Portless Laptops are Coming! Run Away! or are they going to be awesome?

[wanderingfool2]

14 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

Wireless charging on a laptop - LOVE IT! 

In general I am against wireless charging, it is just way too much wasted energy.  I prefer the old methods where they would have exposed metal to connect with in order to charge....I mean it wouldn't be that much different than the current design except needing only a bit of the surface with a metal exposed surface.

 

Wireless charging, if the coils get slightly misaligned could even cause nearly double the energy usage compared to a cable.

 

I really hope that this doesn't end up becoming a trend or worse a standard...as much as I hate Apple their MagSafe chargers of old were pretty solid in their concept and could be implemented in place of wireless if there was an actual will to.  (Examples being the magnetic USB's that you can find now)

[DeScruff]

14 hours ago, poochyena said:

How often are you plugging things into your laptop? The only thing I plug into my tablet is the charging cable. My keyboard and mouse are bluetooth. I imagine most are the same when it comes to their portable devices.

... Every time I use the thing?
Any time I use my laptop the files on it are out of date (cause I don't use the laptop as my primary device) . I'm not guaranteed to have an internet connection when I use my laptop if im going out, so just putting the up to date files on a USB stick is a better option then preemptively turning on and updating my laptop. (Then when I get back turning on my laptop to upload the files back to the desktop)

 

If I use it while at home, its generally because I want to not be in the room my desktop is in for whatever reason, and in those situations - again all the time.
The Mic on the laptop is terrible, so I often use a USB mic if I'm doing a call. Also I am not buying a bluetooth mouse when my old mouse works perfectly fine.

[19_blackie_73]

7 hours ago, dizmo said:

I don't mind the headphone jack. You can buy USB C headphones, or if you don't care that much about sound quality (though if you did why you're using a phone is beyond me) there's BT. 

Yes there are USB C headphones - but i dont see why should buy new ones if the old ones work just fine, just environmental madness - just give me the port that is universal for decades and works just fine

And BT is more hassle than worth it, half the time it wont connect on first try and still you have another thing to charge

I had to resort to a 2017 xps to get a full size sd slot as a photographer to not have to carry a ton of dongles for every crap... Its frustrating to have to carry x amount of dongles just to get work done on the road

[Blademaster91]

6 hours ago, poochyena said:

soooo, a large section of people, including myself.

Then buy a tablet, there are diminishing returns for a laptop this thin and light, you're taking away everything including cooling and battery capacity for very little weight compared to other laptops which have ports and active cooling on them.

6 hours ago, poochyena said:

Taking away what convenience? This is a tablet replacement, not a high end $2k gaming workstation desktop PC replacement.

The convenience of having a USB-A or USB-C port in case it is needed, and no a USB port isn't a feature just for a high end gaming laptop. How is a laptop like this more convenient when you have to carry around a bulky dock?

And the keyboard on this laptop probably sucks, the cpu likely will throttle, and you'll probably needed a padded bag so the laptop won't be ruined.

[Error 52]

30 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Then buy a tablet, there are diminishing returns for a laptop this thin and light, you're taking away everything including cooling and battery capacity for very little weight compared to other laptops which have ports and active cooling on them.

The convenience of having a USB-A or USB-C port in case it is needed, and no a USB port isn't a feature just for a high end gaming laptop. How is a laptop like this more convenient when you have to carry around a bulky dock?

And the keyboard on this laptop probably sucks, the cpu likely will throttle, and you'll probably needed a padded bag so the laptop won't be ruined.

You would hope that the Macbook butterfly keyboard crap would end the thinness wars, but apparently not. Hell, this thing is two millimeters thinner than the Acer Swift 7, and that thing was already in "cool but impractical" territory as is.

[tim0901]

5 hours ago, poochyena said:

It absolutely is. Why would a regular person be using a usb storage drive in 2022? I've only used it once in the past 5 years, and that was to get some documents printed at the library. SD cards a little more commonly used.

Students - one of the prime markets for thin-and-light laptops like this - still use USB drives all the time. Whether that's for printing, transferring files to a school/university pc, even just sharing things with friends (and yes that sometimes would fall under the Jolly Roger). The file-size limit for sending things via email is shockingly small and so for sharing anything bigger than basic word documents USB is the way to go - unless all your friends are rich enough to afford Macs thereby making Airdrop an option. Manual bluetooth file sharing sucks ass and just isn't worth thinking about.

 

And sure you can do this by sharing links through cloud storage providers, but A) that assumes your internet connection is good enough to make that a worthwhile option (I'm not waiting 15 minutes to upload this pdf just to be able to give it to the person sitting next to me) and B) barely anyone that I know actually knows that that's a thing? I would argue it's more of a niche "power-user" option than a thumb drive, which at the very least everybody knows about. Personally I think you're greatly overestimating the average tech literacy of the population.

 

Another use-case for USB ports these days is 2FA hardware like YubiKeys, which are becoming increasingly common especially in industries such as banking and tech. If the laptop supported NFC like some enterprise laptops then this would be less of an issue, but as far as I can tell it doesn't.

[Maticks]

wonder if this means if the power brick is not plugged into the wall. if the ports in the brick will stil work placed against the chassis.

no wall power no ports ?

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, tim0901 said:

Students - one of the prime markets for thin-and-light laptops like this - still use USB drives all the time. Whether that's for printing, transferring files to a school/university pc, even just sharing things with friends (and yes that sometimes would fall under the Jolly Roger). The file-size limit for sending things via email is shockingly small and so for sharing anything bigger than basic word documents USB is the way to go - unless all your friends are rich enough to afford Macs thereby making Airdrop an option. Manual bluetooth file sharing sucks ass and just isn't worth thinking about.

They probably all have provided academic O365 (OneDrive) or GSuite (Google Drive) account that come with A LOT of storage and you can directly share files and folders from those over the internet, should migrate to using that rather than USB drives.

 

And unless it's not a small non "yarr here it is file" then internet speed is a non issue, even less if you are on campus. Once you setup the sharing of the folder you can just drop files in there, they will sync and anyone who has this folder shared to them will just see the files, and just pin this to Explorer.

 

Every student in our school system has been using both cloud platforms for yearsss, they know how to use that more than they do a mapped network drive, email and sometimes a USB drive.

 

Also not a defense for having no ports, just giving some advice to utilize tools provided to you.

[SavageNeo]

buy a tablet, that thing has no performance due to overheating.

Onyl thing tht it has is a keyboard, but you can get those for a tablet too

[Freakwise]

Really curious on how they will manage to make those laptop "stable" (for lack of better word) when the wireless doohickey is attached and possibly other stuff like cable to connect to somewhere or something 

[Thaldor]

On 2/2/2022 at 5:22 AM, GhostRoadieBL said:

I like the idea for a coffee shop or travel laptop, if there's no ports without adding a box I would feel more comfortable charging at airports and at places like Def Con or HOPE

Just saying, no. Unknown company that clearly more goes for the looks than the robustness of tech, everything wireless (most likely BT based because it's easier than develop your own, like many think Apples AirDrop is something next to magic and different while it's just BT negotiation between devices and then WiFi connection between those devices to transfer the data and that is Apple, not a 1-10 person company from Arkansas), I wouldn't take that thing even to the same city where some hacker meetup is happening.

 

In those places having even Bluetooth turned on is more like inviting people into your device and sharing a WiFi is an insult. I would give it max hours before that thing was opened like a boiled oyster in Def Con setting, probably even less if you were to charge it with the included charger that would connect all of the ports (most likely with BT) as soon as you attached it.

[GhostRoadieBL]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

probably even less if you were to charge it with the included charger

Definitely not a good idea to charge with the included charger at a con but wireless charging in how it functions prevents key logging through outlet scoping. There must be some near field connection for the IO, can't tell if it's encrypted or even if it's wireless at all but it should be. 

 

the coil in the charger does look standard and shouldn't be hard to mod a magnet alignment into an off the shelf charger, if it's as the component exploded render displays.

 

I still think it's an interesting option and it's not like you bring your main rig to these cons, most are running burner laptops or modded chromebooks to play around with and nuke before leaving. I even bring burner USBs just in case which get tossed before leaving. Even as just a con challenge to reverse engineer a way to inject to or piggy back the wireless IO would be on the table.

[Forbidden Wafer]

3 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

There must be some near field connection for the IO, can't tell if it's encrypted or even if it's wireless at all but it should be. 

I think Qi chargers use Bluetooth low power. Not the greatest standard in terms of security. 

[GhostRoadieBL]

15 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

I think Qi chargers use Bluetooth low power. Not the greatest standard in terms of security. 

Qi charging has nothing to do with bluetooth, Qi is the title of the standard for coil number and size, along with some detection circuits for shutting the coil off when inductive materials are between the receiving and inducing coils.

There may be some specific chargers which have bluetooth for other functions but not for linking to devices or anything related to the Qi standard.

[Thaldor]

3 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

Definitely not a good idea to charge with the included charger at a con but wireless charging in how it functions prevents key logging through outlet scoping. There must be some near field connection for the IO, can't tell if it's encrypted or even if it's wireless at all but it should be. 

 

the coil in the charger does look standard and shouldn't be hard to mod a magnet alignment into an off the shelf charger, if it's as the component exploded render displays.

 

I still think it's an interesting option and it's not like you bring your main rig to these cons, most are running burner laptops or modded chromebooks to play around with and nuke before leaving. I even bring burner USBs just in case which get tossed before leaving. Even as just a con challenge to reverse engineer a way to inject to or piggy back the wireless IO would be on the table.

I would go with the easiest solutions just because we ain't talking about a big company bringing out new tech. I don't mean small companies couldn't bring new tech, more or less most of the tech is brought out by smaller companies, but this is something probably everyone in some extent are trying to do and suddenly 1-10 person company not only manages to make a portless laptop solving the problem of wireless charging being a bit underpowered but some really impressive stuff at the same time (if this isn't just a hype concept for that juicy investor money) like the wireless Thunderbolt and just that apparently 3 USB-C or Thunderbolt ports + USB-A + SD-card + headphone jack all simultaneously working wirelessly along charging (that rules out any kind of induction based data transfer).

 

If they didn't invent something really impressive, I would put my money on that they either just use WiFi and/or BT to connect the ports because that would be possible (except the Thunderbolt) and would make this one pretty vulnerable; Either there must be software from which you connect to the charger to activate the ports and their functions or (looking at their website and getting the image they are not selling professional gear so it's for consumers) connecting the charger must activate the handshake to connect the ports. Now even if you were to make your own charger that didn't have the ports the charger would still activate the handshake from the laptop side and you would be the blinking light on a rock in a stormy sea.

 

The wireless charging would protect you from outlet scoping/charger surfing but there's way cheaper ways to do that. Just simple decoupler/isolator box, either go with the capacitor circuit or just go with the induction, couple coils and iron heart to join them. What you really want is just ground loop filtering but other way around but same stuff works either way, most easily to get things to solve this are surge protectors, most of them have isolated input and output and minimize the noise between them, if you want to go for the big guns, just get UPS that runs from the batteries and uses the outlet to charge the batteries, there isn't a single change for any noise getting from whatever device you use to the outlet or any noise coming from the outlet to get to your device because your device basicly isn't connected to the outlet (for phones this is easier because many powerbanks are so stupid they do not bypass the power but do just this, charge the battery while charging the phone with the battery).

(E: trust me on this one, having a guitar amp from the 60's which is more like a factory modified ripoff in small apartment with way too few outlets isn't fun because you will get hum from everywhere without isolation)

[Senzelian]

On 2/2/2022 at 4:09 AM, GhostRoadieBL said:

the world's first portless laptop

I honestly read "the world's first pointless laptop".

[Forbidden Wafer]

6 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

Qi charging has nothing to do with bluetooth, Qi is the title of the standard for coil number and size, along with some detection circuits for shutting the coil off when inductive materials are between the receiving and inducing coils.

There may be some specific chargers which have bluetooth for other functions but not for linking to devices or anything related to the Qi standard.

I actually got it wrong. It's Rezence that uses Bluetooth.

 

https://www.rezence.com/meet-rezence/

 

But Qi has a lot more than just coil sizes. 137 pages long specs sheet for communications alone. 

 

https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/knowledge-base/specifications/download-the-qi-specifications.html

[Arika]

6 hours ago, Senzelian said:

I honestly read "the world's first pointless laptop".

same thing. portless = pointless

[Vishera]

14 minutes ago, Arika S said:

same thing. portless = pointless

Meanwhile with my laptop... :

On 10/12/2021 at 7:55 AM, Vishera said:

And my laptop is a Fujitsu LIFEBOOK AH532 (and the CPU is socketed!,I am considering upgrading to an Intel Core i7 3632QM - supported in BIOS of course!)

 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Vishera said:

Meanwhile with my laptop... :

How are you still alive? You should have died carrying that around.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

How are you still alive? You should have died carrying that around.

[suicidalfranco]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

How are you still alive? You should have died carrying that around.

the power of having 4 usb ports in a laptop can modify the gravity pull toward earth

[JogerJ]

Well that's brave, it solves the issue with USB/Display standards changing every few years, except it doesn't since the laptop will be out of date sooner than those ports do. Unless it's water-/dustproof I see little to no reason for this device to exist. Given the limited I/O it's pretty much a tablet with a keyboard. I have serious doubts whether you'd get any real work done before it thermal throttles. They also have to ensure that the connection between the brick and the back of the device is stable and doesn't disconnect every time something bumps into it. And good luck with repairs

[Vishera]

59 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

the power of having 4 usb ports in a laptop can modify the gravity pull toward earth

I can add 2 more with the power of ExpressCard expansion slots

[Forbidden Wafer]

2 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I can add 2 more with the power of ExpressCard expansion slots

Wow, I haven't seen one of these in a long while.