New PC Form Factors

While PC vendors have previewed various foldable laptops in recent years, look for a more serious effort in 2023. Some will be single screen displays that fold, while others will have dual screens.

In September, Lenovo launched its ThinkPad X1 Fold. It has a 16-inch foldable OLED display powered by an Intel Evo-based 12th Gen processor available with up to 1 TB of storage and 32GB of RAM.

Also, more modular PCs are waiting in the wings. One prominent example is Dell’s Concept Luna. Revealed last year, Rahul Tikoo, general manager of Dell’s client computing group, discussed Project Luna at the company’s Dell Technologies World conference in May.

Last week, Dell shared an update on Concept Luna.

“Project Luna is our NorthStar vision for product design,” Tikoo said at the time. It calls for a more modular design of mobile PCs with a motherboard that’s 75% smaller using 20% fewer components. Besides offering a significantly reduced carbon footprint, Tikoo said Project Luna would provide much easier access to a laptop’s system internals.

“We’re going from hundreds of screws down to four building a modular design so you can very easily disassemble it,” he said. “You can very easily get to the parts that you need to o repair, reuse, refurbish and finally, we’re making a lot more intentional material choices in our products.”