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Ever been using your laptop and had the thought: "Man, I could do with at least six more screens!" Well, fret no more, a startup company called Expanscape has the answer to all your troubles.
Behold the Aurora A7 Prototype, the base configuration for which is just $20,700—not including import fees.
The project is something akin to Razer's Project Valerie, a three screen laptop prototype based on the company's Blade Pro, that was unfortunately it was stolen from CES one year, and was never actually released.
According to Tom's Hardware, the price of the Aurora line-up has been upped over the past months. This is due in part to component shortages, as well as new Brexit border policies across the UK, where the company is based. However, the laptops developers are convinced demand will still be high, expressing those who've bought the products said they needed them "yesterday."
These apparently healthy numbers of prospective buyers are willing to pay the equivalent of a year's wages for some, just for the privilege of having seven screens on the go. Though, at 12 kilograms, it won't be the most portable thing in your arsenal.
But it's not just the screens you're paying for. The current A7 features an AMD Ryzen 5950x processor, Nvidia RTX 3070, 128GB RAM, and 8TB NVMe storage, all for $20,700 (£15,000)
The earliest Aurora 7 prototype included an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU, 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, and a boatload of storage including a 2TB HDD, four PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs, and one 2.5-inch MLC SSD.
For those without a fifth of 100k knocking around in your back pocket, there's a mini version with just four 4K, 15.6-inch panels, and a little palm rest touchscreen that's still bigger than most standard phone screens at 7-inches.
This smaller Aurora A5 notebook comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPU, along with 64GB of DDR4 memory, a 2TB PCIe/NVMe SSD, and a 2TB SATA SSD. That'll cost you a much more affordable $6,286 (£4,500), but again that's not including import fees for those not residing in the UK.
Having only just hit us with pricing, it's unclear how much the prototypes will change before they reach a final design, but I must say I'm a fan of the combine interface from Half-Life 2 look, so I hope they don't change too much.
Though it may be an idea to shave a few kilos off the weight, and maybe tidy up those cables a bit.
Updated 02/19 - current spec of the A7 prototype was listed as the older version, now corrected.
