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Daily Authority: šŸ’» No glass please

First the glass people came for the phones, now they're coming for laptops.
By
ā€¢

Published onMay 6, 2022

Lenovo Tab P12 Pro Lenovo branding
Eric Zeman / Android Authority

āš” Good morning! Hey, itā€™s Friday! Great news.

Laptop in glass?

Yoga Slim 9i Gen7 Hero Rear Facing Left
Lenovo Slim 9i

Lenovoā€™s gone and done a thing. Itā€™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, itā€™s possible Lenovo has now started something that makes laptops worse.

Lenovoā€™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 thereā€™s also a new Lenovo Slim 9i, which sports a fancy 14-inch OLED touchscreen, and ā€¦a glass lid.
  • (For what itā€™s worth, the Slim 9i is basically the Yoga 9i convertible laptop without the convertible hinge parts. And outside the US itā€™s known as the Yoga Slim 9i.)

Glass shell:

  • The unusual thing about the Slim 9i, thatā€™s separate from the other Lenovo laptops, is that it has a lid covered in glass.
  • Lenovo calls it a ā€œ3D glass cover,ā€ 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 arenā€™t dropped like phones but they are crammed into bags, carried around, clattered intoā€¦ 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 ā€œlooks sleek,ā€ that sounds like bad news.
  • I say no to glass.

Roundup

šŸŽ§ 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).

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

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

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

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

šŸ“¹ Google Nest cameras now work with Amazon Alexa devices: Watch your Nest from your Fire TV or whatever (Engadget).

šŸ¤” A simple string of ā€œandā€s seems to crash Google Docs pages (Engadget).

šŸ“ŗ Amazonā€™s trying to solve the problem of endless streaming content with IMDb games (The Verge).

šŸ¦µ Thereā€™s a VR app with legs(Wired).

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

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

šŸŒŒ Space Forceā€™s mysterious Unit logos, ranked (Gizmodo).

šŸ”¦ ā€œIf 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 ā€˜light waveā€™?ā€ (r/askscience).

Friday Fun

Ā 

Europeā€™s Space Agency Needs You! ā€¦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 whatā€™s changed between certain images, as algorithms struggle.
  • Itā€™s up to us to decipher it. Citizen science, ahoy!
  • You can check it out at Rosetta Zoo: Thereā€™s a tutorial and everything ā€” it looks quite ok to figure out how to use but itā€™s hard. You need to orient the pictures, zoom, and really try and understand whatā€™s the same and therefore comparable and whatā€™s new/different/interesting. Good luck!

Bonus fun: Would you say wahoo?

Have a great weekend,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.

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