‘What’s old is new again’ feels like an increasingly common philosophy with modern technology. This time, it’s HP harkening back to the 80s with the EliteBoard G1a, a PC built entirely within a portable keyboard from factor.
Although HP’s PC-keyboard hybrid is primarily aimed at enterprise and business use, it’s an interesting design experiment that the company stresses is not meant to replace laptops.
“What we see is that a lot of employees still have, if they have a laptop, they take it to work, they plug it in and treat it as a desktop,” said Neil Westhof, Director Personal Systems, HP Australia & New Zealand. “So what we tried to look at is not to address the mobility factor of that, but address the inefficiency of that type of setup.”
Its slender build is a decent downsize compared to old all-in-one PCs, like the decades-old Commodore 64. However, it’s not an entirely unique concept; Raspberry Pi has made low-powered, affordable enthusiast keyboard computers for some years now.
But enthusiast-level, the EliteBoard G1a is not. It runs on the AMD Ryzen AI 300 chipset with an integrated Radeon 800M GPU, supporting up to 2TB of storage and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. In Australia, HP’s PC starts at $2,685, although it’s not available as a consumer-level product — only via enterprise sales at this stage.
First look at the HP EliteBoard G1a
HP’s keyboard PC feels nice to type on and ships with a Bluetooth-paired mouse out of the box. The only thing the EliteBoard G1a needs that’s not included is a monitor.
This is where HP’s enterprise vision becomes clearer: the PC can plug into a docking station via USB-C to access external displays, storage, and other peripherals. It’s not as immediately mobile as a laptop, due to requiring something to plug into at any given workstation, but its roughly 700g weight lends itself to easy transport.
At HP’s launch event, the company showed several potential use cases for the keyboard PC, ranging from office hotdesking, medical stations that could be wheeled between rooms, to hotel kiosks, potentially bypassing other small form factors, like mini PCs.
Also built into the EliteBoard G1a is a set of speakers and a microphone, with the option of a built-in battery that lasts up to four hours when plugged directly into a display, rather than a powered docking station.
Repairability and modularity are part of HP’s push to distinguish its new PC from the ubiquity of laptops. It doesn’t take much time or effort to open up the keyboard, letting you upgrade or replace components as needed.
With the price impact of the global memory shortage, modular designs are a common stopgap. The idea is that you get the base spec you need now, and then upgrade when PC parts (hopefully) become more affordable. Although based on current industry expectations, we could be waiting a while for that to happen.
Chris Button attended the EliteBoard G1a launch event in Sydney as a guest of HP Australia.
The post HP’s hybrid PC and keyboard combo is a throwback to the 80s appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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