Laptop designer

Each of us has a good time when you think about changing an old laptop to something new and modern. So my time has come. But tracking the news sites on the gland, I never saw what to change it. Gigahertz doesn't double every year, and notebook design has not changed significantly since the 90s. In fact, to change it and why not. Yes, it only began to fall apart physically, but the video adapter has long been forgotten by the manufacturer.

It became sad for me - the tops cannot, the lower classes do not want, my personal micro-revolution was brewing. And since I was tracking interesting iron, I was inspired by the little by little Ubuntu Edge, Tegra K1. Inspired and Core M with passive cooling, which managed to be more powerful than my old Core 2 Duo.


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So, it all starts with a smartphone, which in appearance cannot be distinguished from modern 5 "devices, it can only be thicker, after all, it also has a 256 GB SSD disk, according to Intel's promise .

On-board pins for PCIe bus to connect an external GPU. As an OS, refined Ubuntu (Ubuntu Touch), or Windows (that's just how to modify it?). Core M processor, comparable in performance to previous generation Core i5 mobiles:



Maybe you can shove this into a smartphone? And if not, it will help out the Cortex A57 / A53 from Qualcomm in big.LITTLE or Atom format for 14 nm.

As a smartphone, do not make it thicker, but with fulltime work it will not last long, and how to work without a keyboard? To do this, we have a docking station that does not differ much from the Rapoo E6300:



Inside the docking station, a full-fledged GPU, maybe something comparable to the Tegra K1 or what is more powerful on a 16 nm chip with passive cooling. This is enough to run WebGL, indie games and something more powerful.

Left to the docking station is a SATA to USB receiver for a 2.5 "drive, whatever one may say, and a 256 GB SSD is not enough to store LostFilm serials in good quality. The drive is on mechanics, so there is a power off button for it when you want silence. Along the perimeter, like all decent laptops, a standard set of USB ports, HDMI, Ethernet (over HDMI) and MicroSD. And, of course, a large battery that feeds the smartphone.



The connected smartphone, to the right of the docking station, divides its 5 "screen in two. A laptop touchpad is emulated from below. A small screen on top of which you can place current system information, quick launch icons, or even some program panels.

When you connect the mouse, the screen is fully activated. And here you can turn around, almost like with a second monitor. Especially if Samsung in 2015 starts to supply such flexible OLED panels:



This is where we came to when we have a mobile workstation, if you want to connect it to a 27 "monitor or 4K TV. But we wanted the format of the laptop, so we’ll continue.



Here you will need a special stand, to which it would be nice to hang good speakers, not a Hi-Fi system, of course, but 2 speakers with 45 mm speakers will leave behind notebook tweeters.



As for the screen, you can dwell on the usual LCD matrix, but Intel and ARM promise WiGig technology. Why not take advantage of this, turning the 15.4 screen into a tablet, with the simplest ARM processor, receiving a WiGig signal from a smartphone?





It remains only to add a battery to the screen and, perhaps, a small flash card with a backup Linux-based OS, in case the smartphone is not available (stolen, broken, lost). And now, we have a tablet ready that does not have its own OS, it simply connects via WiGig to the smartphone as a second screen.

And now we collect everything together and get a dream laptop:




The concept is very rough and needs some work, but I would like to have such a laptop. I am even thinking of sorting out this topic in more detail and getting to Kickstarter. But for this you need to find like-minded people who can make a photo-realistic render, advise on the production of electronics in China.

Or maybe just according to your reviews understand that this is nonsense and you should not bother?


On the other hand, can any manager from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, etc. hook on the idea and make the release of such devices, who knows?