Daily Authority: 💻 No glass please

⚡ Good morning! Hey, it’s Friday! Great news.

Laptop in glass?

Lenovo’s gone and done a thing. It’s put glass on the outside shell of a laptop.

• As smartphones have become slippery all-glass devices, there are few alternatives and most people use a case anyway (though there are exceptions!)
• Regardless, it’s possible Lenovo has now started something that makes laptops worse.

Lenovo’s new laptops:

• A bunch of new Lenovo laptops were announced yesterday, including some standouts in the 14.5-inch Slim 7i Pro X and Slim 7 Pro X.
• They have some beefy CPUs and decent GPUs, and claimed 12.5 to 15.5-hour battery life.
• And they seem fine, no problem.
• But there’s also a new Lenovo Slim 9i, which sports a fancy 14-inch OLED touchscreen, and …a glass lid.
• (For what it’s worth, the Slim 9i is basically the Yoga 9i convertible laptop without the convertible hinge parts. And outside the US it’s known as the Yoga Slim 9i.)

Glass shell:

• The unusual thing about the Slim 9i, that’s separate from the other Lenovo laptops, is that it has a lid covered in glass.
• Lenovo calls it a “3D glass cover,” which means nothing since all glass lives in our three-dimensional world, but hey.
• Sites that saw it at a pre-launch event are, somewhat unfortunately, calling it a premium look and feel, though plenty pointed out that it attracted fingerprints easily.
• But keep my laptop away from glass! No!
• Introducing glass is introducing a compromise.
• Laptops aren’t dropped like phones but they are crammed into bags, carried around, clattered into… and bends and flexes are not exactly the best thing for glass.
• The idea of cracks forming in the glass on the stressed edges, or spiderwebs, or just broken glass on the laptop sounds awful.
• And if this starts to bode the end of a solid metal shell, with all its protection, for something that “looks sleek,” that sounds like bad news.
• I say no to glass.

Roundup

🎧 Oh hey, Sony has said the new Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones are coming next week. Sure beats the August predictions I was talking about yesterday (Android Authority).

🔓 Google, Apple, Microsoft are working together to deploy passwordless sign-in via something called the FIDO Alliance (Android Authority).

🔜 OnePlus Nord 2T quietly listed for Europe, revealing price and specs (Android Authority).

👉 All those new WhatsApp features announced a few weeks ago are now actually available if you update your app (Android Authority).

🆙 AMD doubles the number of CPU cores it offers to Chromebooks, upping the ante with HP and Acer already detailing coming devices (Ars Technica).

📹 Google Nest cameras now work with Amazon Alexa devices: Watch your Nest from your Fire TV or whatever (Engadget).

🤔 A simple string of “and”s seems to crash Google Docs pages (Engadget).

📺 Amazon’s trying to solve the problem of endless streaming content with IMDb games (The Verge).

🦵 There’s a VR app with legs(Wired).

🔙 Fortnite is officially back on the iPhone via Xbox Cloud Gaming. Also useful for iPad and Android, and no subscription required (Ars Technica).

🚀 SpaceX successfully returns four NASA astronauts from International Space Station (The Verge).

🌌 Space Force’s mysterious Unit logos, ranked (Gizmodo).

🔦 “If going at the speed of sound creates a sonic boom, then hypothetically, if a light source was accelerated to the speed of light, would there be a big ‘light wave’?” (r/askscience).

Friday Fun

Europe’s Space Agency Needs You! …to help find the differences between these pictures(Gizmodo).

• In short: The Rosetta spacecraft, the first to rendezvous with a comet, collected tons of data about comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and took loads of pics.
• But the human eye is needed to figure out what’s changed between certain images, as algorithms struggle.
• It’s up to us to decipher it. Citizen science, ahoy!
• You can check it out at Rosetta Zoo: There’s a tutorial and everything — it looks quite ok to figure out how to use but it’s hard. You need to orient the pictures, zoom, and really try and understand what’s the same and therefore comparable and what’s new/different/interesting. Good luck!

Bonus fun: Would you say wahoo?

Have a great weekend,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.