What are your favorite insane laptops?
Mine is the Dell Rugged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F56ION4_n0
Bump and fall proof, liquid proof, sand proof (and cat hairs proof I assume), extreme heat/cold proof, can be used as a blunt weapon in an emergency. Ridiculously overkill for anyone that’s not a geologist working in Antarctica or an archaeologist in the Gobi desert, and ridiculously overkill is fun
Reminds me of SOL, a solar powered rugged laptop running Ubuntu. I think they are on that for the past 10 years or something.
I won’t lie that’s pretty cool!
Let summon BOSS: Expanscape Aurora 7
I would like to argue but I can’t… you win 😅 That’s just… I don’t have words. Just wow 🤯 🤯 🤯
I wasn’t ready to see that thing. Would have sprayed my drink out if I were drinking at the moment your link loaded. lol
I would love to have that just to show to co-workers and friends, just to see their reactions. I could see it being kind of nice to have if I really really needed multiple screens. But would never want to bring it anywhere unless it is staying in a hotel room for like a week and working (which I don’t have a job that would even give that situation to happen anyway). Still nice to see mobile workstations still have room for wild-ass designs like that. Kind of like how more smart phones used to have really wild selling points.
i could definitely use something like this when i take a shit
OMG I must have it.
Why hasn’t Oracle made that
TWO floppy readers? 😮
My father had an Osborne 1. Loved it, played so many hours of Space Invaders on it. :)
yea and then you install windows on it
95 obviously, for the vibes
Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046. It was semi-rugged with a magnesium alloy chassis but, the real awesome bit was the Transmeta Crusoe processor. It was super power efficient (~15hr between charges with the extended battery) and performed decently. The thing was really ahead of its time.
That seems much too pragmatic for this thread 😁
Possibly but the CPU was pretty crazy. It used “code morphing” to translate x86 instructions to its internal ISA, something that just seems a bit ridiculous to do at the hardware level.
It’s way more common than you may realize. Intel & AMD (and other x86 CPU manufacturers of the time) did it before the first Crusoe CPU launched. (2000 according to Wikipedia)
CISC architectures are now seen as inefficient, so all the new ones are RISC and new CISC CPUs just translate the instructions to their intenal RISCier microarchitecture. The CPU’s microcode specifies what an instruction translates to.
Oh, absolutely. The thing that is weird is being non-x86 hardware and explicitly implementing the translation layer in hardware that has minimal field configurability (they did have the capability of loading something similar to microcode). It makes sense in some ways (performance being a big one) but, seems like it would be vulnerable to potential changes in the external ISA.
Those things aren’t as rugged as they imply. Go for a brief jaunt and skip a little while swinging it by the handle. It’ll turn into a laptop shaped projectile and leave a dent in both the ground and your wallet.
This was recently featured on Linus Tech Tips: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Ruggedized-trifold-computer-offers-three-18_1600635369600.html
Wow, that looks like something I’d drag to LAN parties in the late 90s.
Huawei Matebook Fold genuinely had me like wow.
The laptop with a full sized mechanical keyboard on it. Oh and dual 330w power bricks.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/407225/acer-predator-21-x-review.html
Wait a laptop with full mechanical keyboard and CURVED SCREEN? 😮
Know someone who stole a military navigational laptop worth about 20,000 , it was pretty cool . But not so cool to try to sell it at the bar and be one of a handful of people with access to it. Unused so no interesting stuff on it either.
