Very cool. It may be worth pointing out to those who love the idea of more screen estate in your laptop bag but are not aware of existing options that you can already do this by packing one or more portable screens.
Less street cred than the featured gizmo but available now and likely a heck of a lot cheaper.
I currently have a portable screen, keyboard, flat mouse and foldable laptop riser with my laptop in it's bag - though haven't used them altogether in public for fear of being "that guy".
Not the OP, but I have tried Duet Display on Android and it only works via Wifi. Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 (the premium price series) can be used as an external monitor, but only for Windows machines.
How long till Linux or Gnome supports these types of laptops? To me this is an incredible concept since I can use it both as another monitor as well as a portable device for a few days of a year during my holiday. If only after it has full Linux support.
Does it work out of the box or do you need to do something specific. I have a custom built desktop with a 4k and a 1080p monitor. I can get one of them to look good. :( I’m on mint.
Works out of the box for me since moving to Fedora running Wayland and Gnome.
I just set one monitor to 100% and the other (4k) to 200%. In fact I think that choice was originally made for me but you can change it.
When I first started using it a couple of years ago you'd get old artifacts when moving a window from one monitor to another. e.g. the mouse pointer could be the wrong size.
Over the years, like many things on Linux, it's got more polished.
Linux supports this, but applications on Linux may not (or not gracefully). I've found Chrome on Ubuntu (GNOME with Wayland) just doesn't adjust its scale when being dragged across displays with differing UI scaling settings. I don't have this problem on Windows or Mac OS.
- Gnome actually does the scaling in the compositor, not in the X server itself.
- Most desktop environments should be doing all that for you. At the time I wrote that (over 2 years ago), in Gnome you had to go in to an advanced settings menu and enable "experimental fractional scaling"; I'm not sure if that's still true today.
- Some things pick up the DPI from the XSETTINGS protocol, not from the XRDB. Specifically, parts of Java's AWT/Swing do this. But other parts use the XRDB. And they conflict with eachother. When I last looked at Swing (April-ish 2020) it was impossible to get it to do the right thing on X11 (I was working on a patch, but then I had some life disruptions and never came back to it).
It is. Right now your mileage will vary depending on graphics driver, compositor (KDE and Gnome have their own), etc - but for me it worked pretty well. Wayland's not _quite_ polished.
Wayland itself functions quite well in my experience, but if you run anything Nvidia or anything with the X11 compatibility layer, you're in for the rare but annoying bug to slip through.
Linux desktops support color management to approximately the same extent Windows does, which is to say "annoying for professional users with specific applications, non-existent otherwise".
Uh, you can load ICC profiles on both Linux and Windows. On my Thinkpad X201 it was a hard requirement if you didn't want your eyes to bleed, without the profile it was like staring into a bug zapper it was so blue.
This is a super common misunderstanding. When you load an ICC profile into "the system", sometimes all the colors everywhere change, because many ICC profiles contain (non-standard) RGB gamma ramps. Those are 1D per-channel LUTs - the same ballpark as changing the "R G B" values in a monitor's OSD; they can't do color-space conversions. The reason this is done is essentially to reduce numerical artifacts when a color-managed application uses the profile. [1] The reason why it's global is because gamma ramps are part of the scanout system (display interface) in a graphics adapter.
This effect makes it look like the entire system is color-managed when in fact the opposite is true.
[1] Any profile that has been created with gamma ramps has to be used system wide and specified in color-managed applications, because the standard color transforms in the profile are calculated to be correct when the gamma ramps are in place. If you skip either step, you'll get wrong results.
Wouldn't it be possible to do a vector product with the wrong RGB gamma ramp to get a resulting color profile that would work system-wide? (as it may be easier to change the color profile than the RGB gamma ramp)
Color temperature is not what's being talked about here; that's just a small subset of color management. HDR is also not about bits, but color space, which requires profile support.
Even 10 bit support is another issue. A few composers have alpha support recently, but it isn't something you can expect to use.
From what I read the windows support for the X1 fold is still pretty bad and usually for specialty consumer devices linux support lags behind quite a bit.
I was considering buying a X1 fold, but reviews saying windows support was bad (probably since windows X never launched) and no linux support even on the horizon made me hold off.
The MacBook-iPad integration for external display use is really quite nice. I don't use it that much right now because I've got a nice extra wide screen monitor next to my laptop stand for when I'm at home and I'm always at home, but I used to, when I would be working at the library in the olden days and it was nice to have an extra screen from time to time.
Yea, there are many people just using their laptops as a monitor on stand next to their existing monitors. Then they just use whatever separate keyboard they like. So this would essentially remove the bottom part from laptop for extra screen estate.
I can imagine this would work fine too in a full display mode (if that is hardware default), but then when you try to switch to a laptop mode somehow half of the screen needs to turn off and the other half needs to rotate 90 degrees. It sounds like a lot of work.
No thanks. Bad idea to replace the keyboard and have to carry a separate thing. There is a reason why the current laptop format is popular. That said, why do I have a sinking feeling that this is going to be widely popular? People will buy this like there is no tomorrow. And then, 10 years later, physical keyboard will be a new reversing trend.
> There is a reason why the current laptop format is popular
Because Apple invented it with the PowerBook 100 series and no one has come up with anything better?
That doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there. PC makers have tried. Apple tried. Nothing has stuck as well.
This may be the thing that does it. We’ll have to see.
That said I kind of doubt this thing works. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets delayed. If it doesn’t I bet it has serious problems like the first Samsung folding phones did.
Whether this is THE new successful design or not, I can’t imagine someone hitting it out of the park with the first try.
> Because Apple invented it with the PowerBook 100 series and no one has come up with anything better?
No, I think it's because laptops have 2 primary things going for them:
1. They're portable
2. They're all-in-one (primarily, there's still the charger)
I agree with the GP post, the folding screen seems more like a novelty at this point given it forces you to sacrifice (a) an included keyboard and (b) with the keyboard separate, you are limited to the places you can actually use the laptop (I know I'm probably rare but I actually use my laptop on my lap on the couch).
I think that's also why tablets are successful, they're even more portable and they're still all in one. I think a portable computing device that doesn't satisfy those characteristics is going to have an uphill battle.
With the PowerBook 100 series reference I was referring to the way the laptop was laid out.
Obviously other people made things that look like laptops before. It didn’t take people long to figure out the screen goes on top and the keyboard goes on the bottom.
But other than that things weren’t exactly standardize the way they are today. Much of the time the keyboard was near the bottom of the case instead of the top, so there was no wrist rest area. And then you had the problem of the mouse which was just starting to get popular. Some laptops had a little tiny joystick/control pad thingy next to the screen in the bezel. Some, like Compaq, offered a track ball that would mount onto the side of the computer. Or people put a little tiny track ball up next to the screen. One very creative company had a little tiny pop out mouse.
But Apple was the first one to put the keyboard near the back, giving you wrist rests upfront, and put the trackball (later trackpad) in the middle of the front. The layout practically every laptop uses today.
The only real serious attempt at changing things I’m aware of would be machines where you can either turn the display around to use it like a tablet, or remove the keyboard all together like the Surface.
> No thanks. Bad idea to replace the keyboard and have to carry a separate thing. There is a reason why the current laptop format is popular.
My daily driver is a tablet style x86 computer plus a Lenovo bluetooth keyboard. I feel so bad for people on laptops. It is so so so excellent to be able to raise my display up to eye level at a coffee shop or office (with a tablet arm, or just pile of whatever), and have my bt keyboard wherever I want.
The built-in folio keyboard is fine for couple hour sessions on a sofa or what-not, if there's not a good place for mounting the arm. But the gooseneck tablet arms are quite flexible & capable, so often I can find something to mount onto & don't need the folio keyboard.
In general, I find it kind of condescending to assume we're all doing it right already, to rule out change. I don't think many people have tried other ways of working. I field ~2 questions/hour about my setup most places I go- people see it & are blown away, they have to know. It's obviously much better, far better ergonomics & freedom, to separate the screen and keyboard. The conventional laptop form factor makes one stare semi-near-by where your hands are, and that coupling either a) leaves your hands weirdly high up or b( your eyes lowered / neck craned. The typical laptop is quite the usability compromise.
I've been using a "screen" keyboard (the Lenovo Yoga Book) for ~5 years now and it's a big initial adjustment, but one you eventually stop even thinking about. Being able to free up your keyboard space for more screen space (or, for the LYB, use alternative inputs) is actually incredibly freeing for your device and workflow, IMO.
If this laptop is priced right, it'll be an instant-buy for me to replace this old boy. I might even start carrying around a small Bluetooth keyboard so I can get an even bigger screen sometimes. Being able to decide whether you want smaller, more portable devices and/or huge screens to dive into seems to be a trend with most foldables; I can't wait to see it (hopefully) become an option in laptops, too.
I'm both a coder and an author, so I'd say I'd type a LOT (I have a little under 2.5 million words written in my Grammarly total over the past few years and I wrote 50k in 30 days a few months ago for National Novel Writing Month, but I'm generally pretty much always coding and/or writing).
I don't look at the keyboard. There's a few spots you can touch-anchor with on the LYB (both with fingers and e.g. wrists) so you don't really have much problem with drift, which was my main issue at the start. It's a slightly different stance than the typical only-fingertips-touch one I use on "real" keyboards and you need a little bit of the muscle memory you have on e.g. hitting multiple physical keys at once and making sure they register in the correct order, but I type roughly 120WPM on touch and ~130WPM on tactile. The convenience factor for the former makes it so much more worthwhile for on-the-go writing IMO.
The upside is a choice of keyboard (if Bluetooth and not proprietary) and removes an avenue of repair costs. This and we all know that keyboards are like magnets to liquids and snack crumbs (even if you don't eat snacks).
It kind of looks like you close the screen around the keyboard such that you carry a single 3 layer book. This would also improve the crease in an interesting way as the fold can be much wider.
Also flickering. Yes, it's a problem for OLED displays. One might assume (like I did) that if you don't have a backlight, you couldn't have that problem in an active-matrix display, but because OLEDs tend to have quite wild shifts in color over their full dynamic range OLEDs are usually driven with some sort of dual-sweep scanout which turns the pixels off completely between frames for dim outputs. As I understand it, the drive regime for these is somewhere between a DMD (clever PWM for brightness control, purely digital) and a normal TFT (purely analog control).
What I would most love from Asus would be a low end laptop released with high quality drivers including source code. That would be awesome and something I could really use.
I'm surprised its so hard to find cheap low powered laptops with big screens and a good keyboard. Usually big screens means GPU and high end components. Esp in this era of cloud computing I only need a browser and a terminal on a 16+ in screen. I'd love a MacBook air with a big screen, why is it so hard?
At this point it wouldn’t surprise me if the screen is one of the most expensive parts of a laptop. So I’m not sure there’s much of a market for people who want a really big screen but cheap everything else.
Based on the specs I'm expecting this to be out of my budget, but I really really want to replace my everyday-carry 12" tablet with this. It'd be so awesome to have a much bigger screen, of such brilliant specifications.
I have to hand it to Apple, they have been pushing the bounds of what we expect from consumer/pro-sumer displays. I expect this will be out of range, but decent screen specs are starting to become more available across more price points, and that's great. With really good computing hardware being the norm, competing to offer a good display on your laptop is a great feature. More and more companies, like Asus here, are being forced to respond, are having to up their game.
Tricks like this here that Asus is pulling- of making more screen real estate available in a more compact form- that's really really a nice trick. It's almost certainly- alas- going to come at that exotic price point, not be the across-the-board competition I just spoke of. But I'm still excited to see it.
Based on the price of Samsung foldable phones, the screen alone puts this thing outside my budget. From a productivity standpoint, I’d prefer 2 normal screens like the MS Duo. This is really early adopter stuff.
Yes I know. In my view, the Liquid Retina XDR displays have raised the bar though. They have created a mass-awareness & a pressure in the rest of the market, that has driven others to compete & innovate. I know Apple isn't the first either, but previous high-quality display notebooks existed in a niche, whereas the Macbook Pro is kind of the a stock-standard industry-default computing choice that so-happens to set the display bar very very high.
Less street cred than the featured gizmo but available now and likely a heck of a lot cheaper.
I currently have a portable screen, keyboard, flat mouse and foldable laptop riser with my laptop in it's bag - though haven't used them altogether in public for fear of being "that guy".