from Hacker News

Pocket 4: Modular full-featured Handheld AI PC

by nmridul on 11/28/24, 3:13 AM with 20 comments

  • by teruakohatu on 11/28/24, 3:47 AM

    I was skeptical of the "AI" but it has 64gb of RAM and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 37 CPU, supposedly has good LLM performance [1]. So yea, its an interesting device.

    [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1gfr60l/ryzen_ai_300_t...

  • by danpalmer on 11/28/24, 4:24 AM

    This looks neat, but it looks like it's trying to be everything to everyone, and while that's always tempting for a new product, I think it's usually doomed to failure.

    Why does it support an RS232 port, especially on such a small form factor? Why does it focus so much on local LLM support? Why has it got such a high resolution display? Why has it got swappable ports?

    Each one of those features makes sense in isolation for some market, but together I'm not sure there's anyone who's the target market for all of them, and because of that there are likely to be better options for each target market. Want to run an LLM? A Mac is going to do that much better with its unified memory and ML acceleration. Want to do sysadmin stuff plugged into an old switch? You probably already have an old Thinkpad for that. etc.

  • by we0x on 11/28/24, 5:27 AM

    It's an interesting idea. GPD makes machines that will appeal to those interested in handheld gaming and those on pager duty.

    I own devices from GPD, and I have had two issues -- devices are simply not reliable, in just over a year the screen showed a green verticle line, and the display died a few months later. Secondly, the keyboard is simply unusable if you plan to program on it.

  • by esperent on 11/28/24, 4:46 AM

  • by steele on 11/28/24, 4:50 AM

    Regardless of the success of this crowdfunding round, I bet they still provide supporting downloads of drivers & executables via zip files served from Google drive.

  • by decker on 11/28/24, 5:05 AM

    This would be pretty nice to carry around during oncall shifts, albeit, probably not the most productive device to have in the event you get paged.

  • by rixed on 11/28/24, 8:45 AM

    These machines always make me think of, and sorely miss, my old companion the vaio pcg-c1. Anyone else used to use one of those?

  • by grakker on 11/28/24, 5:52 AM

    >Most successful businessman own a Macbook or Surface.

    That's some dime-store psychology going there. Freaking hilarious.

  • by Animats on 11/28/24, 4:11 AM

    It's a nice little netbook. But does anybody still want or need a netbook? Especially a rather expensive one.