Lenovo Makes The First Folding-Screen Laptop, For Whatever That's Worth
Lauren Goode, writing for Wired:
The ThinkPad X1 Fold is expected to ship sometime in mid-2020, and will start at $2,499.
So far, I haven’t seen a compelling use case for foldable displays,* and certainly nothing worth $2,500 to a consumer.
The problem here is that two handed typing on a touchscreen keyboard kinda sucks. Even when it’s done well, its finicky and less precise than a hardware keyboard. If a horizontal touchscreen with a software keyboard and trackpad were good input methods, we’d already have laptops with horizontal screens: the fact that we couldn't, until now, bend the display at the device’s hinge to make one continuous screen from the horizontal to vertical surfaces was never an issue. This Lenovo thing is solving a problem that nobody has.
What I want is not a laptop with a horizontal screen. In my mind, a better solution would be something along the lines of Apple’s Touch Bar, but more expansive. I think it would be useful to have tiny displays, e-ink or otherwise, on each key of a keyboard so that they could change dynamically (they could adapt to show different characters to work with any language, show emojis, present app-specific controls, etc.). This would allow a much greater degree of flexibility while maintaining the tactile benefits of discrete, moving buttons.