Oh look, another Tom’s guide advertorial masking as original content…
I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses — here’s what happened
Submitted 4 weeks ago by pandasiusfilet@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Viri4thus@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I also suspect ArsTechnica of running sponsored AI stories these days.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
They’re all doing it. Most tech these days just isn’t exciting enough to attract attention without them pumping it up.
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I would quite honestly be surprised, they have been vocal in the past about having no such thing.
CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Anyone who makes a living off of reviews is going to be suspect whether it’s tech journals, youtubers, reddit shills, Amazon reviewers, review sites, etc. This is why I launched my own proprietary review methodology which I’m willing to share with others in my 16-week online course. Sign up with the code BUTTSTUFF for 10% off now!
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Have they ever not been?
Viri4thus@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Before the sale when Igor still wrote for them, Tom’s was pretty well respected as was Anand.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere
My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
And a whole bunch of other shit.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
I carry two laptops in my work bag regularly, a 15" and 14"
Matriks404@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Laptop is hardly a whole desk setup though. AR is potentially going to be much better than using clunky laptops.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
it is literally a whole desk set up in fact I have one on top of my whole desk
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
Not if they can’t figure out the peripherals. The only thing missing with the laptop is the dual display. Having to drag around a whole keyboard, mouse, PC, and power bank like that is a lateral move at best. You could probably do what he’s doing with a laptop and it would still be just as if not more compact.
mat@linux.community 4 weeks ago
This article reads like satire… it’s sentence after sentence of “and I did it using one of the [best office chairs]” which is a link to some review by themselves. Every bit mentioned had an affiliate link and there wasn’t an actual review of what the experience (software, setup, visual fidelity) is like??
villainy@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Welcome to Future plc publications. Almost entirely clickbait advertorial garbage anymore. It’s sad, really.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Makes me wonder what the onboarding/indoctrination process is.
Is anyone there actually happy, or proud of their writing? Are they actually all just marketing people cosplaying as writers, so they are proud?
mat@linux.community 4 weeks ago
Darn. I recall reading good articles from some of these publications in the past. Shame…
harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
He has reached douchevana
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where do douche has gone before.
grue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I can fit my PC in a backpack. It’s got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.
I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I think you have my pc build, except a 9070 XT for a 6800 XT. But the case is huge, I don’t see how it fits in anyone’s backpack.
grue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Maybe you’re thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:
Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I’m quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I was looking at mini-ITX cases for exactly this purpose a while back — wanted sturdy and small for portable use.
I remember seeing the Velka and one other whose name escapes me right now.
184 x 99 x 219 mm
7.2 x 3.9 x 8.6 in
egonallanon@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
A guy at work asked if he could use some similar pair of AR glasses at work and was rejected because the companion app for it required to always be running as elevated in windows. Was a solid no there.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Depends the type. Some are essentially just a monitor.
JovialSodium@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
It’s a novel idea. But despite the articles claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minpc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.
For traveling, if it’s a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you’d have it set up for a while. Though I’d do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don’t feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that’s a lot to buy for a niche use case.
Damage@feddit.it 4 weeks ago
At this point, something like a steam deck would go better with the glasses, at least it has its own battery
Matriks404@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That’s actually pretty cool idea. Wasn’t there some effort by Valve to support VR anyway on the Deck?
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I’ve looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn’t that small. I think that you could maybe save some space — the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there’s probably some unused internal volume – if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.
Telorand@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
You wouldn’t use a typical SFX power supply for something where size matters; you’d likely use a Flex PSU, which are often long and thin. If you got a lower-power CPU with integrated graphics, you could manage a case that’s not much bigger than the motherboard or much thicker than the IO shroud.
Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of SFF or Ultra SFF content yet, but getting the most out of limited space is definitely a thing people are into, and they can get quite creative.
The final product is often portable but still rarely as tiny as a mini PC or NUC-like. Depending on your needs, someone might be better off making a Steam Brick.
doomcanoe@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Or – hear me out – what if he used his already owned laptop with the VR goggles, instead of advertising the proprietary-connector Khadas mind?
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
im a pretty big fan of AR/VR for productivity, reading books, watching films. the resolution and lenses need to be pretty good for the first 2. but it’s promising. laying in bed and looking up at a book or movie is really something else.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
quediuspayu@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
All this trouble just to be able to use a nosy keyboard and covertly watch porn in public.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I’ve thought about doing this too.
Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don’t blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye.
The privacy is nice – and I don’t think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren’t going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don’t need to deal with those inane “hide your password as you type it” things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.
Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears — circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which may or may not matter in a given situation.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
I use rokid air max and it is wonderful, but fatigue sets in despite the light weight due to the heat. Hope they make them with a heat vent
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. If that device is a Framework is will probably we way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I’m pretty sure that the Xreal glasses have a carrying case. I carry a pair of headphones with my laptop, and they come with one.
Obelix@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
I really would like to try those glasses. They sound cool. But at $500 they are too expensive for an impulse and there is no place around where one can try those offline
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
you can do a similar thing with the quest 3 for less money I think
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.
Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?
For me at least, that’s “HMD all day” is the limiting factor. I don’t want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they’re sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.
I think that to be something that I’d want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the display to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don’t need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.
Euphoma@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
The quest 3 stays sharp when alignment changes, its surprisingly nice to work in outside of the brick on my face. I would hope the xreal glasses can match quest 3 clarity
floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
The only thing that really attracts me about these glasses is that you could hold your head up instead of looking down all the time at a laptop or a portable monitor. But most of the time I need more than one display, while the glasses only offer a single, expensive, fairly low resolution screen. I also wonder what it does to your eyes to use this for long periods of time.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I tried a previous incarnation of these and was not impressed. The screen was too dark in bright rooms and the resolution and image sharpness was lacking. Also the response time was rather slow, which made them basically unusable for playing games or watching (which was primarily what I bought them for). Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use. I ended up returning them after a week.
It appears as if these are at least the second, if not third generation (mine were simply called Air), and the spatial processing chip might help alleviate some of these issues, but I’m disappointed to see that the vertical resolution has not been increased. But at 32:9, it seems that these have twice the horizontal resolution, which would equal two 16:9 screens next to each other.
I wonder if these might be worth giving another try, but I’m loathe to risk it as my Amazon account has been flagged for returning too many purchases before.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use.
The current version of these glasses have this optional device that they sell that provides this called a Beam – I assume that it’s got enough 3D hardware and such to do the projection.
The problem, as I mention in another comment, is that if you do any kind of 3D projection of a virtual monitor, you have to “spend” resolution from the physical monitor on it to get the virtual monitor enough lower-resolution that it still looks good, and I don’t want to give up the resolution.
Like, there are physically 1080p, 1920x1080 OLED displays in front of each eye on these.
My laptop monitor, right now, is 2560x1600. So even from the start, I spend resolution just to get to the physical HMD.
Then I’m projecting a virtual monitor on that. You could argue what’s a reasonable virtual-to-physical ratio is, but it’s gotta be less than 1.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Really. That’s a bummer. if there is an advantage to the glasses it should be that you can have as many displays going as you’d want.
Euphoma@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
It’s longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He’s gotta also drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he’s not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones — I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn’t need to do that bit.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
While I’ve also been interested in similar such systems, the author can accomplish one of his goals — the mechanical keyboard one — with a fairly-traditional laptop setup: he needs one of those hybrid laptops that has a screen that can swivel to act as a tablet. Then he just converts it to “tablet” mode and uses it as a monitor, without the keyboard sticking out at him, and he can use whatever keyboard he wants. Does limit the laptop hardware options, though.
And doesn’t buy him the other stuff that he’s gunning for, like more customizable hardware or a screen with a larger FOV or such.
roserose56@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Imagine being in a cafeteria with his setup, looking straight up to nowhere, people will think of you as crazy!
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I originally had that when people started using Bluetooth earpieces with cell phones.
roserose56@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Yeaaa, exactly. I seeing people talking in the air and I was confused.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
US version with an i7 is $900.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
“My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere”
Man, I guess I’ve been fooled using laptops this entire time. IM SO STUPID
donuts@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
He addresses this by saying a laptop doesn’t allow you to replace components, doesn’t have mechanical keyboard and there’s no ultra wide support.
The funny thing is, this device he’s using doesn’t allow you to upgrade components either.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I read that as well, and it addresses none of that. Also, you can replace components on a lot of laptops, and ALL components on a Framework. This is why they are so sought after.
Whoever wrote this is making a bad faith argument and throwing an ignorant assertion out to serve a specific purpose, which…is not stated 🤣
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
I mean if it did multiple virtual monitors the way vr headsets can I could see this being worth it…
Yeah they make laptop monitors but no ones gonna carry two 24" panels and a 30" ultrawide in their pocket.
Viri4thus@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Here, follow this affiliate link to this overpriced portable machine.
Ulrich@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
You’re not wrong but this is a distinctly different experience. Some these AR glasses allow you to have multiple giant virtual displays instead of the tiny ~14 inch one.
Although I would argue that it would make more sense just to plug the glasses into a laptop.
But also you can use your preferred keyboard and mouse (with more space for the mouse).
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The point is that this is a fake assertion to push a product.