Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Best laptops of CES 2018”.
Every year at the consumer, electronics show we see more and more laptops, we’ve seen crazy light and thin ones, giant gaming ones and ones that flip and spin around. So this year the laptops haven’t been as insane, but there’s a few that give us a little glimpse about what to expect for the rest of the year. So, let’s start with hp, spectre, x360 and dell’s xps 15.. Now these are both 15-inch laptops.
So what really matters is exactly what’s inside, which is intel’s actual processor and then amd’s graphics. This is the first time we’ve seen such a thing and what it basically means is we’re probably going to see gaming laptops or laptops that are capable of playing games anyway. At the sort of size and form factor of these two devices dell’s xps 15 2 in one is new this year and we’ve obviously seen the xps 15 before. But this one has the obviously the hinge, so you can go put it into tablet mode and, as you can see, this is quite a regular looking laptop but the graphics support on it. So playing games and stuff like that should be a little bit better. It’S not going to be amazing just yet, but i think that’s going to set the stage for us having gaming laptops inside of laptops that look kind of normal now. This is the first time that amd and intel have paired up um since, like the 1980s.
So that’s also kind of interesting to see what could happen for the rest of the year there dell’s xps 15 also includes a maglev keyboard. Now that sounds pretty fancy, and it kind of is so what’s inside is essentially magnets, sit underneath the keys and they hold the keys in place. Now that means that it’s actually got a little bit less travel, but it feels and sounds a lot clickier. So it’s quite interesting to see that, on on this particular laptop and on windows, laptops in general and the keyboard is slightly thinner, so something more like the apple macbook pro. But it’s kind of interesting you’re seeing dell doing this, and that might mean we see some of the other pc makers do a similar sort of thing with their keyboards.
Speaking of experimentation, we’re starting to see quite a lot less of that this year. There’S not so many crazy flipping laptops and people are sort of settling on their own designs, but what we are starting to see – and we saw it in december – is these new arm powered laptops now, basically, what that means is you’re, starting to see laptops they’re going To have all-day battery life, that’s 20 plus hours they’re going to be able to be put on standby. You can throw them in your bag, pick them up and they’re not going to be out of battery and inside you’re going to get the similar sort of components.
You would any other laptop and the form factors that we’ve seen so far are mainly tablets and two-in ones, but i think we’re probably going to see a lot more experimentation later in the year. We might even get some just regular clamshell laptops, so this is lenovo’s mix 630.. As you can see, it looks like a laptop stroke tablet. It’S kind of like a surface, a two in one sort of thing, we’ve seen quite a few times before. What’S really unique about this particular device is inside there’s a qualcomm snapdragon 835 processor, and what that means is there’s basically phone components inside so you’re gon na get lte connectivity inside this. You can be able to use it on the train, um anywhere outside the house, and it’s basically it snaps off, so you can use it as a tablet as well. Um you’re going to get all the obviously the lt connectivity um it’s going to be around about 20 hours. Battery life is what they’re saying so. That’S kind of like the key thing about this um. It’S quite a nice little device, it’s thin and light.
So you’ve got the single usb type-c port on the back um, so kind of like the future of tablets and laptops is what we’re seeing and i think it sets the stage for this and other devices like the the hp one as well same sort of family Devices, so it sets the stage for what we might see in 2018, which is a lot more arm. Powered windows laptops, so another trend, i’ve started to see is hdr laptops. Now hdr is high, dynamic range and basically, what that means is you’re going to get a little bit better detail when you’re watching like a tv and a movie colors will pop the blacks will be blacker. So it’s really good for like viewing content and stuff like netflix and stuff, like that.
What we’re kind of waiting to see now is for windows to be updated, netflix and all those sort of different applications. So it’s still really early days, but i think once that comes we’re probably going to see a lot more hdr laptops throughout 2018 and beyond. We didn’t see many chromebooks this year, but razer is experimenting with its own android powered phone and docking it and turning from a phone into a laptop now, we’ve seen this a bunch of times: motorola’s atrix, samsung’s, dex dock, even microsoft’s own continuum, stuff on windows, phone, A lot of those projects have failed in the past, but razer stuff is very much a prototype at the moment too, i don’t think we’re going to see a phone that turns into a laptop, be its success this year, but it’s good to see another company giving It a go and trying another concept to see if we can get to that point. So, aside from all those laptops, we also saw some regular plain old laptops this year too, so dell refreshed the xps 13 to a new white color with a kind of rose gold finish on it as well.
It’S one of the better windows, laptops and they’ve changed. The design slightly, but they still have the webcam placement down the bottom. So it’s still staring up your nose.
Asa also introduced a new swiss 7 and it’s taken the title as the world’s finished laptop now, we’ve seen acer experiment with being thin and light before and this particular device. The keyboard doesn’t feel quite as good um, but it’s good to see acer push everyone else to do thin and light laptops, there’s still something that obviously acer cares about, and i think that’s something that we like to see now, aside from the hardware on the software Side, i think we’re going to see a lot of amazon alexa appearing on windows. Pcs. Throughout the year, amazon announced that ces that alexa will be built into a bunch of different laptops from hp, lenovo, asus and acer. Now those devices are coming later this year, but i’m curious to see whether we’ll ever see google assistant appear on windows laptops, it’s obviously on google’s own pixel book, but it’d be interesting if it made the jump over to the windows side as well.
So all of those trends combined with microsoft’s work on windows 10 and the updates, and also their ability to push the arm laptops out, makes for a really interesting 2018 for laptops, and it’s something we haven’t probably seen for quite a while join me to use it As a tablet as well .