For more information on these three devices, read the accompanying article: Tech Check: Lenovo’s New Twist on Notebooks.
Video transcript:
Today on Tech Check, MacBooks get a boost, notebooks get a twist, and your desk is now a bicycle.
At CES this year Lenovo unveiled a laptop with a special twist—literally. The ThinkBook Plus Twist has a dual-sided display that swivels above the keyboard, giving users a choice of which side to use.
While one side has a fairly typical 13.3-inch OLED display, the flipside has something rather more interesting: a 12-inch e-Ink display like that found in many e-readers. e-Ink is extremely power efficient and easier on the eyes than other displays, and Lenovo thinks users will love it for reading PDFs, writing text documents, and even taking digital notes.
With its unique choice of displays, the ThinkBook Plus Twist is a genuinely novel hybrid that could allow engineers to ditch their e-books, their paper notebooks, and their ultrabooks for one versatile device. The Twist will be available this summer for $1,650.
Apple has announced two new processors based on the architecture of its M2 chip, but bigger. The new M2 Pro and M2 Max will power the upcoming iteration of Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops and Mac Mini desktops.
The new chips come with 12 CPU cores and up to 38 GPU cores in the M2 Max, which can also be configured with up to 96GB of unified memory and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple claims the new chips provide 30 percent faster graphics speeds than the previous generation M1 Pro and M1 Max.
Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max will be available in new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which start at $2,000. The M2 and M2 Pro will also be offered in the new Mac Mini, which starts at $600 for the M2 version.
What’s better than a standing desk? A riding desk. Acer’s new eKinekt BD 3 bike desk shows that work and play don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
The bike desk is designed to let users stay active throughout the work day. It offers an adjustable bike resistance, seat height, and desk position so users can transition from a gentle pedal to a tour de France.
And all that kinetic energy won’t go to waste. The bike desk has two USB-A ports and one USB-C port that can be used to charge phones and other devices purely with pedaling power. Acer says that constant cycling at 60 RPM will generate 75 watts. The eKinekt BD 3 will be available in June for $1,000.
Check out more tech on engineering.com.