Tag Archives: Laptops

Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol

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If you owned a MacBook before 2016, you remember the glowing apple on the lid. It lit up dorm rooms, airport gates, and every TV show where someone typed dramatically in a cafe, and it told the whole room you’d spent real money on your laptop. Apple started switching it off in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, and the MacBook Pro followed in 2016, all in the name of thinner lids. Eleven years later, the light is back on the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, Apple’s first touchscreen Mac. This time, Apple has turned it into a full-blown status symbol.

OLED made the comeback harder, because the old logo ran on spare light from the LCD backlight, and OLED pixels make their own light with nothing to spare. So Apple had to rig up a separate light source just for the badge, and it hasn’t explained how. It even kept the old behavior, with the logo dimming and brightening along with your screen. Then it put the glow on exactly one model, leaving the standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 version with plain mirror logos. Nostalgia is officially a premium feature now, and it starts at $2,899.

Designer: Apple

Thinness killed the glow in 2015

The old glow cost Apple nothing. An Apple-shaped hole was cut into the aluminum lid, filled with translucent plastic, and lit by leftover light from the LCD backlight sitting right behind it. That free light came with baggage, though, because the cutout was an extra layer Apple had to make room for in a lid it badly wanted thinner. As panels got slimmer, there were reportedly worries about the cutout creating a bright hot spot on the display, a nightmare for a screen Apple sells on uniform brightness. So when the 12-inch MacBook arrived in 2015, thinness won, and a polished, unlit logo took over.

Losing the glow meant losing the best billboard Apple ever owned. Apple always knew that logo was aimed at onlookers, and Steve Jobs proved it years earlier. Early PowerBooks and iBooks placed the apple so it faced the owner with the lid closed, which made it look upside down to everyone else once the laptop opened. Jobs eventually reversed that, reasoning that opening a laptop from the wrong end fixes itself in seconds while an upside-down logo stays upside down forever. Hollywood reportedly played a part too, since some filmmakers were sticking decals over loaned laptops so the apple looked right on camera.

Apple now pays for a light it used to get free

OLED changed the math, because each pixel makes its own light and nothing spills out the back of the panel for a logo to borrow. The best clue to Apple’s fix is a 2022 patent for a backlit, partially reflective mirror that looks shiny when off and lets internal light through when lit. That lines up with what people saw at the launch, a mirror-finish apple that glows when the lid opens and goes dark when it shuts. Apple hasn’t confirmed the patent is the one in use, so treat it as an educated guess. Either way, somebody in Cupertino had to design, source, and power a light whose only job is to be admired by strangers.

Then Apple made that light exclusive. The standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 model keep unlit mirror logos, so the glow only shows up on machines starting at $2,899. Luxury carmakers have run this play for over a decade, ever since Mercedes dealers started offering an illuminated three-pointed star in 2013. BMW answered with its Iconic Glow kidney grilles, Rolls-Royce lit up its grille, and Bentley made its winged B glow. Those lights do almost nothing for driving, and Apple’s logo does nothing for rendering, which is exactly the point. A badge that glows is a badge people paid for.

Apple is in the status symbol business again

Apple used to sell status by default. Owning an iPod in the 2000s turned those white earbuds into a flex, and standing in line for the first iPhone in 2007 made you the most interesting person at dinner. Under Tim Cook, Apple shifted toward putting a slice of the pie in every hand, with cheaper SE iPhones, budget iPads, and a $999 MacBook Air. That strategy sold a staggering number of devices, and I’d argue it also made owning an Apple product feel ordinary. When everyone has the apple, the apple stops saying much about you.

The Ternus era looks like a deliberate correction. The $1,999 iPhone Duo folds in half and announces itself every time you open it, and the glowing logo now marks the one MacBook Pro that costs $2,899 and up. Ternus clearly knows what he’s selling, because his launch-morning teaser was a wordless clip of that logo lighting up. Jobs, who spent years fussing over which way the apple faced, would have understood the instinct completely. The apple spent 11 years in the dark, and it came back as a velvet rope.

The post Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

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If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

Posted on by

If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple just launched a MacBook Pro 24-hours before its MacBook Pro event

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On Monday, the day the new iPad mini landed, I begged John Ternus to take a break. On Tuesday morning, Apple responded by dropping a brand-new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip, roughly 24 hours before its Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles. That’s the event literally named after the MacBook Pro, by the way. It’s like a band releasing a single the night before the album drops, if the single cost $1,999. At this point I’ve stopped asking for rest and started stretching before I open my inbox.

The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, the same price the M5 model has carried since Apple’s June price hike. Inside sits the M6, a 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, two more cores apiece than before. Apple claims up to 30 percent faster graphics than M5, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 arriving through its own N1 chip. Pre-orders open October 28, with deliveries starting November 6 in silver and space black. Even funnier, Wednesday’s rumored touchscreen MacBook Pros reportedly run M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, so the cheapest Pro in the lineup now has the newest silicon.

Designer: Apple

Two more cores, 2nm silicon, and a reshuffled CPU

The M6 is built on TSMC’s first-generation 2nm process, and it first showed up in the Mac mini back in August. It swaps the old FinFET transistors for gate-all-around nanosheets, which wrap the gate around the channel on every side so less power leaks away at these tiny sizes. The CPU layout changes too, from four super cores and six efficiency cores to two super, four performance, and six efficiency cores. The GPU climbs to 12 cores, each with its own Neural Accelerator, while the Neural Engine doubles up to a dual 16-core setup totaling 32 cores. Apple claims up to 1.3 times faster Blender ray tracing and Xcode builds than the M5 model.

Apple ditched the M5 model’s Broadcom wireless chip for its own N1, which brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support. Thread is the low-power mesh network a lot of Matter smart home gear runs on, which fits neatly with the HomeView push Apple kicked off earlier this month. External displays get a bump as well, with two 4K monitors now running at up to 165Hz instead of 144Hz. Memory bandwidth rises to 170GB/s, though only on the 24GB and 32GB configurations. The base 16GB model stays at 153GB/s, so if you plan on running local AI models, spring for the extra memory.

Same $1,999 price tag, same body, same 24 hours

The M5 model launched at $1,599 with 512GB of storage last October, jumped to $1,699 in March when 1TB became standard, then hit $1,999 in June when Apple raised prices across the Mac lineup. Apple blamed AI data centers hoovering up the world’s memory supply, saying it had never seen component costs climb so far so fast. So the M6 costs exactly what the M5 did yesterday, while sitting $400 above where the 14-inch Pro started a year ago. That 1TB base is generous at this tier, though it also means there’s no 512GB option to save a few bucks. Students and educators can knock the price down to $1,899.

Everything outside the chip carries over from the M5 model. The Liquid Retina XDR mini-LED display still peaks at 1,600 nits in HDR, with a nano-texture option for anyone working beside a sunny window. The 12MP Center Stage camera, six-speaker sound system, HDMI port, MagSafe 3, SDXC slot, headphone jack, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports all return untouched. Battery life holds at up to 24 hours, matching the M5, so Apple’s “longest ever in a Mac” line describes a tie. Coming from a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro, though, that’s up to four extra hours, plus up to 13 times faster AI prompt processing.

The cheapest MacBook Pro now has the newest chip

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Wednesday’s 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros will bring OLED touchscreens, a Dynamic Island in place of the notch, and a lighter build. They’ll also reportedly stick with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which means the $1,999 model you can’t touch has a newer chip generation than the flagships you can. Gurman says the mini-LED models stay on sale for now before eventually being phased out. Apple announced the M6 model on October 27, exactly ten years after it unveiled the Touch Bar, its last attempt at putting touch on a MacBook Pro. I refuse to believe that timing is an accident.

For an M5 owner, the M6 is an easy skip, since the design, display, and battery are identical. For anyone still hanging onto an Intel MacBook or an early M1 machine, this is the most sensible Pro you can buy, and it costs $500 less than the $2,499 M5 Pro model. Pre-orders for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 open October 28 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific, with deliveries starting November 6. That’s an iPad mini, an iMac, and a MacBook Pro in two days from the guy I asked to take a break, with touchscreen Macs queued up next. At this rate we’ll get that Apple Car announcement by the end of the week.

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The Slurptop DIY Laptop Pairs Power-Tool Styling With a Swappable Battery

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The Slurptop borrows its battery from the toolbox, and its body doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. This homemade cyberdeck wraps mini PC hardware in a chunky yellow-and-black clamshell, complete with an integrated carry handle and mechanical keys. It’s a completed personal project rather than a retail laptop, designed around coding, light design work, and controls that don’t apologize for taking up some extra space.

The angular, 3D-printed enclosure takes its cues from power tools, with similarly conspicuous controls. The yellow frame uses glass-fiber-filled plastic, while black components use carbon-fiber-filled filaments. An aluminum bar reinforces the hinge area, with shared bolts securing several structural layers. The handle fits between sections of the case, so assembling the housing locks it into position before its own mounting screws are added.

Designer: Slurpburgers

Open the lid, and the keyboard immediately takes over. Its 82 mechanical keys sit in angled groups rather than the straight rows you’d expect on a laptop, leaving a green trackball near the front center. That ball runs on three ceramic bearings above a sensor salvaged from a gaming mouse. You can move the pointer without clearing desk space for a separate mouse.

The display keeps things relatively conventional, pairing a 14-inch panel with a 1920-by-1200 resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. Behind the custom shell is hardware from a GMKtec M5 Ultra mini PC, including an AMD Ryzen 7 7730U processor, 64GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. CachyOS supplies the familiar Linux desktop, so there’s a recognizable computing environment beneath all that workshop character.

An XP-Pen drawing tablet also gets its own holder behind the display, adding pen input without displacing the keyboard or trackball. Connected beside the laptop, it provides a separate surface for sketching or editing artwork, leaving the main display free to show what you’re working on. That keeps everything together for travel, although actually drawing still calls for some extra desk space.

The power arrangement follows the same willingness to borrow useful parts. A 24V Kobalt tool battery supplies the machine through a converter that adjusts its output to the PC’s required 19V. A separate cutoff board guards against draining the pack too far. The battery remains an obvious external attachment, making its removal part of the operating routine instead of a repair procedure.

That decision comes with a catch, naturally. The Slurptop doesn’t charge the battery itself, so the pack has to visit its tool charger. Wall power can run the computer independently, and a switching module transfers between the adapter and battery. Keeping it plugged in lets the owner change packs without shutting down, but there’s no uninterrupted battery swap away from an outlet.

The builder reports more than four hours of writing and coding on a 4Ah battery, with some charge remaining. That’s a useful reference, not an independently measured endurance rating. The power-tool styling doesn’t come with a documented weatherproofing or drop rating, either. You can carry this homemade workstation by its handle, but treating it like a drill would be an unfortunate misunderstanding.

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