It should be possible to place batteries and other heavy components as far as possible from the hinge to balance the screens up to a better angle than in the photo. Why they didn't prefer a less tall configuration (e.g. three landscape screens in a row like the frankly more sane Razer Project Valerie prototype) escapes me.
We investigated the 3 landscape screen orientation but decided that 2x 17.3 4K Panels in portrait orientation is excellent for coding when paired with 2x 17.3 4K landscape.
It also takes up less horizontal space.
There are several other benefits when viewing large spreadsheets etc.
The heaviest components are actually placed as far as possible from the hinge. The base is also quite weighty so there is exactly zero chance of this tipping over.
I mean the size, weight, awkwardness and small trackpad all seem like compromises to me. I'd suspect the battery life too. And some of the screens aren't placed in the most practical of locations.
A built in UPS is really helpful for moving from room to room around a home or office.
For a long time I've wanted something with all the properties of a desktop PC, but the ability to move it to another room while booted and without having to do multiple journeys.
A serious enough setup I could use it for work every day, yet still with the ability to take it to the living room to do stuff while supervising the kids...
Put the whole thing on a platform with casters and bolt the case and a UPS to the thing. With a solid metal base, you could put on a shelf for mouse and keyboard and a stand for a monitor.
This seems like a pretty achievable project if you have access to a workshop.
Battery regulations are the weirdest goddamn thing. TSA forced me to stow batteries in checked in luggage when I literally pointed to the regulation (I had a copy on my phone just in case this exact scenario happened) that I had to bring it on carry on. Nope didn't care, I guess the battery looked scary
I had to pay like 80 bucks to check a random bag with those batteries.
And with the "Out of band always visible battery gauge" you can literally watch the charge tick down by 1% every 20 seconds!
I expect it's not a big deal for actual usage, with my controls engineering workstation I typically only use my batteries to transfer from the dock in my office to the dock in the shop and vice versa, and to hold the laptop in suspend when I go to and from work.
Believe it or not there are alternatives to our Aurora 7 prototype but those are too large to fit in standard backpack. They usually consist of monitors bolted on to a standard desktop chassis and don't feature integrated batteries. The Aurora 7 folds down then fits into a backpack.
No, if the manufacturer decides to make the product however they want and not listen to any of the user’s needs or requests, that is zero compromise from them.
I didn't recognize the movie but the two onlookers are John Turturro and Mel Smith - which pegs it as Brain Donors (1992)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103872/
Once upon a previous century I tested a laptop with a built-in printer for an article I wrote for a magazine. Paper was fed through a slit underneath the keyboard, ink was dribbled on it from a microscopically small ink cartridge and in only half a minute it worked its way through a single A4 sheet.
It was made by Canon under the name Notejet [1]. It did not come with a built-in desk though.
Not built-in, but https://youtu.be/2nR3dDVgAVQ?t=51 is someone using a HP 200LX MS-DOS based palmtop and battery powered portable battery powered small Pentax printer, in 2015.
This is how I imagine Bad Place would torture Steve Jobs, with Bad Jony Ive bringing a version of this prototype to every other meeting to get feedback.
They also have a 'teenyserv'. Handheld computer with 64GB RAM and an 8 core i7 processor. [1]
It really seems like these are variations of The Homer. [2] I don't see a use case in mind for them, and the designers seem mostly really excited about the designs. So it looks like these are pet projects that got taken a little too seriously.
Not quite. The designs are only part of the picture. We care mostly about utility. We're quite fedup with this trend of unsustainable, premature obsoletion [1] that is the current norm for hardware. Our design philosophy is very simple.
[1] https://expanscape.com/about-us/the-3-us/
That's great to hear. Too often I get caught up in ideas for projects that fit my interests, but don't fit the rest of the world. This looked like that kind of project, but I'm glad it isn't.
In my dream world, "decision makers" (gov officials, top managers) attend their fancy meetings with one of these, and have on-screen info, fed by an army of people in different parts of the world, to minimize the amount of bullshit said, and make government / admin more efficient.
Yes, they could also have the setup at home, but I think they like the going around in black SUVs, having doors opened for them, shaking hands and all that.
There is only so much information that a single brain can analyze and parse. This is why decision makers employ a team of brains to parse it for them, rather than attempting to do it all themselves. Delegation has very significant performance advantages. More screens isn't the solution -- better parsing and analysis is the need.
I dunno, I think there is value in having all the information actively available sometimes, without needing to scroll. Imagine having every single monitoring dashboard for your app displayed on the wall - you can't truly see all of it in detail at the same time, but you can still glance over it and notice oddities faster than you could by scrolling/clicking through things, and it should actually lower the working-memory requirements.
This is literally one of the primary reasons this was designed. Imagine having to monitor several instances of PRTG, Solarwinds, Vectra AI all at the same time and action multiple issues for multiple customers. All while sometimes spending all day onsite at customers or in the datacenter. Applying a SOAR strategy to SIEM can sometimes only go so far.
I'm not sure if you are serious or not, because your dream world already exists. Maybe not with laptops like this, but most government entities and corporate boards do have software-driven processes to collect info and documents, provide them to the leaders, and run meetings to make decisions. Those who don't have specific software for it typically at least use something like google docs to share info.
I'm not sure if those of us who write such software are making governance any more efficient, but at least we are no longer printing massive binders of info every time someone has a board meeting.
BTW, most government is not feds in black SUVs - it is small local school boards, city councils, and special districts. There are tens of thousands of such government entities in the USA alone. Most of their boards are not in it for shaking hands and all that. Some are, but most are just local folk doing their jobs.
The G2 is around 22 pixels per degree. But you lose a large chunk of resolution due to bilinear resampling. So a 22 degree virtual screen would be around 1320px wide, but have a lower usable resolution. Since people did develop with multiple 1280x1024 monitors, this is a usable resolution with the right setup.
We think the priority needs to be AR. The ability to see your surroundings is crucial. We have also have some ideas around this that we are hoping to demonstrate next year.
A manager left a note for another manager to pay me .25 hours of overtime. I received 25 hours of OT pay. That's why you lead decimals with a zero. (I reported the discrepancy which is how I found out.)
I seem to remember about 10 years ago or so, when that kind of tiny 7-10" laptop was briefly popular. I don't know exactly how the marketing went, but I imagine it was positioned as "your on the go device for when your phone isn't enough." Or, maybe it was kind of like a "super PDA."
I bought a Dell Mini 7 refurbished in high school to play with and it was an interesting device. I actually dusted it off just last week while talking to a coworker about how he got into iOS development on a hackintosh and I remembered that I had loaded OS X (now macOS) onto my Dell Mini. It still boots and is a trip to play with. My parents used it for a year or two to iChat video chat (this was before facetime) with me when I went to college (with a real Macbook).
I was in college around that time and I was very intrigued by the Dell Mini 7. I finally ended up with an HP Mini 1000, that ended up being a great little device too. I never did anything cool with it like make a Hackintosh, I just liked the nostalgia.
I had the Toshiba AC100 "smartbook", one of the first and few Android netbooks... Even after overclocking the shit out of its Tegra 2, it's still slow as hell, mostly because of the low RAM and slow internal storage and SD card controller (swap just doesn't cut it). But the keyboard was really nice.
Probably netbooks. I have a...I think 9.7" netbook from ASUS I bought for grad school that was quite frankly one of the best pieces of personal electronics I've ever purchased and served me for years.
It had a (for the time) a large 250GB hard drive, ran Windows 7 and pretty much everything you could think of available for Windows at the time (at least everything needed for a grad program). I ran Cygwin, putty, all of MS-Office, yED, did some Python stuff on it, some Protégé modeling, lots of research and websurfing. On downtime I watched movies, and played some light games on it.
720p screen, some USB ports, a usable keyboard, SD-card slot, VGA out, hard-line networking and wifi and decent battery life. It cost ~$350 and went around the world with me at least a dozen times as a photographer's computer -- still works just fine except the battery is fried. Dump the SD card from the camera into it and preview photos, do some minor editing and color correcting. It's not fast, but better than the camera and kept my entire kit down to a small sling bag so I could shoot on the go and keep my entire "studio" on me at all times.
My only complaint was I wish it had a bit more RAM and CPU power. But for something the size of a large paperback book it absolutely rocked.
Fun story, my wife launched her startup right after grad school and it was in a kind of testing phase. Things looked kind of settled for a while and we had a vacation overseas planned so we went. When we arrived she received an automated notice that her VMs were maxing out, which made no sense as nobody was really using the service. We brought that netbook with us to a coffee shop in Rome that had free wi-fi, downloaded the Google App Engine dev tools (including Eclipse!) and she was able to save her company right when it was picked up by some news agencies and was getting slammed with users, but needed more VMs allocated to scale out.
Even I have a very lightweight 13" notebook, I searched something smaller and bought a 10" from Lenovo (with "just enough power for the moment"). It was the smallest I could find around here. I would liked even something more small, but couldn't find something around here sadly.
Before 2000 I used an Psion 5. I was a cool thing.
I purchased a Chuwi minibook last year. I have a lot of complaints about the device but I don't think the form factor would be one of them (although the usefulness is very situational)
I had an 8" or so laptop that was wonderful. Perfect size for travelling, and since it was a proper x86 running normal Windows it ran normal software and old games worked perfectly. Nowadays there isn't enough that my phone doesn't do to justify carrying a second device, but at the time it was brilliant.
I have a One Mix Yoga 2S from 2018 and it's amazing for the emergency laptop purposes. BC we used to go out and I needed to carry a backpack large enough for a 14" laptop because I am on call pretty much permanently (but then again it's like I get paged twice a year, tops) and now I can just carry https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn
Funny you should say that. I'm a blind screen reader user, and assumed this was some new 7-inch laptop. Since I don't need a huge screen, I'm always on the lookout for small, performant laptops. Seems this one is anything but. :) Glad I read the comments first.
As I mention elsewhere, it's an emergency laptop for me. I am more or less constantly on pager duty but I only get paged like twice a year or so, thus the keyboard gets used perhaps two hours a year or less. It's good enough for that. Forcing me to slow down my typing in those situations is actually a boon.
I'm curious how well the new Raspberry Pi 400 could be adapted as an effective screen-reader–optimized portable computer. No need to waste weight and battery power on the display.
This reminds me of how I once needed to look at a bunch of screens at once, so I made an app for cardboard VR that put a sphere of virtual screens hanging in the air all around me. All I had to do was swivel in my chair. The resolution was a bit low, but it sort of worked nevertheless. That was a fun hack, but not nearly as fun as building this monster I bet.
Ok, this is clearly a joke / fun project that metastasized / etc, and it's also clearly awesome, but I gotta ask - why 7 screens?
Why not 6? Or 8?
They said that they wanted to design a mobile Security Operations Center - do people doing this work normally need exactly 7 screens worth of information? I've seen pictures of "Operation Centers" which have tons of screens so it's plausible that someone would need "a lot" of screens, but I can't tell if this would actually achieve the goal of being a mobile SOC.
(My gut feeling is that they were trying to see how many screens they could put onto a single laptop, moreso than that small screen next to the touchpad actually being genuinely, uniquely useful, but I'd love to know for sure if each screen actually has a specific purpose)
Traders frequently use smaller monitors stacked up very high. The upper monitors usually have charts or heatmaps or live video feeds. They don't usually read the text from those screens. This product would have sold well to the finance crowd when monitors were relatively expensive.
Our prototypes are definitely geared towards day traders. We have had a lot of feedback from individuals in the finance industry and as such we are refining our prototypes accordingly.
And the lord spake, "Then shalt thou count to seven, no more–no less. Seven shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be seven. Eight shalt thou not count, neither count thou six, excepting that thou then proceed to seven. Nine is right out."
This reminded me of the hitchhiker scene in There’s Something About Mary:
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin’ there, there’s 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
...
Ted: That’s right. That’s – that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody’s comin’ up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won’t even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That – good point.
Hitchhiker: 7’s the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that’s the number. 7 little chipmunks twirlin’ on a branch, eatin’ lots of sunflowers on my uncle’s ranch. You know that old children’s tale from the sea.
So, I think that clears up why they went with 7 screens.
191 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadShots fired Apple. Your move. :)
Also, nitpick: > Designed for for professionals
[0]: https://expanscape.com/the-aurora-7-prototype/screen-transit...
Doesn't look as k-rad if it was more practical. Of all the "no compromise" design goals I don't think sane or practical was among them.
We investigated the 3 landscape screen orientation but decided that 2x 17.3 4K Panels in portrait orientation is excellent for coding when paired with 2x 17.3 4K landscape.
It also takes up less horizontal space.
There are several other benefits when viewing large spreadsheets etc.
The heaviest components are actually placed as far as possible from the hinge. The base is also quite weighty so there is exactly zero chance of this tipping over.
I mean the size, weight, awkwardness and small trackpad all seem like compromises to me. I'd suspect the battery life too. And some of the screens aren't placed in the most practical of locations.
That said it's a pretty impressive prototype.
And it's not allowed on airplanes..
For a long time I've wanted something with all the properties of a desktop PC, but the ability to move it to another room while booted and without having to do multiple journeys.
A serious enough setup I could use it for work every day, yet still with the ability to take it to the living room to do stuff while supervising the kids...
This seems like a pretty achievable project if you have access to a workshop.
Also, that 'ups' allows one to move the device around - it is called out as a mobile SOC.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
Is the battery limit just for carry-on or for checked too? Could you just check this in?
This is due to fire safety.
I had to pay like 80 bucks to check a random bag with those batteries.
I expect it's not a big deal for actual usage, with my controls engineering workstation I typically only use my batteries to transfer from the dock in my office to the dock in the shop and vice versa, and to hold the laptop in suspend when I go to and from work.
You can't have 7 screens, long battery life, and have it be light weight. That would be zero compromises.
It's basically the old adage: Fast, cheap, good - pick two.
They've sacrificed any kind of portability for more screens.
If that's portable, then so is any number of small PCs that could fit in a backpack.
You might be thinking ultra-portable.
Yes, it does. If I don't get all of what I want, then, ipso facto, the product involves some compromise.
Now, if you mean “Zero compromise is almost always a marketing lie”, that's definitely true.
It was made by Canon under the name Notejet [1]. It did not come with a built-in desk though.
[1] http://laptop.pics/canon-notejet/
https://www.asus.com/us/Monitors/Portable-Products/
It really seems like these are variations of The Homer. [2] I don't see a use case in mind for them, and the designers seem mostly really excited about the designs. So it looks like these are pet projects that got taken a little too seriously.
[1] https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/
[2] https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
https://archive.is/gcbcT
https://web.archive.org/web/20201124160116/https://expanscap...
https://expanscape.com/the-aurora-7-prototype/screen-transit...
I'm not sure if those of us who write such software are making governance any more efficient, but at least we are no longer printing massive binders of info every time someone has a board meeting.
BTW, most government is not feds in black SUVs - it is small local school boards, city councils, and special districts. There are tens of thousands of such government entities in the USA alone. Most of their boards are not in it for shaking hands and all that. Some are, but most are just local folk doing their jobs.
Could anyone with experience confirm?
See https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ for more examples of people trying to write code in VR.
This is how this monstrosity was born.
Who knows? I hated them. Never bought one.
It had a (for the time) a large 250GB hard drive, ran Windows 7 and pretty much everything you could think of available for Windows at the time (at least everything needed for a grad program). I ran Cygwin, putty, all of MS-Office, yED, did some Python stuff on it, some Protégé modeling, lots of research and websurfing. On downtime I watched movies, and played some light games on it.
720p screen, some USB ports, a usable keyboard, SD-card slot, VGA out, hard-line networking and wifi and decent battery life. It cost ~$350 and went around the world with me at least a dozen times as a photographer's computer -- still works just fine except the battery is fried. Dump the SD card from the camera into it and preview photos, do some minor editing and color correcting. It's not fast, but better than the camera and kept my entire kit down to a small sling bag so I could shoot on the go and keep my entire "studio" on me at all times.
My only complaint was I wish it had a bit more RAM and CPU power. But for something the size of a large paperback book it absolutely rocked.
Fun story, my wife launched her startup right after grad school and it was in a kind of testing phase. Things looked kind of settled for a while and we had a vacation overseas planned so we went. When we arrived she received an automated notice that her VMs were maxing out, which made no sense as nobody was really using the service. We brought that netbook with us to a coffee shop in Rome that had free wi-fi, downloaded the Google App Engine dev tools (including Eclipse!) and she was able to save her company right when it was picked up by some news agencies and was getting slammed with users, but needed more VMs allocated to scale out.
It's a pity the small (10 and 11 inch) Macbooks seem to have gone.
http://oldcomputers.net/zeos-ppc.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto
I think it sparked my love of tiny computers, which I have far too many of today.
It's the smallest non-Atom, non-eMMC laptop. It's basically a 2018 Macbook Air folded in half both directions.
https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/
Why not 6? Or 8?
They said that they wanted to design a mobile Security Operations Center - do people doing this work normally need exactly 7 screens worth of information? I've seen pictures of "Operation Centers" which have tons of screens so it's plausible that someone would need "a lot" of screens, but I can't tell if this would actually achieve the goal of being a mobile SOC.
(My gut feeling is that they were trying to see how many screens they could put onto a single laptop, moreso than that small screen next to the touchpad actually being genuinely, uniquely useful, but I'd love to know for sure if each screen actually has a specific purpose)
Because 8 is too many and 6 is clearly not enough. This is what separates the Steve Jobs' of this world from the rest of us.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin’ there, there’s 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
...
Ted: That’s right. That’s – that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody’s comin’ up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won’t even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That – good point.
Hitchhiker: 7’s the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that’s the number. 7 little chipmunks twirlin’ on a branch, eatin’ lots of sunflowers on my uncle’s ranch. You know that old children’s tale from the sea.
So, I think that clears up why they went with 7 screens.