The Aurora 7 laptop seems lifted straight from the imagination of a Hollywood prop builder working on a bad hacker flick. But with seven foldout screens, there’s little chance anyone could actually use this beast on their laps. It’s a mobile transforming workstation for those who need more screen real estate than they have room for monitors.
Created by a UK company called Expanscape, the Aurora 7 is very much just a prototype at this stage in the game (as is evident by the extensive use of 3D-printed parts), but it’s designed to be true mobile workstation for everyone from developers to content creators to even well-funded gamers wanting a more immersive experience from a computer they don’t have to leave at home.
Powered by an Intel i9 9900K processor backed by 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1060 series graphics card, the Aurora 7 also comes with 2TB of hard drive storage and an additional 2.5 TB of SSD storage, plus all the ports you could ever need to expand its capacity even further. But the star of the show is the complicated mosaic of screens which includes four 17.3-inch 4K (3840 x 2160) LCDs—two in portrait mode and two in landscape—as well as three smaller 7-inch screens all pushing 1920 x 1200 pixels, with one located in the laptop’s wrist rest.
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Possibly even more impressive is that all those screens are engineered to fold up onto themselves to create a flat profile that can be carried in a bag—albeit a bag large enough to stash a 4.3-inch-thick laptop that weighs in at a hefty 26 pounds. The Aurora 7’s creators are hoping to trim its weight to a lean 22 pounds when all is said and done, but this is not a laptop you want to haul to the office and back every day. This is a machine you’ll want to build a custom wheeled cart for.
Although the Aurora 7 only exists in prototype form right now, Expanscape is still offering to sell its creations to consumers demanding more pixels than have ever been shoe-horned onto a laptop before. But not only is the company not making pricing info public, it’s also requiring interested buyers to sign an NDA promising to keep mum on how much money they actually paid for their one-of-a-kind mobile workstation. In general, prototypes always cost more than a consumer-ready version of a gadget given the time and money that has to go into creating individual parts. Making them by the thousands on a production line significantly reduces costs, but don’t get your hopes up for the Aurora 7 being anything close to reasonably priced if and when it is made available to the public.
