its a shame. it was promising all the way up to this killer point. sad. also the power adapter is a huge no-no as well. companies need to stop putting the plugs on the bulky converter case/cube.
The problem with this thing is Minisforum's EM680 for $425ish for 32gb 6400MT DDR5 and 1TB M.2 drive with a 6800H APU makes this thing completely unappealing. IMO.
That thing (EM680) is bigger than this one (Khadas Mind). The size difference is a premium some people would be willing to pay for. It also has that interesting dock.
@@GinsuSher Actually, the EM680 is about 2x thicker but less than half the footprint on the desk. The EM680 also has 2x USB4 Type-C ports, 3x USB-A 3.2 10gbps, full size HDMI 2, micro SD card slot, and a combo audio jack. All this for about 60% of the cost of the Khadas. Edit: HP also sells a dock about the same size as the EM680 so I could more than double my ports in the same footprint as the base unit by stacking them lol
Lenovo Legion Go and a decent small dongle that has an ethernet port seems like it might be a better all arounder option if for some reason You NEED this small form factor. Can pull off the controller sides if You are going to carry mouse and keyboard anyway while traveling and has some battery life as well....but those who are commenting, "small laptop" are making a compelling argument at this price.
Hey Lisa!! This is your friend from many moons ago, Melvin. I'm still here in Colorado Springs, Colorado.I'm getting ready to start college to get my accounting degree. Would this sort of computer meet all of my needs. I will be using the Microsoft office suite. Do you think that this computer could handle it. Anyways Lisa, as always, your reviews are the BEST! Catch ya' latter okay. -Melvin - Colorado Springs, Colorado - 01.05.24 - 7:00 PM
Hey Melvin, this is Lisa. It's great to hear from you again, hope everything is going well! No, this PC would not have the necessary processing power required by such a power-hungry set of software such as Microsoft Office. The mere click on the icon of Microsoft Word would have catastrophic consequences to this PC and would cause major damages to the CPU. Good luck in college!
Comically overpriced given its limitations. Being tied into their ecosystem and paying $1000 for a 4060 is insanity. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and for a better price with thunderbolt I’d be on the market. But this is DOA imo.
I have been reading about 7 inch Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC). Great for backing up photos / videos from SD cards, when travelling. Biggest hurdle is the cramped keyboards, especially for extended use. Now you show a version with NO keyboard, NO display, and it costs more? Don't know who the target consumer is, but it's not me.
Ill keep my beelink i5 with Thunderbolt 4. It's only a little bit bigger, but still the size of a apple TV box. This looks sleek and nice, but proprietary egpu connector kills it for me.
Omg İt has been around 8 years to watch your last video and yoy changed a lot (in a good way if we don't count the years ❤😊) Glad to see you keep going the good work 👍🏼
I used to have trend micro when my school offered free licenses for it. It made me think it was free in general - then i tried to reinstall it after replacing my SSD, and the rest is history😢
How is it modular if you can't add a GPU or even upgrade the RAM? How is it any sort of workstation? What can you do with it that you couldn't do on your phone? There are a great many low cost, small and portable pc options and have been for years. This adds nothing new. There is an actual need for a genuinely modular small / semi portable workstation. Where users can (easily) add and upgrade their GPU, CPU, SSD, ram and ports. This just fails to meet the need. Why is there this need? Because (real) workstation and gaming laptops are extremely expensive and most of the time upgrading the GPU and adding extra drives is all that is needed to extend the life vs buying a whole new $5000 laptop every 4 years.
Not sure why you call it a Mini PC Modular Workstation in your title, but this is anything but a workstation. It's cpu is way too slow for work one does with a workstation and the lack of a dedicated gpu or at least a decent igpu is going to be an issue. I'm a workstation user and 32Gb RAM isn't enough for me. I've got a Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast and yes, it's larger, but sure packs a lot more power. Looking at the price of this I think buying a Miniforum with AMD is a much better choice. That gives you a choice of ram and has a better igpu in it, even up to a radeon 780m now, which is a much better choice that the outdated Intel Xe. It's also very obvious that they haven't put in a Thunderbolt port so they can sell an expensive gpu which will be held back by slow cpu anyway. Don't like it when companies do things like that, forcing users to buy there stuff and not giving them a choice. A mini pc should have thunderbolt in 2024, just like most of them had in 2023. I suggest keeping an eye on the newer Minforum's that are in the process of being released and doing a review of them. A way better choice that this. Now that Asus has the NUC line, who knows what they will (or won't) do with them.
THIS NOVEMBER, VOTE RED AND SAVE SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS LIKE LISA! NYC HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AT MADISON HS, FORCED TO REMOTE LEARNING TO ACCOMMODATE ANOTHER TYPE OF STORM TAKING OVER OUR CITY.
Geez, when I was product manager with Toshiba Portable Computers, we had docking station for our notebooks. They never sold well. This could also turn out to be a solution looking for a problem. Why not use a notebook, instead of installing a docking base in all of your workplaces? Way to expensive that way.
No thunderbolt or usb4 port is such a shame. They chose greedy proprietary connector, instead of an open platform. Asus did the same thing with the ROG Ally and ROG Flow devices, but at least they gave us thunderbolt
I'd rater get a laptop, has the added benefit of a screen, battery and user input devices. This is overpriced and underwhelming for a "workstation". Also, according to Intel latest marketing, if it ain't latest gen it's garbage.
The ergonomics of a laptop are terrible, at least by the standards of anyone who cares about ergonomics. And if one cares about both ergonomics and potability/mobility "at the same time" without compromise, laptops become even more irrelevant. Laptops are not modular, whether in internal performance components or external i/o components like monitor and keyboard. If you attach your own peripherals, you can't detach the ones that the laptop already has, then the whole setup becomes more clunky and less portable, which defeats the purpose of getting laptop over.. well.. any other category of devices really. That is where mini PCs come into place, because whether or not the internals are modular, the externals are, so this category of devices still serve a purpose that laptops clearly don't, and whether a specific product executes it well or not is another subject. TLDR: Laptops are good enough ONLY for users that don't give the slightest damn about ergonomics and peripheral modularity. Otherwise, they're utterly useless in comparison to almost any other form factors.
These little PCs are pretty great, but they have fairly specific use cases. -Because, honestly, a laptop is better most of the time. Laptops have uninterruptible power built in. A NUC-style computer doesn't. But one such case where a NUC was better... I needed a portable recording studio, something which could pack down into a couple of rolling luggage bags. -Cameras and broadcast quality mics and lights and all that stuff. One of the big issues is that you need a computer with a stupidly wide PCI bus to handle heavy input from multiple video capture cards. I like to build stuff from eBay parts, and a standard used laptop just can't deliver. So instead I got an eBay NUC for a couple hundred bucks. It has a dedicated Thunderbolt port and discrete USB 3 ports. It could do the job. Barely. Most computers, let alone portables, aren't up the task of running more than one HDMI input, let alone three or four. So this Khadas machine, while cute, is really pointless for me without Thunderbolt. Mind you.., the real solution which I eventually embraced, was to bite the bullet and just get an ATEM Mini video switcher. Now I can just run a regular laptop and I have all these old Avermedia capture cards sitting in a box. (They have flames printed on them, because... gamers.)
