I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses

"My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere"

Man, I guess I've been fooled using laptops this entire time. IM SO STUPID

He addresses this by saying a laptop doesn't allow you to replace components, doesn't have mechanical keyboard and there's no ultra wide support.
The funny thing is, this device he's using doesn't allow you to replace components either. And there are 21:9 laptops and mechanical keyboards available.
Seemed like he's trying to reverse-engineer his way into justifying a use case for it, but just failed.
- I read that as well, and it addresses none of that. Also, you can replace components on a lot of laptops, and ALL components on a Framework. This is why they are so sought after.
  Whoever wrote this is making a bad faith argument and throwing an ignorant assertion out to serve a specific purpose, which...is not stated 🤣
- I mean if it did multiple virtual monitors the way vr headsets can I could see this being worth it...
  Yeah they make laptop monitors but no ones gonna carry two 24" panels and a 30" ultrawide in their pocket.
Here, follow this affiliate link to this overpriced portable machine.
You're not wrong but this is a distinctly different experience. Some these AR glasses allow you to have multiple giant virtual displays instead of the tiny ~14 inch one. Hence the reference to a "desk setup".
Although I would argue that it would make more sense just to plug the glasses into a laptop.
But also you can use your preferred keyboard and mouse (with more space for the mouse).
- The point is that this is a fake assertion to push a product.

Oh look, another Tom's guide advertorial masking as original content...

I also suspect ArsTechnica of running sponsored AI stories these days.
- They're all doing it. Most tech these days just isn't exciting enough to attract attention without them hyping it.
- I would quite honestly be surprised, they have been vocal in the past about having no such thing.
Anyone who makes a living off of reviews is going to be suspect whether it's tech journals, youtubers, reddit shills, Amazon reviewers, review sites, etc. This is why I launched my own proprietary review methodology which I'm willing to share with others in my 16-week online course. Sign up with the code BUTTSTUFF for 10% off now!
Have they ever not been?
- Before the sale when Igor still wrote for them, Tom's was pretty well respected as was Anand.

My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere

My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.

And a whole bunch of other shit.
I carry two laptops in my work bag regularly, a 15" and 14"
Laptop is hardly a whole desk setup though. AR is potentially going to be much better than using clunky laptops.
- it is literally a whole desk set up in fact I have one on top of my whole desk
- Not if they can't figure out the peripherals. The only thing missing with the laptop is the dual display. Having to drag around a whole keyboard, mouse, PC, and power bank like that is a lateral move at best. You could probably do what he's doing with a laptop and it would still be just as if not more compact.

This article reads like satire... it's sentence after sentence of "and I did it using one of the [best office chairs]" which is a link to some review by themselves. Every bit mentioned had an affiliate link and there wasn't an actual review of what the experience (software, setup, visual fidelity) is like??

Welcome to Future plc publications. Almost entirely clickbait advertorial garbage anymore. It's sad, really.
- Makes me wonder what the onboarding/indoctrination process is.
  Is anyone there actually happy, or proud of their writing? Are they actually all just marketing people cosplaying as writers, so they are proud?
- Darn. I recall reading good articles from some of these publications in the past. Shame...

He has reached douchevana

He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where no douche has gone before.

A guy at work asked if he could use some similar pair of AR glasses at work and was rejected because the companion app for it required to always be running as elevated in windows. Was a solid no there.

Depends the type. Some are essentially just a monitor.

I can fit my PC in a backpack. It's got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.

I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡

I think you have my pc build, except a 9070 XT for a 6800 XT. But the case is huge, I don't see how it fits in anyone's backpack.
- Maybe you're thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:
  Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I'm quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.
- I was looking at mini-ITX cases for exactly this purpose a while back --- wanted sturdy and small for portable use, something that could go in a backpack or suitcase or the like.
  I remember seeing the Velka and one other whose name escapes me right now.
  https://velkase.com/products/velka-3
  184 x 99 x 219 mm
  7.2 x 3.9 x 8.6 in

It's a novel idea. But despite the article's claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.

For traveling, if it's a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you'd have it set up for a while. Though I'd do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don't feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that's a lot to buy for a niche use case.

Edit: spelling and grammar

At this point, something like a steam deck would go better with the glasses, at least it has its own battery
- That's actually pretty cool idea. Wasn't there some effort by Valve to support VR anyway on the Deck?
I've looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn't that small. I think that you could maybe save some space --- the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there's probably some unused internal volume -- if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.
- You wouldn't use a typical SFX power supply for something where size matters; you'd likely use a Flex PSU, which are often long and thin. If you got a lower-power CPU with integrated graphics, you could manage a case that's not much bigger than the motherboard or much thicker than the IO shroud.
  Lemmy doesn't have a lot of SFF or Ultra SFF content yet, but getting the most out of limited space is definitely a thing people are into, and they can get quite creative.
  The final product is often portable but still rarely as tiny as a mini PC or NUC-like. Depending on your needs, someone might be better off making a Steam Brick.

I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.

Or – hear me out – what if he used his already owned laptop with the VR goggles, instead of advertising the proprietary-connector Khadas mind?

im a pretty big fan of AR/VR for productivity, reading books, watching films. the resolution and lenses need to be pretty good for the first 2. but it's promising. laying in bed and looking up at a book or movie is really something else. standing up once in a while is great also. i think there is a future here.

All this trouble just to be able to use a nosy keyboard and covertly watch porn in public.

I've thought about doing this too, with a very similar setup.
Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don't blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye. Can be used in very bright conditions, like outdoors on a bright summer day, without issues. More comfortable to use in some other orientations --- I use a split ergo keyboard with my laptop when lying back in a recliner or on a couch, lets my hands not be jammed in front of me and obstructing my views of the screen, but an HMD is even more flexible.
Laptops have limited hardware customizability, so it's really the only route other than carrying a portable display if you want more control over the PC hardware. Want a 100Wh battery or larger? Non-soldered memory and more of it? More expansion ports or storage slots? Moving the hot-and-noisy stuff beneath the table instead of beneath your hands? For the form factor: have airflow vents that aren't on the bottom and covered up when on a lap (ironically, "laptop"), chest, couch, or bed? If you're a woman and want to use the thing on your belly while lying down, not having your breasts in between your eyes and the screen? For anyone, not having their hands in the way?
Laptops have a lot of limitations as to input devices. Do you want a Trackpoint? You're limited to a very few models of laptop. Trackball? Few laptops and it has to be very small. A trackpad with three physical buttons? Very few laptops on offer make that an option. Particular about your keyboard layout? If you're getting external hardware, there's a cornucopia of options, and you can mix and match as you'd like. Yeah, you can also do this with laptops and a stand and a docking station and external hardware, if you're aiming for use at a particular desk, but that's not really suitable for a couch, say.
The privacy is nice -- and I don't think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren't going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don't need to deal with those inane "hide your password as you type it" things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.
Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Easy to get something slightly blurry if it's not perfectly aligned. My HMD tends to fog up, though the Xreal thing in the article has more airflow and it's probably less of an issue. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears --- circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which matters in some situations.
A lot of work has gone into making laptops particularly low power, and if you build your own system, some of that is on you, to pay attention to component power consumption.
Also, I couldn't find a way to get some kind of external battery to be treated by Linux as a power_supply class device, which lets Linux do things like automatically hibernate when power gets critical and use nice in-UI reporting of low battery. On the power source side, USB PD power banks, which it would seem would be a good solution, technically have the ability to report a battery level but AFAICT do not actually do this, or even present themselves as visible devices on the USB tree. You could probably work something up yourself with a modular battery bank --- at the very least, even if Linux can't use it as a power_supply device, NUT can be rigged up to treat some hardware that you can put on a modular battery bank as a UPS, which accomplishes some of the same stuff, like auto-shutdown. And a modular battery bank is pretty user-configurable. But...that's not necessarily all that portable.
I would definitely do this instead of a laptop if they managed to get HMDs to the point where I'd be willing to dump my displays and go all HMDs. We aren't there yet, though.
- I use rokid air max and it is wonderful, but fatigue sets in despite the light weight due to the heat. Hope they make them with a heat vent

Wait I saw this on the game Heavy Rain.

I really would like to try those glasses. They sound cool. But at $500 they are too expensive for an impulse and there is no place around where one can try those offline

you can do a similar thing with the quest 3 for less money I think

Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.

Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?

For me at least, that "HMD all day" is the limiting factor. I don't want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they're sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.

I think that to be something that I'd want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the displays or optics internal to the HMD to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don't need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.

In 2025, we don't have an HMD that can do that.

EDIT: Also, this doesn't matter much if you're watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it's a visible issue if you're working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.

The quest 3 stays sharp when alignment changes, its surprisingly nice to work in outside of the brick on my face. I would hope the xreal glasses can match quest 3 clarity

The only thing that really attracts me about these glasses is that you could hold your head up instead of looking down all the time at a laptop or a portable monitor. But most of the time I need more than one display, while the glasses only offer a single, expensive, fairly low resolution screen. I also wonder what it does to your eyes to use this for long periods of time.

I tried a previous incarnation of these and was not impressed. The screen was too dark in bright rooms and the resolution and image sharpness was lacking. Also the response time was rather slow, which made them basically unusable for playing games or watching (which was primarily what I bought them for). Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use. I ended up returning them after a week.
It appears as if these are at least the second, if not third generation (mine were simply called Air), and the spatial processing chip might help alleviate some of these issues, but I'm disappointed to see that the vertical resolution has not been increased. But at 32:9, it seems that these have twice the horizontal resolution, which would equal two 16:9 screens next to each other.
I wonder if these might be worth giving another try, but I'm loathe to risk it as my Amazon account has been flagged for returning too many purchases before.
- Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use.
  The current version of these glasses have this optional device that they sell that provides this fixed-in-real-space projected screen called a Beam -- I assume that it's got enough 3D hardware and such to do the projection.
  The problem, as I mention in another comment, is that if you do any kind of 3D projection of a virtual monitor, you have to "spend" resolution from the physical monitor on it to get the virtual monitor enough lower-resolution that it still looks good, and I don't want to give up the resolution.
  Like, there are physically 1080p, 1920x1080 OLED displays in front of each eye on these.
  My laptop monitor, right now, is 2560x1600. So even from the start, I spend resolution just to get down to the resolution of the displays in the physical HMD.
  Then I'm projecting a virtual monitor on that. You could argue what a reasonable virtual-to-physical ratio is, but it's gotta be less than 1.
  The virtual display might be big in terms of visual arc, use a lot of my optical receptors. But end of the day, I want to shovel a lot of data into those optical receptors.
  Maybe if someone has really blurry vision or something like that, can't see at anything like the kind of laptop screen resolution that I'm describing, it'd be less of an issue. But I'm not there (yet!).
  EDIT:
  The screen was too dark in bright rooms
  At least one of the current models that XReal has out has three levels of cycleable opacity on the display -- IIRC it's a "premium" feature on the high-end model, with a lower-end model that can't do variable opacity. IIRC there's a button on the body of the glasses or something. I don't know if the specific ones that that guy tested was the this model, but if not, they do make a model that can.
Really. That's a bummer. if there is an advantage to the glasses it should be that you can have as many displays going as you'd want.

Imagine being in a cafeteria with his setup, looking straight up to nowhere, people will think of you as crazy!

I originally had that when people started using Bluetooth earpieces with cell phones, and you'd see them talking to the air.
- Yeaaa, exactly. I seeing people talking in the air and I was confused.

I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack. I think it would be much more practical to just use a laptop with the xreal glasses

It's longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He's gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he's not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC --- I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn't need to do that bit.
EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don't usually use it.

Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. Hell, if that device is a Framework is will probably be way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses as well.

I'm pretty sure that the Xreal glasses have a carrying case, based on when I was looking at them. I carry a pair of headphones with my laptop, and they come with one. Does require some volume in a backpack or bag, though.

US version with an i7 is $900.

While I've also been interested in similar such systems, the author can accomplish one of his goals --- the mechanical keyboard one --- with a fairly-traditional laptop setup: he needs one of those hybrid laptops that has a screen that can swivel to act as a tablet. Then he just converts it to "tablet" mode and uses it as a monitor, without the keyboard sticking out at him, and he can use whatever keyboard he wants without the laptop keyboard being in the way. Does limit the laptop hardware options, though.

And doesn't buy him the other stuff that he's gunning for, like more customizable hardware or a screen with a larger FOV or such.