You’ll never uncover The Next Great Thing if you don’t deviate from the norm. When looking back at 2023’s laptops, we can see that many were merely refreshed designs—approaches that already work. But what happens when a company explores a design that, though not the most appealing today, might lead us to a new trend tomorrow?
You might end up with some computers that many, or even most, people aren’t currently interested in buying. But you could also end up glimpsing the designs that influence future laptops.
The laptops we’re about to look at all defied trends in some way, and we’re curious to see if they impact the laptop industry beyond 2023. We’ll also look at the challenges these ideas might face in the future—and some ways they could improve.
Lenovo’s laptop with dual 13.3-inch screens
A company called SZBOX is already selling a similar design, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.Scharon Harding
I was able to multitask like never before on a 13-inch-size laptop.Scharon Harding
Lenovo’s depiction of the Yoga Book 9i’s various forms. There has to be a useful idea somewhere in there, right?Lenovo
With the number of secondary screens already being built into laptops, Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i, as striking as it appears, was a somewhat expected progression. But Lenovo actually pulled it off with a legitimate PC featuring most of the bells and whistles found among traditional premium laptops. With the design serving practical use cases in an improved form factor, I expect it to not only be imitated (one small firm is already selling a laptop like this) but to also give the concept of foldable-screen laptops a good run for their money.
The Yoga Book 9i, with its pair of 13.3-inch OLED screens, isn’t kicking off this list solely because it’s creative, flashy, or unique. It’s because, as detailed in our Lenovo Yoga Book 9i review, it proved itself an effective way to boost the amount of multitasking one can reasonably do on a 13-inch-size laptop. Lenovo’s revision of how to use a 13-inch chassis could improve options down the line for the many people seeking that golden area between ultra-portability and productivity potential.
On the Lenovo laptop’s 26.6 inches of cumulative screen, I was able to do the types of things that would only bring me frustration, if not a headache, on a single 13.3-inch panel. Want to take notes on a video call while monitoring your news feeds, having a chat window open, and keeping an eye on your email? That’s all remarkably manageable on a laptop with two full-size screens. And that PC is easier to lug around than a laptop and portable monitor.
What’s next?
The dual-screen setup worked well for small-laptop multitasking. But the polarizing lack of an integrated physical keyboard and touchpad challenge this form factor’s longevity. Easily accessible touchscreen controls are handy, but you can’t really replicate the reliable tactility and comfort of a keyboard and touchpad with touchscreens. A super portable laptop suddenly feels less portable when you have to remember to bring its accessories.
Still, I think this design has a place in the increasingly mobile world of computing. Future designs could improve with less reflective screens, given that reflectivity is especially distracting on a dual-screen laptop where one screen can cast reflections on the other.
Moving from OLED could help improve battery life to some degree. But, as you might have guessed, a laptop with two 13.3-inch OLED displays won’t be winning any laptop battery-life contests. Further, I wonder what price improvements could be made by foregoing OLED.
But many of the creative laptop designs these days opt for OLED, due to its high image quality, flexibility, and broad market appeal from more mainstream tech implementations, like OLED smartphones and TVs. This presents an ongoing price obstacle for a laptop design that already leans niche.
HP’s extremely expensive foldable-screen PC
Laptops were bound to enter the foldable-screen space.Scharon Harding
But HP’s Spectre Foldable 17, with its two batteries and $5,000 MSRP, arrived on steroids.Scharon Harding
But it’s still, at most, a 17-inch computer.Scharon Harding
There were a couple of foldable-screen laptops released before 2023, but this year was when OEMs seemed to really put their weight behind the idea and started trying to carve a space for foldables in the laptop category.
HP joined Lenovo and LG (South Korea market only) in releasing a foldable laptop this year, but HP’s machine was a beast compared to the rest. The HP Spectre Foldable 17 debuted at $5,000, and by foregoing the limitations of earthly pricing standards, the company was able to build what it perceived to be the ultimate foldable laptop, teaching current and future foldable laptop participants a thing or two.
After testing the Spectre Foldable 17, I was ultimately most impressed with its battery life and the work HP did to get there, including finding space for two batteries.
Nine hours and 4 minutes with the screen set to 200 nits on PCMark’s Modern Office battery test is impressive for a 17-inch OLED laptop. Considering that that’s markedly better than some LCD laptops have performed on this test, HP’s innovations show the potential battery life gains to be had beyond foldables. Dual-screen and foldable-screen laptop designs both play with thin-and-light laptop chassis to find a greater union between productivity and portability. Battery life is one of the secret ingredients that could make those wacky ideas truly practical.
What’s next?
Foldables, be they laptops or smartphones, haven’t proved their necessity yet. It’s not a given that we’ll see laptops like this in the long-term. Additionally, durability remains a top concern. While the HP foldable PC I tested didn’t break, and HP rates it for the same amount of folds as it does its regular laptops, I can’t forget the sound of its creaking hinge. It’s possible that I was not the first reviewer to use the laptop, and I don’t know how carefully it was treated before I received it, but considering the laptop was under a year old, this is still notable. And there are other ways for screens to break, such as the gap (for storing the detachable keyboard) visible between the screen’s two sides when the computer is closed (and the keyboard’s not inside).
Comparing the extra screen space afforded by Lenovo’s dual-screen laptop with a 17-inch foldable highlighted the fact that once set up for use, using a foldable was very similar to using a regular 17-inch laptop. I didn’t get more screen to work with or any other uniquely helpful benefit besides portability. Having a 17-inch screen accessible from a 13-inch-sized laptop is a strong feature for some. But the foldable laptop is mostly a costly way to get a bigger screen in a smaller laptop.
If the industry is going to continue pushing foldable designs, there are things OEMs should do to improve the experience. Finding a way to diminish the effect of the distracting crease (which seems like a big ask) even through superficial means like a brighter screen, could help. The flimsy detachable keyboard/touchpad setup is an area ripe for improvement, especially since foldables are landing in OEMs’ elite laptop lines. And with Intel’s new CPU lineup featuring 9 W U-series chips for thin-and-light laptops (unlike the previous lineup), there’s potential for laptops with similar power efficiency but more modern processors than the HP Spectre Fold.
Asus’ OLED laptops with glasses-free 3D
Asus’ higher end 3D OLED laptop, the ProArt Studiobook 16 3D OLED (H7604). Asus’ laptops are supposed to easily switch from 3D to regular 2D mode.Asus
Asus’ Vivobook Pro 16 3D OLED (K6604) has a touchpad with a virtual dial and stylus support.Asus
Yes, three-D displays have made the list for 2023. Three-D displays are experiencing a small resurgence, for better or worse. Their revival will all hinge on whether they can offer a better experience than the 3D TVs of the 2010s did.
Of course, the obvious difference is that the latest 3D displays don’t require glasses to see the effect. Before 2023, there were already products like this, such as Acer’s ConceptD SpatialLabs Edition workstation-like laptop, Predator Helios 300 Spatial Edition gaming laptop, and, announced more recently, SpatialLabs View and SpatialLabs View Pro portable monitors. Acer and Lenovo also announced glasses-free desktop monitors this year.
Like those products, Asus’ laptops achieve their 3D effect by layering a lenticular lens on top of the display panel and using eye-tracking cameras to help the lens render images for each eye and adjust with user movement.
In 2023, though, Asus upped the ante by releasing the first glasses-free 3D OLED displays. The ProArt Studiobook 16 3D OLED (H7604) and Vivobook Pro 16 3D OLED (K6604) signaled that people didn’t have to sacrifice display quality for the sake of 3D. Each laptop features a 16-inch, 3200×2000 screen with a max resolution of 120 Hz. Asus claimed in a press briefing that the OLED panels’ low 0.2 ms gray-to-gray response time, coupled with the unmatched contrast levels of OLED, eliminated crosstalk between the left-eye image and right-eye image.
What’s next?
OLEDs are already popular in high-end laptops, and they’re becoming increasingly popular for other uses, like computer monitors and handheld gaming devices. The Asus products open the door for future experimentation with OLED and 3D tech, should anyone be interested.
Despite OLED purportedly helping address crosstalk issues, though, 3D experiences can still make some people feel dizzy or ill. Asus’ own product pages for the laptops admitted that crosstalk is also still possible “due to other reasons, and this varies according to the individual.” This makes demos essential for someone considering this type of product. Getting people where they need to be in order to experience such demos will likely continue to strongly limit adoption.
A touted feature of some newer glasses-free 3D products, like the Asus laptops, is the ability to make 2D content look like 3D if it’s supported. But this area needs fine-tuning in terms of support and unofficial 3D content looking “stuttery,” according to The Verge, which saw a demo of the computers.
While at-home 3D technology has certainly improved over the last decade-plus, today’s products only target a small set of professionals doing things like 3D architecture, design, and rendering. Included software hubs, like Asus’ Spatial Vision Hub, should help users make use of the products’ features and include apps that are supposed to easily turn projects into 3D. But with glasses-free 3D needing to win over users with jobs and hours of complex work on the line, the niche products face a high bar. Currently, glasses-free 3D feels experimental or trendy, and temporary fads won’t make the cut for serious professionals.
The display-free AR laptop
Look ma, no screen!Spacetop
The woman is using Nreal AR glasses to navigate the Windows PC.Spacetop
Sightful’s depiction of what using the Spacetop is like. This image highlights the portability of the design. However, it implies he’s doing serious work, which the computer isn’t quite specced for.Spacetop
If you liked 3D laptops without glasses, you’ll love (or hate?) an AR laptop that requires glasses because it doesn’t have its own screen. A stark contrast from the laptops we just highlighted, the Sightful Spacetop announced this year claimed to be “the world’s first augmented reality laptop.” Ditching a built-in display in favor of a pair of customized Nreal-brand AR glasses, the computer is a progressive take on a growing category of computing.
The pitch is that instead of relying on a laptop display or one or more computer monitors, Spacetop users could get the experience of a 100-inch display by wearing the tethered glasses. Unlike other tech using head-mounted displays (HMDs), Spacetop doesn’t call for unique input, like gesture controls. The computer’s creators market it as a way to “work from anywhere.” Imagine being able to pull up enough windows to fill a 100-inch screen at a café with no one else able to see what you’re working on. That’s what Sightful is claiming, at least.
Still, most people aren’t ready to relegate their laptop display to a pair of specs. But like with many AR projects, there’s interest in this sort of product if done really well. And, in some cases, the Spacetop reportedly does perform well. In a demo, The Verge reported seeing “sharp” visuals (1080 p resolution per eye) and enjoying the simplicity of Spacetop working like a regular Windows laptop and the assumed privacy. Spacetop is also supposed to allow actions like pinning and resizing windows, enabling adaptation to the different places people might take the PC.
Sightful is trying to realize what many bigger names in tech have been trying to do for years: create a virtual space that’s comfortable enough that people would actually choose to work there instead of on a traditional computer. More advanced products like the Meta Quest Pro and upcoming Apple Vision Pro have helped drum up interest in working with virtual monitors. With its clarity, lightweight goggles, and the potential price savings of using a discrete computer to drive the experience, Spacetop is bringing a new approach to AR computing right as the industry is gaining momentum.
What’s next?
Spacetop hasn’t reached general availability yet. It debuted through an early access program that was limited to 1,000 units for people who, Sightful believed, had the proper use case, which it described to The Verge as people with “web-forward” workloads.
The company has raised $61 million in funding, but as a young start-up (founded in 2020), it’s unclear if Sightful, which claims over 60 employees, would be able to handle a big-scale release and subsequently support customers.
But one thing that early demos made clear is that this particular design isn’t specced to handle the types of workloads that Sightful dreams of. Choices like a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage were likely made in consideration of things like price. But they severely limit the productivity potential of a device marketed for multitasking at work, as illustrated by The Verge’s report of a demo that featured things “barely crawling along” at times and that was “choppy” overall.
The so-called 100-inch field of view has also been challenged, with demo participants noting that there’s no peripheral view. And while the display can fit many windows, you can’t see all of them simultaneously.
Finally, like many HMDs, increased battery life would make such designs more realistic to a broader audience than the reported “5-plus hours” figure the Spacetop has touted.
The MacBook Air, but bigger
Finally.Andrew Cunningham
A size comparison of a 13-inch (M1) MacBook Air and an (M2) 15-inch MacBook Air.Andrew Cunningham
Apple surely spends a lot of time trying to figure out what the next big thing is. But sometimes, the next big thing is right under your nose, and, in this case, simply bigger.
Let’s be clear. The 15-inch MacBook Air isn’t a drastic innovation or a daring new take on the MacBook. It’s literally a bigger-screened MacBook Air. But when Apple announced in June that it was releasing the first 15-inch MacBook Air, it appeased a crowd of people who have been asking for such a device since the MacBook Air’s 2008 debut. Perhaps the post-pandemic PC sales slump that hit Macs considerably pushed Apple to finally give these people what they wanted. And with things like streaming videos and multitasking becoming increasingly common on thin-and-light laptops, it seemed like Apple was missing an opportunity.
Apple’s first 15-inch MacBook Air arrived just as thin as its 13-inch counterpart, making it the thinnest laptop with a 15-inch screen available. At the same time, Apple added variety to its MacBook lineup, presenting a middle ground for people who don’t need the power of a MacBook Pro but want more than 13 inches of screen.
And when Apple does something new, other PC makers tend to take notes. Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air further pressures other laptop vendors to offer superior performance in lighter builds and with quality screens.
What’s next?
Besides a larger screen, though, Apple’s 15-inch laptop didn’t bring anything more to the table that the 13-inch Air doesn’t. Users don’t get anything groundbreaking when moving from the smaller offering to the larger one.
This could be why Digitimes in July claimed that 15-inch MacBook Air sales weren’t meeting expectations. The publication, citing anonymous “industry sources,” reported that shipments that month were 50 percent less than estimated and that “some customers [were] even requesting a shipment volume reduction to avoid building up a front-end inventory.”
By definition, the middle ground can’t be the best. But as a step above the 13-inch MacBook Air in price and size, Apple should find a way to make the product a more serious upgrade. If the 15-inch Air is going to stay in Apple’s portfolio long-term, it apparently needs a better differentiator than its screen size. And any new features added to 15-inch Airs shouldn’t serve to only diminish the appeal of the already successful 13-inch MacBook Air. Apple users expect more than that.
As detailed in our 15-inch MacBook Air review, some of the computer’s flaws, from a lack of ports to performance limitations, are common in today’s ultralight laptops, Now that Apple has a second size of thin-and-light laptop to push, it would be great if it could consider ways to address either of those category-wide concerns.
Honorable mention
I’ll close this list with a shout out to a company that had the audacity to mod the aforementioned MacBook Air, removing critical aspects of the computer, including its speakers and Wi-Fi antennas. Frore Systems’ mad experiment was about retrofitting the 15-incher with three of its active cooling chips in order to reportedly give the laptop the type of performance you’d only expect from a fan-cooled MacBook.
By using tiny membranes vibrating (an electric field directly applied to the piezoelectric membranes generates motion) at an ultrasonic frequency, AirJet Minis generate airflow, which goes through (required) inlet vents in the chassis, Frore says. “Inside AirJet, the airflow is transformed into high-velocity pulsating jets. The pulsating jets of air remove heat from the heat spreader at the bottom of the AirJet,” a datasheet for the AirJet Mini [PDF] explains. It adds: “The flowing air reaches the same temperature as the heat spreader, which is in contact with the processor. Hot air exits to the side via an integrated spout.”
As noted by Frore and some publications that saw in-person demos, the altered MacBook Air was seemingly able to perform like a MacBook Pro, which, of course, has a fan. This was all with the modded computer reportedly running quietly. Frore even claims its technology could prevent dust from entering a device, by covering its (required) inlet vents with an air filter and using the Air Jet Mini’s claimed 1,750 Pascals of back pressure.
Frore says Intel will eventually offer its tech in reference laptops and that it’s partnering with major laptop OEMs. But the firm still has a lot of work to do to prove that its piezoelectric cooling techniques are a durable, long-term solution for laptop cooling that doesn’t price out users. Power consumption is also a concern, as is the start-up’s ability to partner with vendors for years to come.
AirJet Minis are supposed to be in a Zotac Mini PC coming out soon, though. And there are other applications for a technology like this, such as handheld gaming devices.
There’s a lot of uncertainty ahead, but new ways of cooling laptops like this are something to watch out for in the future—even if this isn’t the thermoelectric cooling dream that some envision when hearing Frore’s claim of “solid-state cooling” for laptops.