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Hardware

Aurora 7 Laptop With 7 Screens Unveiled (gizmodo.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
Sometimes one screen isn't enough and you need two. Sometimes even two doesn't get the job done, and you need three. If your job requires seven screens, a UK firm now has you covered. Gizmodo reports: The Aurora 7 laptop seems lifted straight from the imagination of a Hollywood prop builder working on a bad hacker flick. But with seven foldout screens, there's little chance anyone could actually use this beast on their laps. It's a mobile transforming workstation for those who need more screen real estate than they have room for monitors. Created by a UK company called Expanscape, the Aurora 7 is very much just a prototype at this stage in the game (as is evident by the extensive use of 3D-printed parts), but it's designed to be true mobile workstation for everyone from developers to content creators to even well-funded gamers wanting a more immersive experience from a computer they don't have to leave at home. Powered by an Intel i9 9900K processor backed by 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1060 series graphics card, the Aurora 7 also comes with 2TB of hard drive storage and an additional 2.5 TB of SSD storage, plus all the ports you could ever need to expand its capacity even further. But the star of the show is the complicated mosaic of screens which includes four 17.3-inch 4K (3840 x 2160) LCDs -- two in portrait mode and two in landscape -- as well as three smaller 7-inch screens all pushing 1920 x 1200 pixels, with one located in the laptop's wrist rest. The laptop has a battery life of one hour. No word on pricing or when it starts shipping.
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Aurora 7 Laptop With 7 Screens Unveiled More

Aurora 7 Laptop With 7 Screens Unveiled

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  • It also probably takes half an hour to set it up.

  • Omg. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NicknameIO ( 7707044 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:39AM (#61044016)
    This might seem excessive, but in a world of remote work where living at home in all facets of your life will lead to massive depression, we need tools that allows us to take our webcam, multiple screen, remote office out into the world. While bulky, it is a prototype, but damn that shit is sexy. Coding, trading, social media, you could do it all from that thing. It's pretty much already what I have at home, two vertical two laptop and one main screen, plus 2 more screens. Will keep up with the developments, looks promising.

    • I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. . .

      I hope so.

    • If you're depressed in your own nest, and blame it on being in your nest, that implies to me you swallowed some macho bullshit that prevents you from talking to a specialist about your mental hygiene.

      Nobody cares, though; not even you. And you're the only one who could change it.

    • I'm betting that for mobile power use the world will move towards VR/AR glasses. The resolution and comfort isn't high enough yet, but as soon as it is it makes a lot more sense than lugging around a bunch of physical slabs.

  • Fuck everything (Score:4, Funny)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:41AM (#61044030)
    We're doing 7 screens [theonion.com]
    • You see, most blokes, you know, will be working with two or three screens. You're on three here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on three on your laptop. Where can you go from there? Where? What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Put it up to seven.
    • Fittingly, the Onion article got an ad for Harry's razors, and I counted five blades.

  • Keep searching Homer. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:44AM (#61044038) Homepage
    I fairly recently (over the past two years) went from multiple screens to one 42" 4K monitor and I'd never go back to multiple monitors, they're just too limiting. When I saw the Aurora 7 mess in TFA, it seems to me that a much more practical (in the eyes of this beholder) would be something like an OLED laptop screen that rolled out to expand the amount of surface area available to the user. I'm not sure the problem they are trying to solve actually exists - I'm sure that every business traveler has had cases where they wish they had a bigger display/more pixels available to them but this seems too extreme.

    • Yeah, I've gone down to a single ultra-wide screen and am much happier with it. The only thing I'd want on most laptops is the ability to have a bit more height on the screen. So many of them now are wide or ultra wide and so skinny top to bottom you can't fit very many legible lines of code of writing on them. Some of us do still use laptops to write either code or for stories and it'd be nice to get a larger amount of words on screen.

      But this thing looks like a monstrosity. I can't imagine anyone would

    • My 3rd screen is 40", and I usually leave it turned off, because the incredible convenience of the second screen is most of the gain.

      Maybe you're just using windoze, and don't make efficient use of your interface?

      Or maybe Apple is your Keeper, since you're drooling over rollups.

      • Sorry, you guessed wrong. I just like having lots of real estate for multiple browsers and other windows without having to go to other screens.

        • So you just don't comprehend the situation, and presume that whatever you're using matters, and it working for your use case negates other people's use cases.

          THat's even worse than if you were merely ignorant. Instead, you're fucking stupid.

  • Looks terrible.

    Those monitors are just tacked on, they look anything but seamless. One monitor even covers portions of the monitor stacked behind it...

    Looks terrible. Don't know anyone who would actually buy it.

    • Nobody that wants this wants it to be "seamless." It isn't intended as a large screen, it is intended as multiple screens. It says right on the website what use cases it is targeting; those are all use cases that benefit more from lots of monitors than from a single large monitor.

      • If that's the case, it would be incredible if some of the monitors were detachable (maybe with a magsafe adapter) so you could hand a couple of them out around the table.

        • Presentations is not one of the use cases listed, and does not benefit from multiple screens as much as it benefits from a single large screen. You can easily pass out tablets and have them show different things, orchestrated from your own machine, there is no hardware needed for that, just better software.

  • How'd they connect the displays? (Score:3)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:48AM (#61044052)
    Cute.

    I am curious how they got that many displays to be driven with the graphics card. Is it a simple matter of daisychaining thunderbolt displays?

  • An hour? Hell, back in my time we got 15 minutes off a dual SLI Sager 7620 and we were grateful.

    It sounded like a jet engine on "quiet" mode.

    Haven't learned to trust a gaming laptop since.

    Yo Grark

    • With these portable workstations it's more of a built in UPS and to keep it alive in S3 suspend when lugging it about.
      It's not like you can comfortably use it on a train or anywhere without access to a table and mains power.

  • Not with that heat dissipation profile. A high-powered intel processor, a grip of RAM, and a high end graphics card pushing 40 megapixels? No way you can put that over your crotch.

  • a photoshop of that old W700ds thinkpad with even more screens added and took the joke seriously.

    I hope the "production" model uses more relevant hardware. A 9900k is not only a desktop part but its also 2 generations out of date. Given its chonk the GPU could actually be a desktop 1060 as well and not the mobile version. Again, a desktop part that is two generations out of date. Nvidia and Intel aren't even making these parts anymore. Their use means this thing has either had a long development period or i

  • It doesn't seem to fix any problems. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:59AM (#61044100)

    Get a desktop PC/Laptop with a good video card. and get some USB-C Powered Displays. Put them in a bag or suite case. You are going to be better off.

    • I got a mouse with a scroll wheel, which is much less stuff to haul around--and much cheaper--than multiple USB-C powered displays.

  • Far from daft (Score:3)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @12:05PM (#61044132) Homepage
    This fulfils some genuine needs, and as you can see in the example it's filled with trader-style applications on the screens. I certainly work in environments where six screens are the norm, and moving to a remote working pattern...

    OK, so it's not your new coffee-shop queen, but for its purpose this is a decent move. Like it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      OK - looking at it more closely, the one point would be the keyboard being too close to the screens.

      Since this clearly isn't meant to be another run of the mill laptop and if you need to ask the price, you certainly can't afford it...adding some more custom use case bits to it seems ok to me. For me I'd like the keyboard to either be detachable or pullable-forward, perhaps as an alternative make it so the screens could be pushed further back. No ethernet port seems odd given the environments this is like

  • Cool concept, but who picked that hardware?
    7 screens and the best you can do is a 4 year old midrange GPU.

  • A pity they didn't use the 3840x2400 panels that are starting to be used in higher-end laptops. The 16:9 ratio is just a bit too squat in landscape orientation and a bit too skinny in portrait, to my taste.
  • While I am of the opinion that you can never have too many screens or too much screen real estate ... you'd be so distracted going from screen-to-screen on that thing, looking for whatever it is you need at the moment, you'd never hit a flow state and you'd never be very productive.

    Does anyone else remember the three-screen, fold-up, touchscreen system they had on "F/X the Series?" I'd rather have one of those.

  • Now I want to see someone using a tiny Raspberry Pi Zero making a laptop with 127 small low-resolution displays connected via I2C.

  • Good concept for Software Engineer Road Warrior (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @12:36PM (#61044284)
    If you write code, especially full stack development, there's really no such thing as too many screens. You have an IDE where you do your main work. I have a DB tool if I am dealing with a database for that task. I have a shell window for the application server. I have another for the build. I have a browser window open with the JIRA ticket for the requirements. I have another tab for the actual application.

    I have tried large screens and many screens before and have personally found that many screens just work better than one large in Win 10, MacOS, and Desktop Linux. On MacOS, there's magnet. It's OK, but you have to be very precise when switching windows. I never really mastered using a large screen to mange 4 or 5 windows all visible at the same time. I have to take time to either very precisely position the cursor, like in magnet, or resize them with a mouse, which is tedious and distracting. I am having to switch window focus every 2 seconds, approximately, so the resizing and rearranging adds up.

    For this laptop? Yeah, it looks fugly and poorly made. I wouldn't go with that precise model, but something with fold out screens, if done well, would be a godsend. My desk is my most productive area, but I often have to work in a conference room or on a client site. Not only would client site productivity increase, it's a great marketing tool. When you see the consultant whip out serious hardcore equipment, it makes you feel like you're dealing with a serious professional, especially if you're not very technical.

    The marketing factor would be enough justification to pay an extra 1-2k for one of these laptops. It makes a great impression. It's like if you hire an electrician, he pulls up in a van with his logo, he's wearing overalls with the company logo, and he brings in a professional toolbag and lays it on the floor before he begins working. You feel like you're dealing with a professional. If you hire one and he pulls up in a honda civic with a giant spolier, walks in your house with board shorts and a T-shirt on with just a screwdriver in his pocket, you'll be much more skeptical...even if he's the superior electrician, you'll be much more cautious and less trusting of him for quite awhile based on the first impression.

    Similarly, imagine if your mom hired a technical professional. One shows up with some gaming laptop with "cool" stickers all over it and 20 different color of flashing LEDs all over his mouse and keyboard and another shows up with one of those....you'll be much more impressed and less skeptical of his judgement. You'll be more likely to pay the extra money when the project goes over budget, etc.

    Looking serious and professional makes a good first impression and is usually great for business...and tons of fold out displays do look very serious, especially if most of them are showing intimidating looking command line shells.

    • That said, I think this thing would do better as a tri-fold. One central screen, two that flip out/rotate vertically for the sides. Those extra slide out screens on the top and in the palm rest don't seem to add much... maybe that upper center screen is useful? I dunno.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        If you only want a pedestrian three screens, you don't even need a custom laptop.

        https://slidenjoy.com/ [slidenjoy.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        I only have two screens, my laptop screen and an LCD monitor above it. I find having the second screen above the relatively small laptop screen works a lot better than side-by-side, especially with the widescreens that are par for the course nowadays. Even if I had flip-out screens to the sides, I would really want another screen above.

  • What?!?! (Score:3)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @12:37PM (#61044288)
    How the hell am I supposed to read anything when you share your desktop in a meeting?

  • Just because ... (Score:3)

    by dromgodis ( 4533247 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @01:00PM (#61044390)

    Just because you can doesn't mean that you should.

  • As cool as the concept is it would be nice if it were one. What is here looks like a hobby project. It's cardboard held together by glue. The company's other product looks like it came off a poorly calibrated 3D printer and was covered with fake carbon fibre tape.

    This is vapourware. If you need anymore proof then look up the Companies House registrar, they haven't filed their yearly paperwork and were given formal notice in December that their company will be de-registered 12 days from now.

  • A GTX1060, not even a premiere card in its time, to run 40 megapixels worth of displays? And a winchester drive? Who the fuck uses a drive with platters in the past five years? This is a terribly executed joke
  • GME on screen 1.

    Bitcoin on screen 2.

    AMC on screen 3.

    Unemployment web site on screen 4.

    Netflix on screen 5.

    Slashdot on screen 6.

    Porn on screen 7.

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