We’ve seen a lot of unique designs for mini and portable PCs in recent years, but nothing comes close to this new design, which packs a fully functional AMD Ryzen 7 8840U PC into a foldable keyboard.
Chinese PC maker cleverly hides a fully functional AMD Ryzen 7 8840U PC inside a keyboard,
Ling-Long, a PC manufacturer from China, has come up with a clever solution for a fully portable and functional PC. The idea is a combination of a mini PC with a laptop-centric design, in the sense that the PC is not a mini PC, as those require a power source to boot up, and it is not a laptop either, as you don’t get a display with the machine, but fully functional means that you can simply plug it into a display and mouse and you’re good to go. To demonstrate its new PC design, Ling-Long showed how you can fit the entire product into your pocket and take it anywhere.
The market for mini and portable PCs is evolving into something we never expected, as a few years ago it was all about Intel’s NUC products and another mainstream company releasing the “traditional and old” boxy design. While we definitely saw an improvement in performance, there was little to no innovation in the overall design, but it seems that trend is shifting. Products like the Cybertruck mini PC show that the market is indeed moving towards unique designs.
Ling-Long drew parallels to Apple’s Macbook and Mac mini systems, saying that they wanted to create something that would take “compactness and functionality” to a whole new level with mini PCs. Linglong says that their product uses a “unibody” design, meaning that it is a single-molded unit with a special conversion mechanism. For those still confused about the product, it is a “mini PC in a keyboard” or probably the other way around.
Let’s talk about the onboard specs. Ling-Long’s “keyboard” PC features AMD’s Ryzen 7 8840U APU, which features 8 cores based on the Zen 4 core architecture, up to 5.1 GHz clock speeds, 16 threads, and a Radeon 780M iGPU with a total of 12 compute units. With the use of AMD’s Hawk Point APU, Linglong strives not to compromise on performance despite the compactness of its product.
The keyboard as a chassis has two compartments, one housing the main PC which is equipped with a single active fan with a copper heatsink that expels hot air through the ventilation openings on the front and back, while the second compartment contains the battery. The whole unit measures 15x10cm and weighs just 800 grams.
The device comes in 16GB/32GB memory and 512GB/1TB storage configurations, which are again pretty decent. The device packs a 60Wh (16000mAh) battery and features a dedicated “Mini-Touch” touchpad for improved accessibility. The onboard software also comes with three modes, including an Efficiency, Balanced & Performance profile that can be configured based on your preferences. The company claims that the PC can last for 10 hours of light workloads, 6 hours of media playback, and around 4 hours of gaming workloads. The PC also ships with a 100W Fast power adapter and can also be charged using a power bank, like a typical smartphone.
The price of Ling-Long’s mini PC with keyboard is 4,699 RMB or US$646 for the 16GB + 512GB configuration and 5,699 RMB or US$784 for the 32GB + 1TB configuration.
Well, all the best for the company’s efforts, but the usage scenario here is indeed questionable. This mini PC will definitely not give you hardcore gaming performance, and thermals will still be a question with the product. But, since it’s something innovative, we won’t discuss it much.
News source: Bilibili