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- Yo, what's up?
I'm MKBHD here.
Welcome back to Dope Tech
in Techtember, the busiest, most wonderful time of the year,
but I've got three really cool things to show you.
So first up is this laptop here.
This is the Dell XPS 13 Plus.
It's probably the hottest laptop design I have ever seen.
And then when you actually get to using a laptop
you pretty quickly realize it's a little bit
more difficult to use specifically
because of the sick design.
It's probably the purest example
of form over function I've ever seen.
Let me explain.
So just look at this thing.
Look at this thing.
Most laptops look really similar to each other
but when I picture a modern,
even slightly futuristic laptop, this is what comes to mind.
It's this all white, clean, thin folding piece of metal
with edge to edge everything basically.
The keyboard goes to edge to edge
but is also particularly flat
without being terrible to type on,
which looks really good
and it matches up with this 13 inch 4K OLED touch screen
also going corner to corner.
And this is not the only laptop to have basically
full screen display corner to corner,
but the fact that it does it all while keeping the webcam
up at the top and not having a notch is welcomed.
And then down below the keyboard you have this track pad
but it's an invisible track pad.
You might have been looking at this laptop,
wondering why does it look so clean?
This is definitely why.
It's still a normal sized, normal shaped track pad
under here, but it's an area underneath
this single piece of glass that doesn't move at all.
It just vibrates with the haptics to simulate the feel
of a click and it's quite good at it.
And then all of that put together
in this clean, metal body with metallic champered edges,
the half inch total thickness.
It's under three pounds.
Makes it a pretty sweet aesthetic for an everyday laptop.
However, y'all know what form over function means.
So as hot as this laptop is, there are some pretty
clear trade offs that make it obvious why others
aren't running to copy everything that they did here.
So the track pad, for example, is super good looking,
but as you can imagine when your finger leaves
the sensitive surface area, the mouse just stops working.
You just have to get used to knowing where it ends.
So there's a reason why other laptop manufacturers,
even though they also use one piece track pads
that don't move,
they will clearly define the track pad area visually.
And then the keyboard, it's a quirky one.
You've got the power button
cutting into the backspace button a little bit up
on the right side here.
There's the shorter up and down arrow keys.
I guess for the most part, even though it's flat
and the keys aren't particularly clicky,
this is a reasonable keyboard,
until you get to the touch bar right above it.
So we've seen touch bars before
and there's a reason why we've started moving
back away from them.
This one is definitely not any better than the rest.
It's a soft escape key and then F1 through F12.
And then they can turn it into media controls
and quick controls as you move around between apps.
But this is an even worse version of a touch bar
because it's not a screen.
So you don't really have visual confirmation
of your touch targets
and they're smaller than normal touch targets
and there's no haptic feedback.
It's just not fun to use.
And then also, yes, this is a beautiful, thin, crafted
piece of metal, which is awesome to see an everyday laptop
but you might have noticed there's only one, two USBC ports
and no headphone jack on this entire laptop,
which is not nice to see on an everyday laptop.
Actually, here's the perfect example
of form over function with this laptop.
It's super clean and and nice looking.
There's no indent for your thumb
where you'd normally be able to open the laptop
cuz I guess they wanted it to look super nice and sharp
at the bottom, which it does.
But now, this is not as easy to,
yeah, form over function.
Either way, I still consider this dope tech
just because it is still a pretty respectable laptop
inside, decent specs and everything.
There's also a higher fresh rate display option.
I'll link to a full Dave 2D review
where he goes over a lot more of this stuff in depth,
benchmarks, et cetera.
But for now, I guess I just leave this
with a better understanding
of why more laptops don't look just like this one.
All right, so the next piece of dope tech is something
we've had for a little while now.
It's actually a piece of gear that we've been using
behind the scenes on a couple of these more recent videos.
And it's also from a sponsor of this video.
It's from EcoFlow.
So you might have been watching the Ioniq 5 review
and been thinking,
wow, this is the best Ioniq 5 review ever made.
How did they shoot that?
So long story, a lot of fun gear,
a lot of practice goes into stuff like that.
But one of the most underrated parts behind the whole thing
was a mobile power station powering it all.
So that was EcoFlow's Delta Pro, which is an absolute tank.
This thing was powering the camera, the audio device,
the light we used, just everything we used,
with way more than enough extra to charge up
anyone's laptops or smartphones or any other gadgets.
And yes, before we start typing,
some of you are eagle eyed enough to realize
that the Rivian we're shooting with
also has some power ports.
But then how are we supposed to get this shot
with the Rivian in the background hundreds of feet away?
That would be the Delta Pro.
Now, as we've also probably been able to guess
by the fact that I'm outside again,
yes, this whole video shoot is powered by a Delta Pro,
but they also have a smaller, slightly more affordable,
more portable version.
This is called the DELTA 2.
It's still ridiculously capable.
This here is a one kilowatt hour battery,
but it's gotten expansion port here,
cuz you connect it to more and daisy chain them together
and have up to three kilowatt hours just of these.
And just one of these can power
up to 15 devices simultaneously.
You can see these six AC outlets on the back.
Just these by themselves can do 1800 watts of steady output.
And then around the front there's some USB A,
and some USB C ports that'll do 100 watts.
And then there's a screen that breaks down
how much power you're outputting
and how much time it'll last.
But even better than this screen,
they also have a smartphone app
that connects by Bluetooth that just breaks down exactly
how much power each port is drawing, the temperatures,
the time remaining,
and even this real time graph, which is sick.
When we finally do run through this whole thing,
it can fast charge up back from zero to 80% in 50 minutes.
And I think you can go to 100% in under an hour and a half.
But it's good for 3000 charge cycles like that,
which is like a decade, if you used it a whole thing
every single day.
It's great.
These are the same types of batteries
that are in Tesla's vehicles, very durable.
There's also five year warranty that covers everything.
It's one of those pieces of gear
that you don't realize how important it is to you
until it's pointed out to you,
like a favorite lens or something.
So the bigger Delta Pro power station,
this guy is 3.6 kilowatt hours
and can sustain 3,600 watts of AC output, which is crazy.
And that one can even be linked up to your home
as a battery backup,
and it can be charged up via solar panels
or even at a level two electric car charging station
with included accessories.
It can also be charged up via multiple sources at once.
It's incredible.
This thing is a real beast.
But here's a kicker,
and this is a question I get all the time
about electric cars.
So when you drive a gas car and you run outta gas,
you can always have someone go find a nearest gas station,
but grab a bunch of gasoline in a pitcher or a can,
bring it to you and fill it up.
What happens if you run out of electricity
in a battery powered car?
Well, now the answer is you get a battery
and someone can bring you an actual battery,
one of these EcoFlow Pros even,
and it'll just plug right in
and actually charge up the car
straight from the outlet on the side.
And it is super impressive.
It's not gonna be the fastest charge in the world,
but you can see it's drawing nearly 1000 watts.
You can add one or two miles real quick
just to get to the nearest fast charger
and that is incredibly useful.
It's the kind of thing where I feel
like every roadside assistance vehicle
should just have one of these now
because of how popular electric cars are getting
and that would help a lot of people out.
So yeah, anyway, if you wanna get one of these,
it's great for our portable studio use,
but it's great for peace of mind too.
If you wanna grab the 2 or the Pro,
you can use the promo code I have down below,
which is MKBHDEF8.
That'll get you 8% off your order.
So you're welcome.
All right, so a few days ago I got an email
asking if I wanted to try haptic gloves in VR
and I got a lot of weird emails,
so I was very close to just skipping over this one.
But something made me say yes to this one
and I'm very glad I said yes.
So this is a fascinating piece of tech
and the idea is pretty simple.
It's not a finished product by any means,
but the concept is what if you could feel inside of VR?
Like VR, the visuals are getting so much better.
It's entertaining your sense of hearing now too.
It's getting more and more immersive.
But here's one more of your senses to actually entertain,
feeling stuff inside of the virtual reality world.
Now, the major VR headsets that are out right now
don't really do this.
So this is a hack or a layer built on top of that.
So for the Quest 2, that I've been using for a while,
you have the gloves and then the gloves attach
to the actual controller itself.
So you end up looking like you have a rig
basically like this as you use it in the game,
which is kind of a lot.
But they've built some experiences inside of the VR world
to actually take advantage of these gloves
and they're pretty impressive.
- [VR Voice] Before we start assembling the robots,
we need to clean up the place.
Place the drink cans inside the trash bin.
- You can kind of hear the haptic engine or motor working.
When I'm picking up a can, I can feel that.
Throwing it out.
You can see one finger at a time move exactly the way
you tell it to.
Put my thumb in, close it, open it.
It's pretty sick.
- [VR Voice] Pick up the left wheel
and snap it to the robot.
- Unfortunately, there's no weight of anything.
When something is heavy,
like this should be a really heavy object,
I don't know how they would add weight to it,
but that would be kind of cool.
All right, this is the part
where you get to feel the trigger of the drill.
Pick up the drill and just...
- [VR Voice] Screw up the arms and the wheels of the robot
with the drill.
- This is a complete experience.
I feel the drill vibrating when I squeeze the trigger,
and it's only my pointer finger that feels resistance
when I squeeze the trigger of the drill.
(drilling sound)
That is good.
(drilling sound)
So there are wires down each of the fingers, as you can see,
and they're connected to motors in the knuckles
that can give you up to 20 newtons of resistance per finger.
Then there's vibration motors in the thumb
and the tips of all the fingers and in the palm.
So the idea is anytime you grab something or touch something
or hit or squeeze something or let go of something,
all of that is slightly more feelable.
You can feel all of that when wearing the gloves
instead of holding a controller.
Really the most interesting thing to me is that
all of this is on the outside of the finger.
So it can only do a certain type of force,
like squeezing you can really feel,
but you don't actually feel the object in your hands.
It would be cool if this was developed more
and I think that's what's gonna happen.
I think you're gonna start to see
the other VR headset makers actually work on this problem,
because they also are thinking about immersion.
And then I think the future of this is endless.
I imagine a lot of sports games,
like driving games, feeling the resistance of the wheel
while you're in VR or even something
like you're holding a tennis racket or ping pong.
Imagine ping pong while feeling the spin you can put
on the ball.
It's crazy.
That's gonna be super advanced.
Anyway, as of right now,
the company that's making these sense gloves is selling them
in super limited quantities to enterprise companies
for 4,500 Euros a pop.
So companies like Volkswagen
and the European Space Agency have sets of these
for procedural training, which is still pretty cool.
But again, I'm really glad I said yes
to this experience because this is dope tech.
This is the bleeding edge of stuff
that makes sense mentally now,
but is going to be really cool sometime in the future.
And I can't wait for that.
Either way, that's been it.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you out as the next one.
Peace.
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