fit a niche.
Innovation is always going to be risky, and Asus stands to lose some of their credibility if the device does not hold up over time. So I'll be more than happy to let them do their thing.
As for sustainability: all electronics that contain rechargeable batteries are in principle not sustainable and we all have one or more of those devices. Let the person who has never used a portable battery powered device cast the phirst phone.
God help your soul if you need to deal with an ASUS hardware RMA. They are easily the worst PC hardware manufacturer of all, and they sell clearly damaged and broken parts as "refurb."
Late last year going into early this year I had to deal with ASUS RMA with my ROG Flow X13 and the dock. The dock started failing. They wanted both the laptop and the dock sent in, so I sent both in. It took a while, but they got it taken care of.
The only problem I ran into is apparently FedEx treated the return as a soccer ball. The sturdy packaging was very damaged, and I'm surprised the damage to the laptop and dock weren't worse than a cracked frame, bent hinge, and cracked dock frame.
ASUS handled redoing the RMA without charging me anything. My assumption is they used the FedEx insurance.
They always re-image the device. When I got it back the second time, they forgot to remove their repair image and I had to re-image it myself. No biggie, I'm fine with that.
Perhaps what helped me is I've worked with technology for a couple of decades, including doing technical support and front line support for several years at the start of my career. I used my troubleshooting skills before even contacting ASUS and gave them all of my findings. The person I was talking to didn't bother with trying any further troubleshooting and just requested the RMA.
So, while I get that talking to any system builder's tech support and RMA can be a pain, I had a positive experience with ASUS RMA.
I have a friend with a recent Alienware laptop that had issues on day 1. Dell technician did a house call, basically destroyed his laptop, and left. Another friend has sworn off Dell because after several RMAs of his laptop, the warranty eventually expired and it still failed again. I don't know many people who have had to go through RMAs of other companies. But I get the impression that, outside of business support, all of them are garbage. However, ASUS did me right.
I bought about 16 refurbished asus gpus last year and 9 were DOA. Some had extreme damage but no packaging damage, making me think they were sent damaged.
Requiring a laptop for a dock issue is insane. That is not good service.
Failures happen. I've had to deal with Asus RMA only once in over a decade (I still have a monitor from 2009 that works and is in use). The only "horror" that happened was caused by FedEx, not Asus. I'm definitely upset that I had to send it back to Asus for a second time, but I don't blame Asus for FedEx damaging my device in transit.
I've had more "horror" from Corsair products. And not just one product line from them.
@bedast if you don't mind my asking, how do you like the Flow X13? It looks like an interesting machine -- thin, light (so it's very portable), but with the option of an external GPU and display.
It's okay. I probably won't do this setup again in the future, though. I think Asus had the right idea, but not the right execution. Future standards may make their proprietary solution unnecessary, also. Not say that's where I think Asus failed on execution. I would have preferred if the laptop didn't have discrete graphics at all to cut back on power requirements on the go. But I get it, they were aiming to try to keep gaming performance up when undocked. This just isn't my priority.
I suspect when I'm itching for an upgrade in a couple of years or so that I'll go back to a SFF desktop with desktop class graphics and separate thin and light laptop. I might even forego the laptop altogether, depending on how things look at the time.
The Framework laptop (which has been in the news lately) looks like it fits into the thin/light category (< 3 lbs), with integrated graphics rather than discrete. The thunderbolt port supports an eGPU and external display, so it might work for these types of use-cases.
Alternatively, there are these from Origin (which have Nvidia discrete GPUs):
For me, for the future, I'll likely do something like a Framework without an eGPU and just use a SFF desktop for gaming. I don't do much advanced gaming anymore so I don't need a lot of power for something bigger than SFF.
Just to note - those thunderbolt eGPUs are a bit more limited in performance than Asus's solution because thunderbolt only provides 4 lanes of PCIe, while Asus's port provides 8. So far as I know, USB4 and TB4 didn't expand on this, even with the new PCIe mode. All of that is to say Asus's connector allows for the 3080 Laptop GPU to be used likely near 100%, while TB likely would not be able to, so you'd be limited to lower end graphics. This is what drew me in to the Asus solution.
Maybe it's worth pointing out the eGPU does NOT use the USB-C port on the Flow X13. The proprietary connector includes a USB-C connector along with the PCIe extra connector. The USB-C connector can be used separately. But in terms of the dock, the USB-C port on the connector is used for port expansion (the dock has 4 USB-A 3 ports, ethernet, and power, along with the display outputs).
This is where I think things could end up deprecating Asus's solution. Future TB may provide higher end PCIe (ie: upgrading to a higher level, adding more lanes). There may be other standards based technologies coming as well.
I could probably be fine with a 4060 in a TB enclosure in the future. But at the moment, my needs are met, so I'm not planning out my future technology stack just yet.
Also had terrible experience with that last year, brand new X570 constantly crashing after a year, found a capacitor leaking they kept the card for two week and sent it back without any change and with the shipping sticker directly on the box.
Had to throw the card away (out of spite, I had my own machine constantly crash for months before finding the cause) and buy a new one and X570 is not cheap at all. I'll do everything I can to never buy an Asus again for a long time, this include work where I can weight on this.
Since then two friends with a Asus MB (one same as me the other an intel one from 3y ago) went dead too due massive amount of capacitors leak, made me think they have a big problem that isn't talked about very much.
My $800 Asus monitor developed a faulty power supply, so I RMA'd it in original packaging. They refused the repair on the basis that the screen was cracked and sent me back a cracked screen. Unfortunately, my proof pictures weren't illuminated and in focus on the corner where Asus RMA cracked it, so I couldn't prove anything and was SOL. Ah well.
I hear more RMA horror stories about ASUS motherboards than any of their other products. That could just be due to a higher amount of MB failures though.
I am too old. In 1980s if you buy motherboard you have to buy asus. Ever if it is built, asus.
Not sure these days as more a mac person … except my pc is running i9 still asus. Never have motherboard issues. Just sample of one but so far so good.
They are shit in RMA but as is every other company, most service centres are outsourced. I remember I just need a droid to remove the cmos battery from my zenbook to fix some weird power on race condition that prevented the whole thing from switching on - I didn’t have the silly screwdrivers - yet they wanted to rma it for two weeks - had to literally scream down the shop unrefined - losing face - until they relented albeit with sir it won’t work but calm down you idiot we’ll try, of course it worked and I was back in a taxi 20mins later with working zenbook and my data. Still better than Acer but still shit. This was bangkok
Not every other company. Apple - to name one - are often simply excellent at this because they understand the power of customer satisfaction. There are numerous stories of apple replacing failed hardware with equivalent, newer models - phones and laptops alike.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can make of Apple but customer satisfaction under warranty is not one of them.
Agree. I had a nearly-new MacBook Air that had some weird power-on behavior. Took it to an Apple store; they ran diagnostics, found something amiss and I walked out with a brand new replacement in under an hour. (No "we have to escalate to corporate", just "You have a good TimeMachine backup? OK, here ya go...")
In summary, I got sold a defective product from a company and left with a much higher overall impression of the company.
I personally don't care for their devices, or their locked-down software. But seeing how they treat my parents, they certainly have great customer satisfaction.
I consider myself a fan of Louis Rossman. He's fighting the good fight and nearly every individual bad thing he says about Apple is correct. My point is that Apple is colossal and even if they were saints anointed by God -- which they aren't -- I would expect them to have enough design mistakes and negative experiences to fill ten Rossman channels. To some degree these reflect their size, and to some degree they reflect Apple's quality, and you can't tell which without making some effort to correct for base rate. Louis makes absolutely no effort to correct for base rate. That's fine for repair purposes and even for engineering feedback, but it makes his criticism completely useless for analyzing the overall quality situation.
I have a desktop PC for gaming and most of my work laptops have been PC, so an estimate from my own experiences has waaaaay less base rate bias at the cost of admittedly tiny N and much more variance. I've probably seen a dozen big issues (bezels that delaminate on flex, charger DRM broken in update, wifi cables that pull out when you tilt the screen back, ...) on the PCs that would have been twitter scandals and would have filled Rossman Repair's shelves if they had happened in the Mac world, but because of the low expectations in the PC world they just sort of float under the radar. "Dude, that's what you get for buying a Dell/Lenovo/HP/Acer, buy Lenovo/HP/Acer/Dell instead."
So yeah, if I count by twitter complaints, macs suck. If I count by how many broken computers show up at Rossman Repair, macs suck. If I count by average problems that I've personally witnessed per device, macs rule.
I replaced a broken display on a friend's ASUS laptop several years ago (which she had bought a few years before that at my recommendation) and found that one of the display hinge screws went right through the wifi antenna cable. "Oh yeah," she said when I pointed it out. "The wifi reception's never been very good." I put in a replacement antenna and cable from a parts laptop I had around and it worked much better.
That was the moment I realized that most consumer hardware is crap (even well-respected brands), and it can be difficult and expensive to try to find something that's not. I no longer recommend any specific brands to people.
I went from having ASUS graphics cards and motherboards, to swearing off from buying ASUS products ever again. For me, they refused to repair or replace a brand new motherboard with a defective PCI-e slot because of some tiny cosmetic scratch somewhere else on the motherboard, claiming the "damage" voided the warranty. Magnuson-Moss anyone?
IDK if ASUS has been doing it longer than others. However I find that this is common practice now days for most companies. I exchanged some sony headphones the other week and the ones I got back literally had dirt smeared in them, like some construction worker or mechanic had them and returned them.
I had some issues with a corsair power supply a couple years ago I had to do 5 returns before they finally sent me one in a box that was not already opened.
Apple does this as matter of practice. You go in they will give you an "new" phone that is in some weird box that is not the retail box. Those are returned phones.
> I had to do 5 returns before they finally sent me one in a box that was not already opened.
Before this year, I've never had a defective electronic device (laptop, phone, monitor, camera, etc.) or encountered any issue that made me return a device. But a few months back, I had a similarly terrible experience with returns.
I bought a new lenovo yoga, it came with a defective spacebar. Got a replacement, it came with another defective spacebar! And this was a new laptop, still sealed. Decided to just replace the keyboard & upper case under warranty (which was the recommended procedure), and now the spacebar issue is finally fixed. But now I notice the new upper case had a raised crease above the "Esc" key. This time, I'm not bothering with another return or replacement, at least the crease isn't affecting any functionality.
I've never experienced QC this poor before on a brand new, >$1000 electronic device. The whole thing turned me off from lenovo laptops.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. Dealing with any company that isn’t apple is a nightmare.
I had a razer laptop with display issues. I paid to ship it to California, and 2 months later they shipped me back a laptop with display issues.
And the tech was anything but fluent in English. He had a very rudimentary command of the language so I question whether he even understood the problem.
>Dealing with any company that isn’t apple is a nightmare.
Really I found the experience quite the opposite. It was incredibly insulting to have them take the defective iphone i just spend $1200 on and try to make a show of giving me a refurbished unit to replace it. They bring one out in some weird non retail box and make a point that you see them unwrap the cellophane. I asked them WTF this is I want a new phone from a retail box on the shelf over there (so to speak) they made a huff about it but finally conceded to give me an actual new retail phone. Apple is scum. People falling for their dumb little customer service pony show are what keep them in such high profit margins. If any other company did that you would be having a fit that they should give you a discount for getting a used unit.
I shouldn't have to get aggressive with them to force them to give me what I paid full price for. They are at least as bad as any other company and also actively trying to hide it.
ThinkPads are the only good thing Lenovo ever put out, and they just bought them off IBM. I would never recommend the brand (or almost any brand) as a whole.
> Apple does this as matter of practice. You go in they will give you an "new" phone that is in some weird box that is not the retail box. Those are returned phones.
That sounds like a replacement refurb. They won't tell you that it's "new." Apple does that, when they can't fix the problem. I've gotten a couple of those, over the years, and never had a problem.
I get AppleCare, by habit. I seldom need it, but when I do, I'm sure glad I did.
I remember, once, I had a laptop that developed a fatigued hinge, as well as issues with the USB-C/TB ports. Apple basically replaced the entire unit. Another time, they gave me a refurb replacement that worked great.
I used to travel a lot, and my laptops saw a lot of action.
They are used and it is intentionally disingenuous to give a customer a used/refurb phone to replace a defective brand new retail price phone. Keep being an apologist though they need people like you to keep those stock prices soaring.
And the underlying engineering is unreliable for some models --- which is a shame --- I'm still sad that my Asus Note 8 w/ Wacom stylus quit working (just after I'd kitted it out w/ every accessory I needed), and I regret not picking up their b/w LCD unit.
I really wish they'd design the case of the product to be fully removable easily (ie. 30 seconds with the right tool). Then a 'refurb' can consist of switching your case onto new innards.
Since this form of 'refurb' would be so cheap to operate, all warranty claims could be handled this way no questions asked.
Send the old innards back to the factory to run the full factory test suite, and if they pass then great, and if they fail have them stripped for parts.
That wasn't my experience. In college a roommate spilled a pint of beer on my ZenBook. They replaced the keyboard for me even though I was clear that it was an accident and not a product failure.
I've bought zenbooks ever since then, and they've been great.
Have heard almost exclusively good things about EVGA's RMA process. Haven't needed that service myself but from what I've seen/heard they'll replace defective hardware without fighting you about it and the replacement is shipped quickly.
I take exception to you casting them as having a reasonable reputation for reliability. In my experience it's a gamble for reliability, if you lose expect poor support, long repair times, and if it's out of warranty the repairs are always more than the cost of the device.
You gamble when buying any product. No one has a 100% success rate. In my personal experience over a decade of using Asus products, I've not seen a 100% success rate, but my only one failure was recently and they took care of me.
Dell might send a technician to you, but that doesn't mean the quality is any better. Friend of mine fairly recently had his Alienware laptop "repaired" which ended with Dell completely replacing it because the technician effectively destroyed his new laptop. Ordered, received it months later, was defective out of the box, technician destroyed it, had to wait even more months for a replacement, tried to send him an inferior replacement in the process.
None of them are without faults. But I've had a lot of success with Asus.
Currently I have 2 PCs under my desk and 2 monitors that I use for work. I've fantasized about trying to travel and work but lugging a laptop and a portable monitor around seem too cumbersome. I'd love to experiment with two of these that could fold inside of each other (like 2 hands clasping) and set them up on a desk in an airbnb and remote desktop into my 2 home PCs from each.
But most likely the idea of trying to travel/vacation and work at the same time is a bad one. Should probably just take advantage of economies of scale and do all my working at once and then all my traveling at once.
New ARM-based chipset on a laptop? There are benchmarks and apparently we trust that they don't just melt after 1000h of use. (and sometime you can replace a laptop cpu)
Smartwatch? Cool new thing, doesn't really cost an arm and a leg, might try that - maybe the battery can be replaced.
A screen - the one thing that you had to carry very careful (crt), be careful not to scratch while wiping off dust, or not letting your waterbottle press against too heavily in your bag... and now you're folding it?
This is one of the few times you can call me a pure Luddite, I am terrified of this and the idea that it could break like 2 months after warranty ends. Or inside warranty and they just tell me to gtfo because I handled it wrong. Yes, maybe I am overly careful here, but my personal laptops are from 2016 and 2013 and both got some amount of abuse... I like long-lasting hardware...
Well, wait and see. Early adopters get to claim the cool factor and the rest of us can pick it up if and when it survives. But it's an interesting development and I do hope that it works out for them once they start fielding them in larger numbers, a recall of these devices in quantity would not come cheap.
> it's done by a brand that has a reasonable reputation for reliability and for standing behind their products
This is simply not true. Asus like acer is a brand I tell people to avoid when shopping for a new laptop. They have a horrible reputation on QA and as others have mentioned their support is dead last in actually getting things done.
Can you show a metric that shows their support is dead last? Or are you going off of emotional experiences and anecdotes of others?
I've owned multiple Zenbooks over the years and they've been fine. I've helped friends choose Zenbooks as well and they were happy with them. The one time I went with a non-Zenbook for an upgrade (Lenovo Yoga) I regretted it.
Been using Asus products for over a decade. Only ever had 1 failure and they handled it fine. I have a 24" LCD monitor from 2009 that's been relegated to being a small dumb TV with a smart box on it to provide TV functions, so longevity seems fine.
I used to be a fan of Asus devices but their quality has gone down over time, and it wasn't that high to begin with. At this point the only product of theirs I stand behind is their routers, and that's only because the quality standard of the router industry is even worse.
Funny you mention their routers, I specifically avoid ASUS routers as they usually use Broadcom chips, which means horrible software support and no chance of OpenWRT working well. I look up individual models and can't recommend any whole brand, but the Netgear R6220 is pretty good, and I think there are a couple other Netgear routers with good support. TP-Link has some as well, like the Archer C7.
I had one of the early Archer C7 versions and it soured me for the whole brand. I've heard the newer ones are better but bad wifi is so exhausting they don't get a second chance.
Is there a similar device on the market right now?
A 'bigger version' by two orders of magnitude surface wise certainly seems innovative to me, I'm not aware of another company risking their reputation on something like this at present but I'll be happy to be corrected.
There was an intel proof-of-concept but I'm not aware of anything that was actually available to the public.
Keep in mind that what looks trivial to you ('just a bigger version') may require an enormous amount of engineering to make it reliable enough for mass consumption.
Not sure where you've got the high price tag, it's priced starting at USD2,499 in the US. Recently it was selling at a steep discount at £899 in the UK [1].
The 2nd gen ThinkPad X1 Fold release is just around the corner [2]. Will be very interesting to compare the 2nd gen X1 Fold with the new Asus Zenbook Fold.
[1]Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold foldable Windows tablet selling for a steep discount:
Just so GP knows how much bigger "2 orders of magnitude" from the Galaxy Fold would be, it's >16 square meters of screen space. That would mean a screen north of 160" on it's diagonal. Somehow, I don't think 17" cuts it.
I'd be really excited if they offer this as part of their ZenScreen portable monitor range.
They seem to be currently mostly 1080p but a folding 17" or larger HiDPI screen for an existing laptop would be brilliant.
I generally like smaller laptops like the MacBook Air or XPS 13. I could see me using a tri-fold ZenScreen in hotel room and then just the laptop on a plane/train tray table.
iPad Pro 12.9” as external second hidpi/retina monitor for Macbook is remarkable in three modes
- USB-C to USB-C for all day powered zero latency extended desktop
- WiFi for cable free extended desktop
- keyboard mouse sharing (by pushing your Macbook cursor against the side of your laptop screen by the iPad, till it “pops” onto the iPad) for seamlessly running Macbook apps and iPad apps side by side using your main keyboard/mouse, able to not just cut and paste but drag and drop (!!!) between the two devices and OSes.
And then just the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard (and its trackpad) on the plane/train tray table (hinge design sets the screen in from the hinge, allowing use in shallower depths like the tray tables).
Which is considerably worse, the monitor or the iPad?
Comparing this:
12.9” mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display
2732x2048 resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi)
2D backlighting system with 2596 full‑array local dimming zones
120 Hz refresh ProMotion technology
Wide color display (P3)
True Tone display
Multi‑Touch input
Apple Pencil input w/ pressure and tilt sensitivity
Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
Fully laminated display
Antireflective coating
1.8% reflectivity
SDR brightness: 600 nits max
XDR brightness: 1000 nits max full screen, 1600 nits peak (HDR content only)
1,000,000:1 contrast ratio
… to what’s available on Amazon in 4K or 5K screens with no computer (iPad or iMac) attached, I can mostly only buy the LGs for $1400 to $1700, and they don’t work with a stylus. The comp isn’t really a monitor anyway, it’s a Wacom Cintiq Pro.
Have you ever used an iPad Pro with Sidecar - ie, as an external moniyor? I have! You're going to be compromising heavily. Bye bye to 120hz, you're going to be struggling to hit 60hz sometimes. Hello to video compression, so all those pixels are going to be far from what they can actually do.
Any real external monitor is, I'm sorry to tell you, going to blow it out of the water in image quality, and it's not even close. Especially if there is any movement or if you're going to be pushing more frames. It's just the name of the game.
It's real competition isn't external displays, because it really can't compete there. It's laptops with pen support. And it can't compete against those either. Believe me, I tried to make it work, it just can't.
You clearly haven't seen a modern iPad Pro screen if you think it's inferior 'in every way' to other portable monitors. 120Hz refresh, super high pixel density, amazing color replication, I could go on. they're beautiful.
What high-refresh rate OLED travel monitors are you comparing it to?
Have you tried using it as an external monitor? It can't even hit 60fps reliably, and there is noticeable lag and compression. As an external monitor, it really sucks.
As a monitor of a machine into its own, at 12.9", I'm comparing it to the OLEDs in the new Vivobooks, which have even higher pixel density, better contrast, very comparable colors, and inherently better motion performance.
I've been pitching for a while hinged screens, like double laptop screen that unfolds a second same-size screen above the first. The fold seems like a nice touch, if this would come as a separate portable monitor I'd buy it in a pinch.
I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware. I don't mean technical specs. I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
A big foldable screen looks cool, but doesn't feel at all pragmatic. Could someone please compete with Apple?
The reason that there is no non-Apple alternatives to the MacBook Pro is because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the best job of stuff that already exists.
Quality is the feature that apple sell. I don't think anyone else gets near them.
Apple's built up an incredible lead right now (in quality and specs), but as the son of a of a macbook from a few years ago, the idea that Apple sells "quality" is mistaken, with the most obvious example being the butterfly keyboard, which would make your device unusable if you happened to say the wrong combination of words at the wrong time.
But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.
100%. I take this opportunity to make people NOT forget 'Staingate' [1]. My colleague had horrible time getting his daughter's Macbook fixed by Apple, as officially they did not acknowledge that the problem exists for months (maybe close to year+).
Ouch. Looking at that link, today I discover my late 2013 MBP had that fault and is in the list of machines that was eligible for repair, but of course the time limit has passed.
I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair.
That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.
I took my quality Macbook to a dogbark. My quality macbooks' fancy screen broke because of a thin layer of dust at said dogpark. Opening up my quality macbook was like difussing a bomb. I learned from that experience and won't ever buy another Macbook again for as long as I live. the Macbook replacement has made several trips to a dogpark. I did have a good experience at the mac store though. Dude was honest about the situation and could relate to my pain and rage.
Interesting! In our experience, travel and residence in central African dust the likes of which doesn’t exist in EU or NA didn’t do anything to Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. What kind of dust was the dog park? How did it affect the screen in particular?
Which is funny because while current 14' and 16' MBPs are very ahead of competition, previous generation was dogshit in terms of quality, and had a lot of this "blue sky innovation" that decreased usability - like the touch bar.
The M1 and M2 (and the benefits from them, like ridiculous battery life, low heat (enough so that you can run it totally fanless unless you're outside in the direct sun or something), and more importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good. Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now, especially if you have other ios devices.
Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side).
As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
I made a similar comment down below..there are many good laptops out there and it's insane what we take for granted now. High PPI super-bright screens, 8+ hour battery life, < 1" thick, < 2lbs, 2tb+ nvme ssd, etc.
I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
> importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good
Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming.
> Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now
Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
You're right..the lack of a touch screen is weird.
I do use mine for dev work/etc though (M1) and it's completely fine, even with only 8gb. I've never had any slowdowns or felt like it was holding me back.
> Very generally, Java is one of those things. CPU performance is really, really good for non-rosetta workloads.
Single-threaded (or "lightly threaded") absolutely. But if we're saying "desktop-comparable" and "heavy workloads" I'm gonna assume a multi-core workload and go throw things like the 5950X or 12900K into the ring at a minimum, and the 5995WX at the extreme. M1 ultra starts at $4k after all, it's absolutely fair to include Xeon-W & Threadripper Pros against that. M1's big cores punch above their weight, but they still can't make up that much of a core count deficit.
I don't know what other manufacturers are focusing on, but it sure looks unimpressive. I just received my shiny new macbook pro 14 inch. I spent the last few months using a Linux laptop. Overall a good experience and it works. But I'm glad to be back on a mac.
Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition.
That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.
There's plenty of good laptops out there not made by apple. Dell XPS 13 is excellent, asus has several zenbook models that are on par, etc. They don't get much media coverage because the standards we expect from laptops are so high now that we take it for granted (0.75" thick or less, all day battery, insanely high pixel density (enough to require scaling), fast enough cpu/memory for any day to day task, great screen brightness, 512gb-2tb+ nvme ssds, generic charger ports (usb-c), etc. You can get all of that for under $1k from several makers now.
Selective quality. There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables from aliexpress could run circles around long after those were discarded (or not, my mother-in-law still carries one around, I guess to remind everyone how crappy engineering looks like). Bending phones (was it 6?). Also some nefarious moves like slowing down older phones.
Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium.
Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand.
Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.
I never understood WTF people were talking about with the cables. I'd go 5+ years with various Apple cables without a single sign of fraying. Not even careful with them, would just wad them up in bags when moving around, that kind of thing.
... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible.
[EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
I think most people (not devs/designers) view a laptop as something that costs around $750. That is why Windows still has a huge marketshare. Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Microsoft all have laptops that have solid build quality, OLED screens, touchscreens, etc. at $1,500-2,200 price range but no one buys those. If you are in that price range, you are probably in one of those niche industries (design, development, graphics) and you are probably buying an Apple.
That view is so myopic - loads of people buy high end non-apple laptops. I would anecdotally guess many many more than apple overall. Just seems you're lacking in awareness of it. Probably a particular social bubble you are in, combined with myopia to the rest of the world.
I disagree. Buying Dell and Samsung laptop in that price range I'd say it is an overpriced rubbish if you compare to current Apple produce.
There is really no comparison when it comes to build quality and performance.
I have an XPS and I personally find it better than the M1 MBP in almost everything except power efficiency, so I have much difference experiences compared to your other review in this thread.
The XPS doesn't make much noise and I notice no difference in speed while developing. Some tasks are even faster, because native Docker instead of running via Docker for Mac. The battery doesn't last as long I guess, but it will still last for 8 hours, which is far longer than I need.
This is not my experience with XPS 15 (2019). It is substantially slower, it is loud and battery used to last less than an hour. Then constantly dying chargers, I had a box of Dell chargers that worked for a month and then laptop stopped recognising them.
For the tasks I do (I use Docker heavily) M1 is more than twice as fast in low power mode and never heard fans going off or felt any slowdowns.
On XPS if I opened a heavier webpage, it was possible for the entire laptop to slow down and not even refreshing the screen timely, so you witnessed a slideshow and usually only way out was to perform a hard reset.
Also random power off or if it goes to sleep it won't wake up. I have to then leave it for an hour and then maybe it will power on (sometimes I have to try a couple of times). This is actually the same experience I had with earlier XPS 13.
Google XPS won't power on - plenty of people have this problem.
I think Linux is still much better than MacOS in terms of design and usability, but that doesn't really mean much when operating systems compete on compatibility with programs (which themselves compete on compatibility with operating systems). It is a vicious cycle.
If your job requires you to run AutoCAD or VSC++ or something, you're just going to use windows. The average user isn't going to figure out how to use KVM or Wine or something. If your job requires some linux/unix tool, is the average user going to fidget with it until it works in MacOS or just use Ubuntu or something? MacOS is the worst of both worlds: it is both closed-source AND a minority OS.
I used a rolling release distro for a while on desktop and a NUC, it was really nice and convenient. But I switched over to Ubuntu for a laptop ("they'll sort out the touchscreen drivers and onscreen keyboard situation" I told myself), now and I kinda regret telling people to "just use Ubuntu or something" in the past.
It worked when I first installed it, until quite recently, when a new version hit. Upgrading every package at the same time is obviously destabilizing, something has changed in the plumbing and under certain circumstances some gtk programs require a 30 second timeout to occur before they start, and there's the whole snap firefox debacle. Longing for the stability of rolling release, oddly enough.
Anyway, I haven't used MacOS, but I've generally been surprised to find that my current system is hovering around near-Windows level usability, other than the familiar terminal which is nice. Probably time to try out tumbleweed...
I've been very happy with my Dell XPS 15 - 5 years old and still going strong albeit with reduced battery performance. Great Linux support and a nice screen.
Will probably upgrade in the next year or two primarily because replacing the battery and increasing the ram is pricey enough that I may as well buy a new machine.
The New XPS line doesn't support real sleep mode. It is a huge pain starting work after the weekend and most of your battery is already gone. I'd avoid them until they get this fixed.
+1 for the XPS line! I have one that is probably ~5 years old. Just replaced the battery on it with no hassle (got a reasonably priced OEM replacement from NewEgg). The build quality on these things is excellent, and the specs are not bad either!
> I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware.
I used a MacBook Pro for work a few years ago, 2014-18, and really liked the hardware.
Never got the vaunted "It's So Intuitive!" UI hype, though. And from OS "upgrade" experience -- felt more like downgrades, with the ever more limited configurability -- during that time and from everything I've heard since about the constantly shrinking "walled garden" of their ecosystem, I've pretty much come to detest their software side.
Soo... Give Asahi Linux a couple years more to mature, and if in that time they release a fanless (M2, M3?) laptop with a larger (16-17", or, heck, why not even more?) screen, I might be really tempted.
There are plenty of non-Apple alternatives to the MBP. Plenty of laptops with a 6800U or 6800H. None of them have better trackpads, but plenty have nice ones and significantly better keyboards. And some have OLED or 240Hz screens which I'd say are better than the ones in the MacBook Pro. Any laptop with that processor and a reasonable 65Wh+ battery is going to have great battery life.
Some even have great graphics cards, or touchscreens with pen support, or mechanical keyboards, etc... ASUS even makes a few laptops in this category (some of them are branded as gaming laptops but really do everything you want).
The issue with PC laptops isn't that there is no competition for the MBP. It's just that it's very confusing and that there are literally hundreds of options and only 5-6 models that will do what you want.
The "great battery life" is part hardware, but largely software. See also: iOS devices with "worse" specs and smaller batteries that perform way better than "better" Android counterparts, while also having longer battery life. Some of it's hardware voodoo, but a lot of it's iOS and MacOS and various pieces of Apple software (notably Safari and Mobile Safari) being very respectful of system resources and protective of the battery.
It's a bit like how you used to be able to put BeOS on a Windows or Linux desktop and it'd feel like all the hardware was 4x higher clock / bigger memory size than it had been.
Looks very niche to me as well. But I can already see it might well be the most ideal laptop for presentations, given you could preview slides on one half and keep keynotes on the ‘keyboard’ half.... I can see myself enjoying using something like this for such purpose.
> I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
The competition on the other side is on specs. It's hard to stick hardware with bigger numbers in a thin case. Look at Intel's NUCs vs the Mac Mini... they come with a power brick larger than the computer to win in specs, while Apple has an elegant built in PSU.
And... a working touchpad that can actually replace a mouse for 95% of use cases? How are you going to market that?
You want the largest numbers, you have to go with the others. If you can stomach windows. You want a less annoying experience, Apple unfortunately has about zero competition there. Which is bad even for Apple users because then you get masterpieces like the butterfly keyboard...
In East Asia, novelty or "cuteness" of a product, i.e. the look of things, is mostly what counts. That's how East Asian makers try to stay ahead of the competition, because actual innovation that goes beyond the surface (no pun intended) is hard and not actually encouraged in societies with a confucian view of the workplace.
I think this is too shallow a dismissal of innovation in an area so large that it spans 35% of the globe, and there are quite literally numerous existence proofs that it isn't correct.
The idea that all innovation happens in the United States and Europe is fairly ridiculous, innovation happens on all levels of product development, both deep in the guts of products as well further up as well as sometimes entirely new classes of products.
I have anecdata. I worked for an European guy who was designing new (and at least in his mind) innovative hardware from scratch in the US. And getting it manufactured in China. The Chinese looked at him like he was insane because he was designing everything from scratch instead of cloning something.
>actual innovation … is not actually encouraged in societies with a confucian view of the workplace.
How does this follow? If the implication is that collectivist societies frown upon excelling relative to one’s peers (which is not true, BTW), then wouldn’t the exact same logic apply to novelty or cuteness?
No, this is the result of corporate bean counters thinking they should maximize short term profit with a splashy product, rather than maximize long term profit with high quality and reliability, which take more time for the market to recognize.
Guess why - because the East Asian customers want thinness and lightness over power. I know because in Japan, when people saw my Mac (a 2013 MBP), first they were like "oh a Mac, can I try it?", but as soon as they held it, they were extremely surprised by its weight (compared to some 11" Toshiba notebook they preferred). It's understandable because in Japanese and Chinese cities, city people rarely drive but lug around their computers in bags, up and down stairs, standing for 1-2 hours in the crowded subway, etc.
Just get a Thinkpad. They have all the features you want. They're not going to be as thing and light, but their keyboards are better than anything out there. The touchpad is iffy, but if you're using Linux (I use it too), your touchpad experience is going to be subpar anyway.
I have an X1 Yoga which is capable of all of these things. It is a laptop with a good keyboard setup that can hold up it's own screen w/out a kickstand. When I don't want the keyboard I just fold it up and the keyboard changes to lift and lock so the back of it is solid making it easier to put on a stand (or A frame it and use a couple of books in a pinch. They sell one with linux preinstalled too.
This is especially a problem on the older models. Some Thinkpads are really excellent machines besides their unfortunate 720p, TN panels.
Admittedly though, Lenovo seemed to get their act together on later laptops. My T460s has a matte 1080p display with 90%+ DCI P3 coverage, which is pretty good for a $300 used laptop.
I ordered a 1080p screen and controller from Aliexpress for my trusty old Lenovo T420. Installed in about 30 minutes and worked perfectly. The difference in image quality versus the original crap panel is huge.
Older Asus fold had many issues with Linux. In most cases, you can get headless mode working but forget about GUI. A better solution would be trying out System76, HPDevOne or Dell XPS dev edition for Linux desktop.
The Purism Librem 14 isn't half bad either. Currently using it. Love the build quality of the case, matte screen and kill switches. Quality of the built-in speakers is not that great. Keyboard is acceptable. The trackpad is nice and big.
Most likely only if packaged in ChromeOS or Android workloads, which isn't what you're asking for, but is what OEMs care about after the netbooks market vanished.
I have a Surface Pro 7 and it's great for this. It doesn't have a matte screen but does the rest of it well. I'm running PopOS on it and switch between the included keyboard and an external keyboard with it on a tablet arm.
Should be back in stock "soon"... Though I'm keeping an eye on the pipenote instead now - more powerful CPU. Instead of LCD it is epaper which as pros and cons for this use.
Cool design, but absolutely never buying an Asus product again. Every single product I've bought from them (router, motherboard, monitor, etc) has broken, and their support system is an absolute nightmare.
In what situation would you need the manufacturer's support? Asus doesn't sell direct to consumer, so issues while still under warranty are handled by the store you bought it from.
the store is not an expert in the electronics inside the device, or the firmware that runs on it, so they're incapable of providing any meaningful support
I guess my question is what kind of support do you need for a laptop (that any other manufacturer is going to provide)? Software issues are the OS vendor's problem, for hardware issues they'll just tell you to send it to the shop, parts compatibility doesn't exist since nothing is replaceable... I guess driver issues? But then they'll just tell you to either run Windows Update or install it from their downloads page.
sure, it sounds like you understand why the support is bad for most of their devices (which aren't laptops), so here are things Dell support has helped me out with, with one of my laptops they made:
- issues with the OS (yep, Microsoft definitely isn't going to pick up the phone and provide support)
- processor speed issues
- processor virtualization issues
- overnighted me a processor replacement for me to replace under warranty
- overnighted me a technician to fix my poor processor installation, still under warranty
- overnighted me a replacement keyboard to install
as far as I know, Asus has neither negotiated nor paid retailers to provide the type of support manufacturers are supposed to provide, so they can't wash their hands of it
you seem to be pessimistic about things a support team of engineers can or should or will do, possibly based on experience with Asus support :), but tech support for a computer or a device exceeds "have you tried turning it off and back on" and "ok return it", or it's bad support
You know literally nothing about me except that I've had a bad experience with a brand, so you come to the conclusion that I'm "simply using them wrong"?
Unbelievable.
A $400 Asus router I bought had a broken 2.4ghz band, was that 'using [it] wrong'? I had a motherboard fry itself, do you think I was in there 'mishandling' the motherboard? An Asus monitor I bought would periodically shut off and not turn on again unless you physically unplugged and plugged it back in, a faulty power circuit that I found many others having issue with.
It truly is rare that someone may have so much bad luck, since QC is automated these days. Perhaps you may want to check your home's circuitry for noise or spikes, or install a power conditioner?
I'm not a lawyer doctor or electrician, full stop. Anecdotally, however, I've used ASUS for a couple of decades, and it's been above average in my experience.
I'd hazard to guess the router was something like https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Rapture-Gaming-Router-GT-AXE1100... not your typical 2x2 wifi AP + gigabit router combo. I say this because I once returned such a top end ASUS model 3x (twice to swap, 3rd to refund) as they were all just some form of DoA. I felt like I was going crazy to the point I took the 3rd one to work to unbox it thinking. Based on the number of 1 star DoA reviews at the time vs the reviews now they seem to have figured it out.
Overall their support is a bit lacking for the high price point stuff if you turn out to need it, the low end or normal stuff I have no complaints on.
> You mention a fried motherboard -- this is not caused by the board itself, but from too much current being put through the board.
Though one leading cause of too much current being put through the board, besides too much voltage at the inputs (in case of a power supply fault), is the motherboard drawing too much current. Which can well be caused by failing components shorting out, for example. Or a voltage regulator on the board producing too much voltage.
Saying a fried motherboard is generally not caused by the board itself is not true.
> Every single product I've bought from them (router, motherboard, monitor, etc) has broken
Has broken in what time frame? Because if it breaks within the first year or so, I'd understand it, but tech breaking/malfunctioning after the standard warranty time expires is pretty common in my experience. I've only ever bought one laptop from Asus but it served me well enough for 4 years, until the battery went haywire and ballooned to thrice its size.
Pretty cool tech, but from the Dave2D video, the crease + bulkiness is still bad enough to be a dealbreaker for me (and I imagine many others as well).
I find it interesting that companies like Asus, Samsung, etc. frequently put out these devices that feature emerging tech, but clearly aren't ready for primetime. You would never catch Apple releasing something like this since they have brand value to protect, but Asus seems to be fine risking that in order to claim the title of "first to market".
One day this tech will be ready for the masses, and I imagine that's when Apple will release something. Why are companies like Asus spending money on marketing that "warms up" the general audience to this tech, only to have Apple come eat their lunch a few years later?
Rise tinted glasses much? Apple have had more than their fair share of bad tech. Such as fanless computers overheating, keyboards that break, monitor hinges that tear the monitor cable, and the first iPhone had fewer features than many of the “dumb” feature phones released years prior.
I say this as someone who owns a lot of Apple hardware too. So this isn’t some anti Apple bias
Moreover it’s pretty absurd to say that hugely popular products aren’t ready for the prime time. The fact they’re popular and sell well means they precisely were.
Haha yea maybe my glasses are a little tinted, but I think you're conflating two different points. Apple has released flawed products in the past, but they rarely (never?) include emerging tech that isn't polished enough for mainstream consumption. I say this as a former Android user who loved touting that "Android had that feature first", but it's hard to deny that features like mobile payments have just been executed better by Apple.
Also, since when are foldable OLEDs hugely popular?
> Apple has released flawed products in the past, but they rarely (never?) include emerging tech that isn't polished enough for mainstream consumption.
I'm not sure "they screw up well-established and fully-functional tech rather than new, innovative, and risky tech" is really that good a compliment.
They also keep questioning the status quo with what's already established, which is something I really like. Most are stuck with local maxima because they're afraid to change things that "work" (badly) while Apple dares to change things for (in their opinion) the better.
It's usually small things, but they add up over time and now they have a massive edge.
... oh, in the last few generations they also managed to integrate "normal" stuff like double tap to wake to iPhones as well, I was pretty pleased to find that that just worked.
Eh, I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that they screw up well-established tech — at least in a significant way. They've certainly had a few misses, but they've had a ton of at-bats.
> I say this as a former Android user who loved touting that "Android had that feature first", but it's hard to deny that features like mobile payments have just been executed better by Apple.
This, but like 10x. It's like most non-Apple manufacturers just bash shit together without ever looking whether it even works and then lose interest in 1 or 2 generations.
Apple eventually comes along and uses the technology to provide actual value and people on HN are surprised that this time people actually like it.
Apple is still far behind on pro tablet game. I had an iPad Pro and it was extremely clunky to use. Multitasking is a mess with three different systems to learn [1], people resort to bizarre hacks to get the keyboard to work at different angles [2], the app ecosystem is still lacking, etc. Sure it fits some people's use cases, but you could say that about the Asus and Samsung folding screen products too. The idea that Apple always gets things right and "provides value" to the masses is absurd.
Oh, and let's not forget about 3D touch, or the macbook touch bar. How did those do after 1-2 years?
Their market share and their pro customers (artists, photographers, videographers, and more) would all disagree.
Seriously, when was the last time you saw someone actually use an android table for anything professional other than in a cheap point-of-sale terminal?
How do you define "massive hit"? That article cited an estimate of 9M foldable smartphones being sold in 2021 - compared to 1.4B total smartphone sales last year (~1.12B just looking at Android).
Apple sold 240M iPhones in 2021 - 15x as many as the 'massive hit' of foldables... I think you're living in a bit of a bubble if you think they're that popular.
Again, not comparable. You're comparing two models against an entire company. It's really Android vs iPhone, and in the Android world those numbers mainly in one model is a massive success.
Value is relative. Take the iPod. I would rather pay the premium for it even though it does much the same as competitors. Because it does it just that little bit better, that's still worth a lot more.
The iPhone was revolutionary, lacking some software features at launch was nothing that couldn't be fixed.
What the post above clearly means is releasing hardware that's still a few iterations from being "mainstream appealing"
If you actually follow the story of the iPhone, Apple could have released a bulkier more primitive version, but Steve Jobs refused because it wouldn't have mainstream appeal.
And Apple just seems to be more conservative in the feature wars in general. They held out the longest on OLEDs, they held out the longest on 120hz, etc. all until it was practically "boring" tech.
You're completely misunderstanding what I don't think is a difficult point.
Don't look at sales of the folding phones for example... look at sales at the very first folding phone (low production Samsung model)
Look at sales of not 120hz screens, but the first 120hz (spoiler: It was a low production Razer gaming phone)
Look at the laptop linked here... clearly it is not meant to sell in mainstream numbers like a Macbook
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Other companies seem to be ok with releasing what are essentially prototypes with production bodies. There's bound to be teething issues, but they're ok with that.
And the feature might have mainstream appeal, but the entire device they release it on does not... at least not in the current iteration.
Apple on the other hand seems to only want to release once they can release in full force and maximum widespread appeal.
I understand your point perfectly fine. What you’re doing is cherry picking examples to suit a personal bias and ignoring the fact that some of your examples of “unready technology” not only sell well but are hugely loved by those who own it.
Take the Samsung phone you’re citing. One of my non-technical friends has one and absolutely loves it.
Plenty of companies have successful products with hardware that you consider beneath you. And Apple have released plenty of hardware that has absolutely been unfit for mass market. The destination you’re making here is purely your own bias.
Again, being way way way too defensive, and completely missing the point because you're so focused on being as combative as possible.
Things like the Galaxy Fold are successful products aimed at non-mainstream scale.
No one is calling those features useless, or unappealing, it's the entire package that is intentionally not marketed for the mainstream.
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It's ironic because you seem to be getting increasingly upset thinking that this is all pro-Apple propaganda, when the reality is I'm saying Apple is afraid of taking risk and iterates internally instead of externally which isn't necessarily a good thing... we've seen that with AirPower for example.
Odd how some people get about these companies, this really shouldn't be such an emotional topic, it's pretty much non-debatable that Apple doesn't really do the kind of device in this post, while other manufacturers do.
> Plenty of companies have successful products with hardware that you consider beneath you.
That's a crazy emotional statement and a completely wrong interpretation of what was written!
I'm saying these are features that are so cutting edge they can't even be packaged in mainstream hardware... and you transformed that into me calling them "beneath me" because you're rationally interpreting what I write? Or emotionally responding without comprehending. The latter no?
I’m not being emotional. That phrase was chosen because, as I’ve posted already, my opinion of your comments is that the differentiator here is nott technology but rather your preferences in technology. You then go on to argue your preferences as being better than other peoples (by proxy due to dismissing other peoples preferences as “not ready”). Hence why I considered your opinion to be one of elitism rather than a pragmatic evaluation.
But since you’ve degraded this conversation into a pointless meta-debate about whether I’m getting emotional or not (I’m clearly not but would it really matter if I were?), shall we just agree to disagree and get on with our lives? It’s pretty obvious no constructive discussion is going to come from our discourse.
> You then go on to argue your preferences as being better than other peoples
Show one example of this. A single place where I say or remotely imply anything about either strategy is better than anything.
In fact, show one place where I show a preference. You're literally imagining my preferences. After all, I've owned some of these devices... I've owned the first 4k phone (an Xperia), I've owned interesting low volume hardware like lightfield tablets and cameras.
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I am saying that brand new tech that literally cannot be scaled, like can't even be manufactured in mainstream numbers, is released by some manufacturers, but not by others.
Like it's not even an opinion, it's a statement of fact which is why it's mind-blowing that it's gone this far in back and forth, and again, makes me look for meta reasons why this is even an argument...
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> I’m clearly not but would it really matter if I were?
I guess I was being charitable in assuming the reason why you:
- missed so many plainly stated points
- keep using really combative retorts like "you think your preferences are better than others'"
- keep putting words I never said or implied in my mouth
Was emotion... but it might just be malice? So yes, I enthusiastically agree to disagree.
This is really exciting. Being able to fold will make it so much easier to carry around. My dream is to have a 24 or even a 27 inch monitor that you can fit in an every day backpack.
I don't really care that it's also a laptop. Heck, I don't get why you would ever want a foldable phone. But foldable monitor at this size makes a lot of difference in packing.
At 17 inch, it's not the biggest difference since you can still fit that in a backpack. 24 inch? Good luck. But I'd imagine the size to increase over time. Surprised nobody is talking more about this.
I wonder if it would have a crease in the middle over a long time.
I've seen people with folding phones, they look cool at first but after 6 months they look like shit.
But what is the software support for the folding screen? The hardware is cool and assuming it doesn't break in a few months, I see the lack of much software support as the biggesr adoption roadblocker.
I don't think just treating it as one big screen or two/three separate screens without any more context would be enough.
I don't see why not. I don't think it folds to arbitrary configurations. It will just toggle between two different rectangles. Modern PCs handle plugging and unplugging external monitors no problem
Modern PCs have an external monitor in addition to the main one just to extend the area. This one, because of its placement especially in the semi-folded form, would unlikely to be used just like a normal display, because of their position and rotation relative to the user, that one sees in front of their eyes, so additional software measures would be needed to make use of that space efficiently to, say (making it up), keep app windows on the main area but move shortcuts, desktop items, widgets to the bottom area etc.
Anyone who works on a job site will love this (e.g. architects, electricians, plumbers, etc).
Much like on the other extremely, pilots absolutely love the tiny iPad Mini because it can easily fit in the cockpit (and even be mounted to the windshield).
For a laptop, it's a small machine with a large screen. For a desktop, don't know.
This is probably going to cost a lot and installing Linux would probably mean to forfeit all the screen modes except one (I don't expect much driver support - but maybe xrandr?) anyway I can see me buying something like that.
Too bad for the missing touchpad buttons (three of them, this is almost a deal breaker), wonderful not having a number pad, I didn't check if it can be upgraded (RAM, SSD) and which ports it has. My wishes: video, ethernet, 3.5 audio jack, at least two USB A 3.0, USB C would be ok, I bet there are adapters for old hardware.
Not parent and I don't have kids but if I did, there's no way I'm giving them an ipad.
They can have coloring books, crayons, Legos and building blocks, doll houses, physical plastic, wooden and plush toys, restricted access to PCs/consoles, but no portable smart devices with screens, online connection and spyware apps.
By kids I'm talking about pre-teens. They can get smart devices when they're teenagers.
So... the kids will probably not have much friends as all the other kids will be socializing online even if that's inferior to physical friendship.
Good or bad, that is the norm now and if you don't let your kid access to a tablet while all the other kids do, that child will be lacking a lot of confidence and practical tech skills.
A balance with both iPad time and physical activity time would be a better tradeoff IMO.
> Good or bad, that is the norm now and if you don't let your kid access to a tablet while all the other kids do, that child will be lacking a lot of confidence and practical tech skills.
I'm pretty sure most of us on HN grew up without access to iPads, but still somehow developed practical tech skills, including the ability to learn to use iPads.
We've grown up to something technically harder-to-use than an iPad, and I'm comparing today's equivalent.
If we normalize this to current HN audience's childhood (roughly), it's more like not touching a computer and not seeing a modem until 20s, while all the kids know at least how to turn a computer, use Windows Explorer/Mac Finder, developed motor skills to use a keyboard efficiently, know how to modify Word docs etc. and the social norm is knowing all these things (as opposed to our chilhood).
Sure, a legendary hacker might arise after touching a computer first time after 20s, but much less likely.
Certainly, but all the technology with which we grew up is still out there. A kid who hasn't had an iPad is not automatically a kid who hasn't had any hands-on experience with technology, and, while I can imagine there's some debate here about whether or not it's feasible to raise a child in today's world without an iPad or equivalent device—I'm not a parent, and so wouldn't presume to participate—I can't imagine anyone here advancing the position that "I'll raise my kid without any kind of 'hacking' experience."
Then how do your kids communicate with those who only have android devices? That's a big social issue among teens in the US.
iMessage is never popular in Europe, as everyone here uses cross platform apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. due to the lower market share of IOS vs Andorid.
Some of the auto updated apps have a history of adding circumventable embedded browsers in about boxes and things on Android which can be used to browse the internet. This happens on iOS too but the browser engine is safari and is subject to the same white lists as normal Safari.
This is a fairly large security concern if I'm honest generally.
Unless your kids are network engineers who can join wifi networks or get around firewalls, or hackers who can defeat parental controls, you should be able to control what they do on an iPad pretty easily, including making it an offline device. You can even lock them in to a single app if you really wanted to.
There are some things which you should not answer unless you have experienced it yourself. Having kids is one of them.
All your activity sounds good on paper but real life does not work like that. Kids are smart, they can see you are on your smart device, they can see others are on their phones/ipads when they go outside. You dont want your kid to be a social outcast.
Sometimes when you want to do your chores or want some quiet time for yourself the best solution is to give your kids an ipad so that they remain busy.
I don't think that's a responsible attitude to have. "You dont want your kid to be a social outcast", sure, but sometimes you have to lay down the law. That starts with setting an example yourself.
If you're always on your phone, you're sending your children the social signal that that's OK.
parent here, if you can’t work while your 3-5 year old is entertained with drawing or reading (looking at pictures in) your books/library, you didn’t teach them to entertain themselves. Music and radio drama work wonders too.
Just compare their feedback over time using the different approaches and you’ll notice that they work more their imagination when the content is not laid out entirely by someone else.
I agree this is a good attitude and start off point for parents-to-be but I have to agree with other commenters that it is impractical and goes out the window pretty quickly unless you have nerves of steel :). Imagine for example being on a flight with a toddler throwing a tantrum, for the sake of everyone's sanity an iPad is a wonderful device.
Having said that it is all about balance, and limiting screen time is a good way to go about it.
Some parenting advice: if your toddler loses their marbles, do not pacify them with a reward. That's a seriously bad idea.
I found the best low stress and low effort solution was to be a larger drama than they are. This culminated in myself lying on the floor in the Lakeside shopping centre in the UK screaming my head off. Oh yes I can do it too. And it makes you look like a dick when I do it. Make sure you talk to them at the same level afterwards. You are now equals :)
She never did it again after that and has been a joy. Advice has worked for other people.
> agree this is a good attitude and start off point for parents-to-be but I have to agree with other commenters that it is impractical and goes out the window pretty quickly unless you have nerves of steel :). Imagine for example being on a flight with a toddler throwing a tantrum, for the sake of everyone's sanity an iPad is a wonderful device.
It doesn't have to be the kid's iPad though.
We have a "family" nintendo switch. I sure don't mind if they play with it on the plane, but at home they only have access to it on request and within a limited time. Same as for a laptop if they want to watch something or my eldest daughter's phone. There is no way these devices stay in their room either. I give them an allotted time, and all these devices need to get back to my office where the charging cables are once time is over. And if for some reason they try to cheat and use the fact I am busy with something to not take notice they are still using it, they get punished for a week without access to said device.
In the end I am glad my daughters are so creative and spend so much time drawing, building things with cardboard, glue and tape, or play outside. Usually screen time is limited to when I am cooking for dinner, after they took a shower. They still aren't stranger to tech but don't need to be hooked on social medias. My daughter's phone is mostly used to play music and for whatsapp, as well as camera when we go out. But since her time on it is limited, every comm is asynchronous and doesn't end with her having to answer to every single notification right away.
Haha, man, gotta love how you get downvoted for wanting to be a proper loving father and not someone who outsources the upbringing of their children to youtube and roblox!
It's a tool. Another creative outlet. I bought my kids ipads and apple pencils and they love them. My eldest, now at university bought a new iPad Pro recently and uses that exclusively as her work computer.
What you're doing is enforcing a semi-luddite position on your own kids because you can only leave them unattended with old things. Just be a parent ffs.
My child is 4. They prefer fruit and vegetables over sweets. Milk or water over soft drinks. They come home from nursery and, in the warmer months, play outside with their friends until 7pm. They also draw and do "craft", and we do "science" together (make slime etc). They also have a base model iPad.
It's locked down using a combination of Apple's parental controls, controls on the router and NextDNS. The level of pedagogic software available on the platform is excellent, especially for preschool. There are also other 'games', like Crayola's Create and Play[0] app (available for Android too) which are fun, engaging, creative and educational.
Like it or not, this is the world they are going to grow up in. It's the parents job to teach them to be responsible with everything, from sweets to using technology. Kids aged 3-12 can get as much out of a device like an iPad as any teenager.
In early childhood, children's brains will rapidly adapt to their environment (https://academic.oup.com/pch/article/11/9/571/2648303?login=...), for example Aboriginal Australian children develop strong spatial cognition to survive in an environment with few landmarks (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...). It'll be interesting to see what happens when the generation of children whose brains have adapted to oversaturated, constantly changing, narrative-free stimuli by being raised on YouTube Kids reaches adulthood.
> It'll be interesting to see what happens when the generation of children whose brains have adapted to oversaturated, constantly changing, narrative-free stimuli by being raised on YouTube Kids reaches adulthood.
This sounds word for word like worries about the first generation of children raised with ready access to TVs.
Sadly, Qualcom's performance is still laughable compared to Apple's M1. You can get a Macbook air for around the same price that runs twice as fast (and probably has better speakers). If you intend to run Windows, you'll also run into slower x64 applications more often than with a Mac.
I'm really not sure what the advantage would be for picking a Qualcom processor over getting an i3 or lower end AMD APU.
Someone really needs to step up ARM processor design because no matter how much I detest Apple's business practices, I can't deny that their ARM chip is far superior to the rest of the market.
> Someone really needs to step up ARM processor design because no matter how much I detest Apple's business practices, I can't deny that their ARM chip is far superior to the rest of the market
Never going to happen unless regulators do something about Qualcomm's monopoly. Apple is pretty much the only company with the resources to fight them, yet they still can't get away from Qualcomm parts even in their latest iPhones.
If it wasn't for Qualcomm, I think powerful ARM workstations would've arrived much, much sooner (among other innovations). But of course, monopolies are an enemy of innovation.
EDIT: Okay, "never" may be an exaggeration, but if it's going to happen, it's going to happen on Qualcomm's schedule, not the free market's.
> Never going to happen unless regulators do something about Qualcomm's monopoly. Apple is pretty much the only company with the resources to fight them, yet they still can't get away from Qualcomm parts even in their latest iPhones.
The regulators would be hard-pressed as they have nothing to regulate. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly on the ARM ISA. Samsung, Mediatek, Fujitsu, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. all have licenses. Even Microsoft and Google have designed their own ARM processors.
Qualcomm has nothing to do with ARM aside from being a licensee itself. Apple's contentions with Qualcomm center on, inter alia Qualcomm's already awarded patents on cellular modems and the licensing fees it charges Apple.
> If it wasn't for Qualcomm, I think powerful ARM workstations would've arrived much, much sooner (among other innovations). But of course, monopolies are an enemy of innovation.
Intel already tried with StrongARM/XScale to little noteworthy success. Nvidia has achieved limited success with Tegra, but mainly in automotive dashboards and their Shield boxes. All of this is the free market at work. Qualcomm isn't necessary for ARM laptops to fail and his historically had little to do with it.
This seems much more useful than the plethora of folding phones from a year or so back. Like doubling the size of a phone's screen doesn't get it to a size that is more useful imo - I don't watch tv/video on my phone, so I realize the value may be different for others.
But being able to have 17" of real-estate without having a 17" rectangle seems like a big deal, and I can see the half size also being more useful.
I remain worried about creasing, etc but I think those are technical things that are going to be resolved eventually. Making a device that is useful when switching between two screen sizes is the product issue, and on face/marketing image this looks like a great concept to me.
Aside from concerns about the folding display, the keyboard is wireless and detachable unlike a Microsoft surface, so you can actually put the display on a stand and not worry about craning your neck down - all with the stock keyboard. In my setup I actually have the screen close up such that I no longer need to wear eyeglasses when at the computer anymore.
Ive used the foldable oled samsung phone a few times, and I REALLY like foldable OLEDs -- No idea how long they will hold up (how many folds between noticing the wear on the screen in that area, pixel failures (do OLEDs have pixels/failure of pixels?)
AFAIK there is absolutely no innovation with software defined keyboards, they statically mimic a physical keyboard. I would expect well defined open APIs so that applications tailor the keyboard for optimal contextualized use for that app.
The only thing that came close is Apple's touchbar but even that one is quite static and not very liberating in practice.
Of course the downside of adaptive software keyboards is that you have a slightly different keyboard layout per application, so mostly a feature for experienced and professional users.
Adaptive keyboards are actually more oriented towards beginners than advanced users. They optimize for feature discoverability (and coolness factor).
Physical keyboard is current optimum for text entry precisely because it is not adaptable, and that enables you to adapt to it. Without muscle memory you are much, much slower. When an advanced user wants to refresh page, they can instantly recall Ctrl+R combo and just press it, without glancing down and coordinating between hand and eye to tap the icon, and then verifying the tap was registered. With adaptable keyboards the advanced users lose all their edge.
That said, swiping is really nice way to enter English text on touchscreens. I still hate switching to numbers and special characters, or entering non-dictionary words, but it works unexpectedly good. I agree with you that more innovation is needed.
> they can instantly recall Ctrl+R combo and just press it, without glancing down and coordinating between hand and eye to tap the icon
Interesting example, I can imagine something like an Ctrl+R combo to be a bit cumbersome on a software keyboard, would need to test it to be sure though.
Touch keyboards don't sound very liberating. I think experienced/professional users will be an especially bad fit for this. Imagine having to constantly look down at the keyboard to see what contextual options are available. It's like getting a new keyboard and having to get used to a different layout, except it's forever. Say goodbye to your flow state, hope you haven't gotten used to it.
That said, this laptop seems to include a physical keyboard, so maybe it's not that bad. I hope manufacturers keep experimenting with computer form factors, but preferably sane, human-centric ones.
I see what you mean here, but am not so sure about that to be honest. We just haven't seen much innovation here IMO. It could specifically optimize for flow, somewhat reminiscent of Github Copilot and the suggestions in phone keyboards.
For example I am wondering how a keyboard could adapt in a spreadsheet application if you focus on a non-empty cell. Depending on what's already there, there might be a predictable set of options on what is likely to be done next. (without limiting free form either).
I don't have good examples, because I simply don't know what could be done. But I am convinced that something that statically mimics a physical keyboard can be improved upon.
I think eventually (5-10 years?) most "laptops" may be using on-screen keyboards. Especially if there is somewhat decent haptic feedback.
It just makes so much more sense from a manufacturing standpoint for one thing. Makes it much simpler and you don't need to create separate keyboard layouts for different languages.
Also, younger generations are quite comfortable using on-screen keyboards on their phones.
But what will really make it take off is contextual and customizable user interfaces that sit next to the virtual letter and symbol keys. Which of course there could be many more symbols or emojis available in subkeyboards or for different contexts.
I have some doubts about this, since I feel like using a screen as a keyboard is more prone to joint based injury or wear and tear like posture or RSI related problems. So at least I don't think it would be the main keyboard type.
For me personally, this is exactly what I want. On days where I have meetings. It's a tablet for note taking. On days where I'm studying, it's a PDF reader either in 12.5" mode or 17" mode depending on the symbols. On days where I'm coding I would probably pair this with a g915 tlk and a second 15" portable monitor. That's a very reasonable workstation in a bag and wouldn't be heavy at all. The flexibility to be different types of devices in just one laptop is excellent. Where do I buy it?
I'm a programmer that spends a lot of time programming on my laptop without an extra screen. I use 15" laptops exclusively because it has a decent balance between screen size and portability. But when coding (and a lot of coding is done over Zoom where folks with bigger screens are sharing their desktops) every little bit of real-estate counts. So the idea of having a 17" in a more portable form factor, and weight is very intriguing. Like its crazy to think a 17" laptop can be under 4 lbs (3.3 lbs to be exact).
I HIGHLY recommend you grab a couple of these: AOC USB Screens [0]. They are cheap, LIGHT, and great. I have two of them with my also 15" Omen laptop.[1] So I have a full size gaming/workstation machine, and TWO external screens, at 1920 while the machine is 2500 resolution... and ALL of this fits in my backpack. and is super light.
(Also, I am designing a bracket using the VESA mount screws on the back of the screens to attach them to the small camera tripods I have which are also very light and fit in backpack - this way, I can mount one screen behind the laptop, and have that screen directly above my laptop screen, and then another to the side.)
If it's pair programming or collaborative programming you are after, I'd suggest Code With Me on latest Jetbrains IDEs. The code is E2E encrypted over Jetbrains servers, or you can even self-host. Makes presentations, lessons a breeze too.
I would love something like this if it used a real hinge or a slide instead of a folding screen. Best of all IMO would be a three part screen (two hinges/slides) with a 1:2:1 ratio so that the line - which can be small with modern bezel-less design but still present - won't be in the middle. That makes it usable for games etc. as well as many tiled terminal/editor windows. Innovation is great and all, kudos to them for trying this, but validating the UX aspects separately from the base display technology seems worthwhile.
As a replacement for my laptop, I hate this. But as an auxiliary tablet, this is much more interesting. If I had a good use case for a tablet, a folding one that runs Windows sounds much more appealing than a flat tablet running Android or iPadOS.
My biggest complaint is that I see no indication that this could accept a video input and double as a portable display. If it did that, I would start to consider something like this for myself even without an obvious use case for a tablet.
This could be such an enormous game changing format. What an exciting time this is.
For me, the idea of being able to lift up the keyboard and reveal a second screen is just crazy exciting. Fluidity in format feels like the next great leap in mobile computing.
To that end, I wonder we haven’t yet seen devices without multiple detachable wireless screens? I would love to detach a screen off the back of my MacBook — when I had space to — and have an impromptu second display.
I think there's a good user story for it. I'm normally working at home (folded, docked), in the car/train (small laptop), or in a room away from home (full size). I don't have experience with large foldables, but I'm theory this is a perfect form for me - and I love large screens (already carrying a 15.5) I'm also likely to keep it folded at home for weeks, so the hinge durability would be less of an issue.
Nice system but it is ironic that nowadays many people are moving to Apple Silicon just for the battery. Beyond the better specs like touch screens, cameras resolution, etc.
Going back in time I just now recognize and remember that one key aspect of the Palm original devices was battery duration comparing to previous experience (e.g. Newton) in innovations.
For me the battery was the least of concern - I am used to having my laptop plugged at all times. Any laptop I had wouldn't last more than an hour on battery after few months of use.
The selling point for me was silent operation and performance. For instance, my XPS 15 will wake up fans even after entering the BIOS and just opening a browser tab with a heavier website would make them fans spin like airplane blades.
It's so annoying that I dread everytime I have to work on it.
Yes, I would clean the fans regularly etc.
Working on a Mac M1 is a pure bliss. It feels next level in every aspect and the battery life is outstanding. The fact that I can run the laptop in low power mode and it is still much more performant than my XPS is mindblowing.
I find this potentially intriguing for my use case, which is 95% working from home in a fixed office arrangement.
Under those circumstances, if this can drive two external monitors, I could have the best of both worlds- a big third monitor for my primary work situation, but then it's the same device but mobile when I need to go into the office etc.
I really didn't want to do this, but I bit the bullet and bought M1 MacBook Pro.
Oh, having previously worked on XPS 15, this laptop is like next level in terms of pretty much everything.
I feel like manufacturers putting Intel or (to an extent) AMD processor in any laptop just waste their time. Sure there will be people who will buy it (who don't know about M1/M2), but it's like buying a legacy technology for premium price.
So while the folding screen looks impressive, I can't help but think it is just an expensive gimmick.
Rather than churning very much the same laptops year on year I wish manufacturers spent some time on designing a new CPU if Intel and AMD can't keep up or trying to license the CPU tech from Apple.
You're comparing an (I'm guessing) few years old xps that needed replacing, to a last year's premium quality/pricing laptop. I know Intel is still behind on efficiency, but you should try a 12th gen with p/e cores before you write the whole thing off as legacy.
Also I'm not sure apple wants to license anything - they're doing quite well keeping the design to themselves.
I had a couple of generations of XPS and I am not convinced it will be much different. I watched a few comparison videos on YT and there was no contest.
Laptop would have to be constantly plugged to achieve similar performance to M1 and the fans... the fans is a deal breaker for me.
Intel is far far behind now, even with the 12th gen.
I've been wanting a Microsoft Courier since they first did that concept video - I'm getting one of these Asus ones even if it is very early days. This Asus has a better setup than the X1 fold, I've saved up the cash, I want one.
I scrolled all the way through and couldn't find a price and/or a release date. Does anyone have the numbers?
I've been using a Lenovo Yoga Book (10" foldable running Android with virtual keyboard/wacom on second "screen") for years now that this would be the PERFECT upgrade for. Love the ratio, love the screen size, and love the screen versatility. Took me a few months to get used to typing on a screen, but it's kind of a non-factor now; being able to bring your own keyboard for an even bigger screen though.. that's a killer feature IMO -- as long as the crease isn't too noticable and the hinge actually lasts a long time.
It blows my mind that companies have the resources to sink into "innovations" like this that are just so far out that they are sure to fail. The mere sight of this stresses me out with how fragile it looks, and how clumsy it would be to use
The innovations in this area are incremental so you won't get the best out of it now. Investment into bending oled already went into smartphones so migrating it to laptops doest require signifiant capital. I would take this over a new set of "emoji innovation" and new OS skin/theme anytime.
I must confess that I like bending/folding screens and "rolling screens" even more (i.e. for TVs). I would fold my iphone if I could(assuming that the screen would not get worse) and I would love to double the screensize of my macbook air or shink it into an ipad.
We haven't solved the "bendable glass" problem yet, so foldable displays are made of soft plastic which is extremely easy to damage compared to the toughened glass you're accustomed to. You can put a permanent dent in them with your fingernail if you're not careful.
apple decided to use a paper sticker in place of metal shield, turns out whoever designed the phone in the first place used that metal shield as a structural element. No shield = bendy phone = Touch IC just so happen to be located at the bend and its balls pop off. You end up with
They are around and actually very good. I got a flip 3 for my wife and I wish I got one myself, too. While not bad, the camera could be better - I like the pixel camera more.
I would buy a laptop with two separate screens that unfold. I need the extra space to show more windows, not bigger windows, so I wouldn't mind them being separate panels. With different sizes even.
This looks really cool. Imagine if Apple had released this.
Even the software stuff is genuinely very interesting: use a tablet and phone as external screens when I'm travelling? Smart background noise reduction? Yes please!
I can't help but see folding screens as a limited-life product. Sure, laptops only last, usefully, about 6 years anyway, but it's such an obvious wear spot which would cripple the entire device.
When I read about the 30,000 cycles, I can't help but picture a mechanism which performs a "perfect" opening/closing cycle with equal force distribution.
How many cycles would that translate to when being opened/closed on the go by pulling on a corner? Or being used by a toddler?
Please show me this data from any other manufacturer... take Apple, do they put out how many drops they test their latest iPhone, the one that they advertise doesn't need a cover? The standard deviation, Bell curve?
Nobody cares about this - what people care about is: What happens when this breaks ? If Asus offers good warranty on it, why does it matter when it breaks??
But there is no indication that it breaks every month, and there is a strong indication that it breaks less ten once every 6 years. Also there is literally no indication that it takes 2 months to repair.
What I am seeing from you is just negative comments about this technology, literally based on assumption and made-up standards that are not common in the industry.
Samsung's recent foldable phones (e.g. Galaxy Z Fold 3) are proving to be quite reliable, the crease is still visible to some extent but they don't tend to break.
Micro-USB plugs are supposed to be designed for a minimum rated lifetime of 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal. My experience has not had one last even 2,000 cycles before becoming unreliable, even for cables that have always been used in ideal circumstances (gently plugged in, resting on a table). As for ones where the device gets used while plugged in, moved around, occasional lateral forces on the plug, well, they’re generally just about completely useless before 2,000 cycles.
USB-C plugs are supposed to be 10,000 cycles too. The A–to–C cable that came with my PinePhone was dead at the C plug end within four months of daily usage with occasional somewhat-stronger-than-ideal-but-not-all-that-excessive forces being applied. A couple of other cables haven’t had issues so far.
When they say 30,000 here, I’d be surprised to get 3,000 before significant problems are apparent, and wouldn’t be surprised if I failed to get 300. I like the idea and want it to work, but don’t expect it to just yet. I wish they’d focus their effort on having two separate screens with a small gap between them rather than trying to straddle the hinge, because that would be somewhere between almost as good and slightly better, and much more likely to be reliable.
This is still early tech. Early generations of mechanically-difficult things are generally terrible. I can speak to the unreliability of the Surface Book hinge: I had four units (19 months with moderate issues by the end (mild battery pillowage, screen yellowing, several split keycaps) that led to warranty replacement; 8 months then battery 2 spontaneously died; roughly DOA; two years before battery 1 died and it was out of warranty and after only a little more use it’s now pretty much a brick, can’t even stay powered on and significant pillowage on both batteries), and their base/clipboard, base/power and clipboard/power connections (which were basically the same interface) always became not completely reliable well within a year, though they weren’t particularly troublesome until maybe fifteen or eighteen months. I do acknowledge that I used this hardware fairly hard, but it was consistently well under a thousand cycles before at least minor issues in the connection were apparent, and these OLED hinges are probably even more demanding.
I've had a couple of laptops where the mechanical hinges became wonky after a couple of years. Intuitively they should be a lot sturdier than a folding screen, but perhaps intuition is misleading.
I’ve had an OLED tv from Panasonic that I used quite extensively for the last 3 years and there is absolutely no burn in whatsoever on it.
I was worried about it when I got it but loved how black the backs are so I bought it anyway.
No regrets. I remember a renowned panels review site doing extensive tests on each and it basically took them two years of full brightness always on torture to have burnin on the tv stations markee and around the presenters face. They really overdid it and so I decided it’s not a realistic risk for my usage.
How about a console? There's the menu screen with no moving pictures, and I have the habit of leaving games paused for extended periods while i get on with life. That worries me should i get an OLED.
"...while technological improvements mean OLED burn in (often called image retention by manufacturers because that sounds less scary) is less likely to hit an OLED TV than it used to be, the actions of the manufacturers themselves prove that the issue hasn’t completely gone away..."
"...It’s pretty obvious from both the messaging of OLED TV manufacturers about screen burn and the extreme lengths they go to to combat it that nobody who buys an OLED TV can yet afford to completely ignore the issue. That said, all the latest evidence suggests that – for most ‘regular’ TV users, at least – the issue is now much less likely to appear than it used to be..."
This is something I'd always thought about eg. "why not have both halves be screens". Now here it is. Will be interesting how it's like typing on a piece of glass, we do it on a phone. I'll try it one day but that'll be when they're not $2K each or whatever price. Which I don't buy brand new laptops or $1K phones to begin with so nothing against this in particular.
Although I imagine buying something like this used is probably not a good idea. (wear tear)
What I wonder is: how a screen that's supposed to be put indistinctly "vertically" or "horizontally" refreshes the image?
I remember the Dragonbox Pyra having some trouble because the cellphone/portrait screens they could get didn't have a way to refresh normally when put in a handheld/landscape orientation, and the shim software they made to adapt for this caused a penalty in performance.
Using a touch screen as a keyboard when it's folded in laptop mode just looks painful.
If the technical issues could be ironed out, folding phones would seem to make a lot of sense theoretically since it would be great a device that's small in your pocket but has more screen real estate when you're using, but this device doesn't seem like it would be that pleasant to use even if it worked perfectly.
Now I am genuinely curious why I have the psychological impulse to immediately think to myself "disaster" whenever I see one of these folding screens. I guess I have Samsung to thank for that. And I doubt I am alone in this sentiment.
Good on Asus for making bold moves. I've got one of their laptops as my primary machine for the last couple of years and it has been as reliable as the best of them.
It's competing with laptop + USB monitors that are optimized for portability. That setup is a little less elegant, but it's less expensive and it's composed of reliable components. And, you can easily use the stand-alone laptop in cramped quarters like on a bus/airplane.
The only real downside is, it's a little less compact compared to the Asus design.
I think the only thing about foldable screens is eventually the crease does not iron out and is part of the screen permanently, meaning likely you'll have to live with the crease eventually.
I've seen many Samsung foldable screens that are display units at the store, that crease is pretty worn out after a few months to a year.
Another interesting point is - does the smartphone experience translate to the laptops. We usually open the phone tens of times a day. The laptop screen will get much less movement.
Ah, I got one of their Flips around the beginning of the year, wish I'd waited as this looks really cool.
Wonder how the Linux support will be. The Flip has decent Linux hardware, as far as I can think of, every feature is working other than their useless numpad-on-trackpad thing (which I didn't even bother looking into).
Folding tech for phones wasn't quite as interesting, just a small cherry on top of something we already accommodate. Fine.
But folding tech for 17" screens is amazing because of how massive those screens are. They are completely unwieldy in the normal unfolding form factor, unlikely to fit in your backpack.
I have a 16" MacBook too, but an extra inch of diagonal (and anything bigger than that) is surprisingly bigger and gets unwieldy fast.
I wouldn't be surprised if 16" is the biggest you can bring to market that hits enough trade-offs for people to buy it. Plenty of people think that's too big.
My point is it will be interesting to see if good folding tech, by changing the nature of these trade-offs, can open up the market for larger laptop screens.
Expensive luxury land fill like all foldable displays currently are. This takes it to the extreme. I am not impressed. We should be building for sustainability at this stage of our existence and this is exactly the opposite of it.
Plus it runs the worst touch based operating system on the market.
Yep. Fuck the butterfly keyboard and touch bar. But I'll still get an Apple laptop next time I get a new device because it's the least annoying when they don't let Ive run amok.
Only because Apple's track record so far is a lot better than Asus' or other OEMs in terms of not adding novelty or gadget-y features to their pro products.
Apple has mastered the second mover advantage. They let all the other companies blow money on R&D and educating users while they simply observe the pain points. Then, they swoop in a few years later and reap the benefits.
To be fair, they don't just "reap the benefits". They are working hard at improving new technology until it is really a product. They have many prototypes long before the first product, but don't end up selling those prototypes.
What novelty features did Asus do? Apple did touchbar, the thinnest keyboard on earth, a super underpowered 12 inch MacBook, a screen with an iphone build in. And that is only the last few years.
I bet you've heard the saying "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" . That's what Apple is. You can be a "fan" of the one-eyed man without believing everything he makes or says is awesome.
I think most people are aware of fandoms and that some people will blindly support something, but that's very different from saying "this site would be cheering for it".
A device that allows me to get both a desktop-like experience as well as a notebook-like experience is more wasteful than having both a desktop and a laptop? (or a desktop dock with monitor and a laptop)
The point is that the iPadOS is not designed to be used with a keyboard but windows is. Having a touchscreen on this laptop is a useful/useless add on and not the primary feature.
It, uhm, works with a keyboard. While touch-based UX is nearly flawless, there are some weird delays, e.g. when switching keyboard layout (you may not know of this problem if your language uses Latin script) -- very annoying since it tends to swallow characters.
Uhm, I have the iPad Pro 12" and that "magic" Apple keyboard cover (that crazy expensive one) and use Japanese, English, German as my input languages, switching often. Zero lag whatsoever.
Good, maybe it was related to the Logitech keyboard. How do you switch layouts, cmd+space? It opened a small window that blocked all input until it auto-closed half a second later.
It has a dedicated key with a globe symbol in the lower left corner. I know what pop-up you are talking about, but that's non-input-blocking, i.e. the language is active when you press the button, and you can continue typing without any wait.
It's possible that your iPad is not performant enough to both render that popup and and deal with keystrokes at the same time. I'd recommend the Pro iPads for any kind of serious work.
That was Pro 10.5 2017, it’s still a very fast device. The Logitech keyboard didn’t have this dedicated button and I last used it like a year ago, so I’m glad the issue is nonexistent now with proper hardware. Thanks for the response.
Windows 11's window management is brilliant, nothing comes close out of the box (of course i3/sway/etc. can be customized to match it). Windows tablets as laptops are generally more usable than iPads as laptops due to stuff like multi-user support, filesystem access and much better window management. As tablets (media consumption + creative work like drawing) iPads are better.
This foldable device can be a nice primary machine while an iPad can't replace a laptop for most users. Macbooks are of course fine devices, but I think folding can become a nice feature when it matures.
> This means companies are being pushed to build more efficient things.
No, this means companies are being pushed to build the least expensive things, efficiency is just coincidental in some cases.
> Humans will fix sustainability issues automatically.
That depends, if you mean "eventually" I can somewhat agree with the argument but that's just a wishful thinking thought exercise. Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable of.
> No, this means companies are being pushed to build the least expensive things
Least expensive literally translate to more efficeny. To build cheaper things you need to spend less on electricity for manufacturing, less on transport (fuel), less on labor etc. Which means more efficeny.
> Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable
Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
> Least expensive literally translate to more efficeny. To build cheaper things you need to spend less on electricity for manufacturing, less on transport (fuel), less on labor etc. Which means more efficeny.
You are just considering the production aspect of efficiency. Cheaper is not higher quality, cheaper goods have a higher rate of failure, higher rate of failure means increased consumption which pushes production up. More efficient and cheaper production with better quality definitely falls into your argument, anything else becomes highly variable if it will translate, ultimately, to better efficiency of resource usage overall.
> Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
Why on the verge? I'm using the same time-scale as you did: eventually, which in mathematical terms would mean a function with its time component using a limit approaching infinity. Eventually automatically solving sustainability because "market forces" push towards efficiency doesn't mean that we should just accept that as a rule and that it's the best course of action given that we can actively model and predict if we should and could be more efficient and sustainable.
What's the argument against focusing on sustainability first? Hampering innovation and some warped sense of progress?
Folding, glasses or projection seem the only ways to smaller yet bigger.
On a folding phone, I found the hinge is noticable on a blank screen - but not when watching a video. Not sure how it will go with a terminal, but if a window doesn't cross the hinge, would it matter?
That's almost what I wanted from Lenovo with the X1 Fold, I already have space to carry around a 14" notebook, I gain nothing on a device that's half the size, but twice the screen on the same space, that would be awesome.
Great idea! A lot of people still WFH, I guess its adoption would take some time to take off, if that was not case. Of course, it all depends if the product itself takes on the positive trajectory.
WFH people are exactly the people who need a desktop-like computer for 80% of the time, then a laptop for 20% of the time (when they have to swing by the office or want to work out of a coffee shop)
In other words, this device is the PERFECT device for WFH
Needless complexity, similar to folding phones no one found a use for. It makes for really great YouTube tech content but is mostly just a direct downgrade in everyday usability.
I want something akin to a desktop with a big screen at home, but which I can also bring to a coffee shop. I don't want to have to fiddle with ugly docks, usb monitors, etc. Those things are a PITA.
It means I can only get a big screen when I happen to be where my big screen is (even a different room in the house is a pain) and every time I connect Windows decides to reposition my apps differently, and 10% of the time I have to reboot because something janky happened to the screen connection
Admittedly, An interesting idea for the very mobile user.
As for mainstream usage, horrible in my view. A 12.5" laptop, who works on this? Ants? Even the "full fledged" desktop experience is 17". A size I considered too tiny for ergonomic work 2 decades ago. Windows in touch mode...meh.
Given that it's main value is in ultra mobile use, it's weird to flex all kinds of gimmicky features like audio. As if it's some kind of "creator" laptop, which it isn't.
It's typical of Asus, a showcase laptop throwing lots of stuff at the wall.
dude thinkpads were being sold with LESS THAN 1080p screens all the way up through the mid 2010's. to this very day 1080p displays make up MORE THAN 50 percent of the steam hardware survey. resolutions that are higher than 1440p on that survey make up less than 10 percent. you are so wrong that it isn't even funny.
I love the innovation but I don't see me buying something like this. I'd use it like a standard laptop and I think most people would do the same.
And then you have all the possible screen problems. We've seen it happening with phones and I wouldn't like paying a considerable sum of money for something that will break easily if I look at it the wrong way.
Gives us connectivity, good screen, power and autonomy. Leave the weird designs, they remind me of the mobile phone era before the iPhone.
at least according to all the Asus laptop fixes from https://northridgefix.com/ - these are probably pretty unreliable laptops... like probably a capacitor will fail causing a short that prevents the laptop from charging after less than a year...
I love how these companies advertise Windows 11 Pro as a feature. As if anyone would be surprised or excited for what is effectively the status quo. It'd be like being surprised or excited that it was black.
Its just kinda funny. Now if it was certified to run OSX, Linux, Beos, or Temple OS, or something, now THAT would be a selling point.
Unfortunately this proprietary marketing-speak BS makes it easy to sell to creative professionals and those who care about color, and does signal somewhat well-defined properties.
DolbyVision works well if you have the proprietary stack (it's the format newer iPhones shoot HDR videos in -- and even DaVinci Resolve didn't support it last I checked), and PANTONE does reasonably solve the important problem of color matching.
> There's more made up marketing BS there than English.
Just because you don't know what TÜV Rheinland is doesn't make it "marketing BS". Imagine, shock horror, not everything in the world that's relevant to a lot of people has to be in English.
I can have a giant monitor in any room of the house when I'm working from home
I can get a stealth giant monitor at the coffee shop without looking like a freak (by using laptop mode but placing keyboard in front of lower screen)
And I can have a single PC I use for everything, no juggling files, no messing with docks, no messing with USB monitors (that require random reboots because of connection issues, or cause Windows to randomly reposition my apps all the time)
Dislike it or not, no material will endure getting bent 180° at a radius this small many times a day without developing some sort of visible artifacts, let alone with the layer of light-emitting components embedded in it.
My solution when traveling was to rest the keyboard on a bit of acrylic over the keyboard. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZRltWhpA6x/
(I didn't like the idea of resting an external keyboard on the laptop's keyboard directly).
The official numbers will be from an optimal test rig, but someone did do a more "realistic" folding screen test recently by flipping a Flip3 manually until it died.
Samsung rates it for 200,000 folds, and it lasted 418,500 folds before the hinge failed, with the screen actually still working.
As with most Asia-led "novelty" features on electronic devices, this looks like a "because we can" feature rather than a "because it's useful" feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFGhvYLbBRE
I think it seems like a cool idea, 17" at 4:3 ratio is alot of screen real estate, at a 12.5" 16:9 footprint.
Lot of negativity in this comment section, personally not something I'm that interested in, but I am interested in people experimenting with the form factor.