This laptop from Ace Magic spent over two years buried in our warehouse. Why
are we making a video about it today? Well, because I was digging through our
warehouse looking for interesting stuff and I pulled this out of the sleeve and
I went Woah! That is so cool. How did we
never make a video about this? Look at this thing. Double your pleasure, double
your fun. The craziest part is it's not
even really thicker than a normal laptop. Here's my daily driver. Okay, in
fairness, the PX13 is probably about 10 times more powerful, but let's have a
look at what comes with the Ace Magic. Ah, yes, cardboard, my favorite. Mmm,
second cardboard. Cardboard with treats. That is one thick
manual. Decoration. Vent. All right, I'm an expert now. We
also get a power adapter, which is really important either because it was sitting in our warehouse for two years
or because it was degraded in the first place, but we're only getting about 50%
of what Ace Magic said we should get in terms of battery life. Actually, before
we charge it, now seems like a good time to have a look at the IO. We've got a
type-C port that is just for charging, type-C port that'll do data as well as
display out, and along this side we've got this incredible looking hinge
mechanism that probably looks cooler than it ends up being, but we'll get to
that in a moment. On the right, we get an HDMI port. This will do HDMI 2.0 as
well as a USB 5 gigabit per second port, another speaker, and that's about all
you get for IO. As the documentation helpfully pointed out, this is vent and
you will need that vent because in its shipping configuration this device was
configured to only draw a maximum of 30 watts and a baseline of about 15 watts
leading to performance that would be best described as pathetic compared to
anything even remotely modern, and while
we were able to tune the BIOS to allow the CPU to draw more power, we found
that this area up here, which contains the buttons to configure the secondary
display, got so hot that it was painful to the touch. Hey, now that we've got it
cracked open, we can take a look at this. We've got a fingerprint sensor
including power button. We've got these buttons right here, which A B glasses
and multitask do something with the secondary display. We've got decoration.
Stay hungry, stay foolish. Apparently, Steve Jobs said it. Anyway, we've got a
little tip sticker here. For faster setup, avoid Wi-Fi or LAN initially.
Connecting might trigger long updates delaying desktop access. Okay.
That is actually some solid advice. Not normally, normally I mean, Microsoft
actually requires you to have an internet connection to set up Windows unless you go through a bunch of hoops.
But on this device, even though it's got a 12th gen Core i7,
so perfectly cromulent modern processor, we found that in its stock BIOS
configuration, it throttled down as low as 4 100 MHz. So, yeah, it was
absolutely painful waiting around for Windows
updates. Now, you might think, well, surely Linus then that resulted in
really truly excellent battery life. No, not so much. Even if the battery had
operated at 100% capacity, we'd have been looking at about 4 to 5 hours of
battery life in our maximum endurance configuration, which is not amazing. So,
why am I bothering to make a video about it? Go ahead, give it the zoom. Ah, yes.
I feel productive already. You know what's really productive? Telling you
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off at the links below or at lttstore.com. Time to experience this
thing. Let's start with a quick notepad. Can't open this app. Uh,
that's a new one. Just so you guys know, I don't really detect that flicker with
my eyes in person. That doesn't mean it's not there. Okay. Advanced options.
Okay. It launched.
The keyboard is fine. I love the look of this hinge. It's so cool. I do worry
that never mind getting a little bit of dust or moisture in there. You could get
like a whole sandwich lodged in that hinge. But, oh, that's a cool potential
use case for it. You could have a display on the front and a display on
the back. So, they make the argument that you might sit in a coffee shop
sharing a presentation with your boss sitting here across from you, for
instance. Of course, if we want to do that, we're going to have to get that screen turned on. [music] Sorry, I keep
getting distracted. The keyboard is not amazing. Um,
perfectly functional, but boy, is that ever a lot of deck flex. Also, this may
be the worst right shift position that I have ever seen.
>> [laughter] >> Across the arrow key. No. Keyboards were
invented by people who are much smarter than you. Don't reinvent them. It's
quiet. I lied, it's not that quiet. As soon as I launched task manager, this
the fan started ramping. Let's play around with the gimmick.
B. Why the hell would you ever want that?
Okay, I'll bite. Maybe I'm a gamer and I want to sit just ever so slightly closer
to my screen. It was a touch screen.
Um, yeah. Yeah, if it Wait. Oh, for crying out
loud. You can't just like use it as a tablet. A, because it's not a touch
screen, and B, because it will just go to sleep even though one of the displays
is totally open. Hey Adam, have you ever [clears throat] thought that your laptop
is just you know, 12 in shy of being exciting?
No, not really. Oh, right. You have this but not stupid.
I guess you're not that jealous. All right. Well, I guess it's time for us to
try the other buttons. Boop.
Okay. If I was sitting like this, I
wouldn't want this way out flat because if we're being honest, the viewing
angles on these screens not amazing. So, you can see it's
reasonably bright from the front. We ended up getting anywhere from mid to
high 200s to low 300 nits for both of them. They were, in spite of reporting
as being the same panel, quite different in terms [music] of their performance
for brightness, which was weird. Same color gamut.
Horrible. Worst we've seen in years. Like, less than 70% of sRGB. Freaking
wild. Uh, but they do this weird thing. See, it's quite bright
and then it goes like really dim and then it kind of goes bright again.
I've never seen that before. In all my years of doing this. You see that?
Dim. See, it goes bright again at the very extreme. Anyway, the point is I would
want it kind of here so that I'm looking straight at it. And the hinge
if I wiggle wobble it at all, it's going to just kind of flatten out. The good
news for Ace Magic is that they don't seem to actually be responsible for this
design. As far as we can tell, they just bought something they found on Alibaba
and rebranded it. Okay, that makes them responsible for the product, but it
raises a lot of questions for me. Who made this? Who bought it? What does this
last button do?
Oh, now we're cloning. So, there's your coffee shop use case. All right. Why
don't we try playing a game? I'm going to optimistically grab my mouse assuming
that I will ever actually be moving across here. And I'm going to grab it
from this new colorway of our Commuter Backpack, by the way.
Stay tuned on lttstore.com. I wanted to lean it down so you guys
could see it in the top-down, but I don't have to. What a great design. That's a small
trackpad for modern year. In all seriousness, if it wasn't for the poor
execution, I actually do like the overall idea of having a second screen
side by side like this. Is it better than the one Adam brought over that had
the detachable keyboard and that you could kind of put into landscape and
then spread out that way? >> [sighs] >> Probably not. I daily drove one like
that for a little while and it was pretty awesome. But I do think there's people who would prefer something like
this, too. This is wild. I'm getting 3 FPS in the menu. I didn't even know that
CS 2 pre-compiled shaders. Probably cuz it usually happens so fast I don't
notice it, but here it is. You know what? I'm back to blaming Ace Magic for this.
They should have known better than to put their brand on it. Or they should have at least found out what it was
before putting their brand on it. On their site, they actually have a guide
to how to replace the RAM. Well, we cracked it open and it turns out that
you can only replace the NVMe storage drive. The RAM is soldered. So, they
don't even seem to know exactly what it is that they're selling. Yeah,
about 7 FPS. I'm going to get a kill.
Oh, whoa, that was a big stutter.
Whoa, that was another big one. Going to kill Oh, I got one.
I got one. To be clear, these are bots. Whoa, did you see how long that mag took
to fall to the ground? That was crazy. The game physics are completely broken.
Whoa, that was like a 3-second pause. Not much else to say at this point.
Nobody's going to actually buy this laptop, so I don't think we need to get
too deep into what generation of Wi-Fi it has. Six.
>> [music] >> Or what Bluetooth it supports. 5.2. If
it was really cheap, maybe it could be justified if all you really need it for
is basic office work and you don't mind putting in the work to go modify a BIOS
or something like that in order to get decent performance out of it. But even
when it was on clearance toward the end, it was over $800, which is more than I'd
be willing to pay for this experience. Wait, this just in. Last December, it
apparently went down to just over $400.
Okay, hold on a second. That promo code is still on the site?
>> It's sold out. The whole laptop is sold out now. Oh. Oh, it's sold out. Okay, at
that price, yeah, I'd say it might actually be worth it. 400 bucks? Yeah,
it's still pretty crappy. But you know what's not crappy?
Subscribing to ShortCircuit. You should definitely do that. Oh god. If you are
interested in the concept of a very large screen laptop or expanding screen
laptop, we've got a video coming on the ASUS ZenBook Duo coming up soon. It's a
lot more expensive, but it's a much, much better experience.