There was a line of ThinkPads with two screens. I'm not really sure who they were aimed at.
Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#42I wonder what the thermals are like on it. Also how long you could have it on your lap before you have to tap out.
I think you could safely outlast the battery, but you might lose circulation from the weight.
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#43If you angle the hinges a little bit slightly back from straight vertical does the whole thing flop over?
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.
I'm not sure if even lead acid batteries could provide balance for that tipping moment. Maybe a brick of pure lead.
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.
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#44The memo initially said to design a 7" screen laptop, but the " character got lost in communication. This is how this monstrosity was born.
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." Who knows? I hated them. Never bought one.
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).
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#45Ok, 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"…
Its six up top - the 7th is the one on the wrist rest...
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#46In 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 h…
Reminds me of a bunch of "execs" in dystopian anime series, much like ghost in the shell or others where you have some super powerful cyborg executive
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#47Haha, I've used the poor and lazy man's version of this:
https://i.imgur.com/xPvcUnc.jpg
In Soviet Russia you become the task scheduler!
Back laptops are older Elitebooks, front ones ZBooks. Since I can't seem to sell my old laptops, I found a use for them. I had a better multi monitor setup, but unfortunately it would've been impossible to pack and move.
Works really well tbh, either as a multi-monitor setup for one machine or as separate machines for different tasks.
But what I really want is to shove some new hardware into an old Elitebook 8530w chassis, I love that design!
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the specs, this 12KG laptop gets 28 minutes at full power on batteries >_ And it's not allowed on airplanes..
Why even waste weight on battery at that point. That is a built in ups, not a portable device.
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...
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#49The memo initially said to design a 7" screen laptop, but the " character got lost in communication. This is how this monstrosity was born.
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." Who knows? I hated them. Never bought one.
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.
Re: Aurora 7 Prototype – 7 Screen Laptop
#50The memo initially said to design a 7" screen laptop, but the " character got lost in communication. This is how this monstrosity was born.
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." Who knows? I hated them. Never bought one.
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.