It's an interesting idea. GPD makes machines that will appeal to those interested in handheld gaming and those on pager duty.
I own devices from GPD, and I have had two issues -- devices are simply not reliable, in just over a year the screen showed a green verticle line, and the display died a few months later. Secondly, the keyboard is simply unusable if you plan to program on it.
I was skeptical of the "AI" but it has 64gb of RAM and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 37 CPU, supposedly has good LLM performance [1]. So yea, its an interesting device.
This looks neat, but it looks like it's trying to be everything to everyone, and while that's always tempting for a new product, I think it's usually doomed to failure.
Why does it support an RS232 port, especially on such a small form factor? Why does it focus so much on local LLM support? Why has it got such a high resolution display? Why has it got swappable ports?
Each one of those features makes sense in isolation for some market, but together I'm not sure there's anyone who's the target market for all of them, and because of that there are likely to be better options for each target market. Want to run an LLM? A Mac is going to do that much better with its unified memory and ML acceleration. Want to do sysadmin stuff plugged into an old switch? You probably already have an old Thinkpad for that. etc.
This is not GPD's first laptop in this size and design.
Yes, many people who buy laptops like this need a physical rs232 port and a kvm port.
Yes, you could buy an old thinkpad, and it won't fit in a pocket, you could buy sometehing small, and it'll be slow, or you could buy this and get both.
Regardless of the success of this crowdfunding round, I bet they still provide supporting downloads of drivers & executables via zip files served from Google drive.
I own devices from GPD, and I have had two issues -- devices are simply not reliable, in just over a year the screen showed a green verticle line, and the display died a few months later. Secondly, the keyboard is simply unusable if you plan to program on it.
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