More Mobile: Minimizing and Overthinking (Premium)

Last month, I began writing about my experiments with more mobile PC setups for productivity and gaming. Since then, those experiments have evolved, at least on the productivity front. (Gaming remains an open question.) By which I mean, I’ve weathered the transition from a desktop PC-based setup to a laptop-based setup, successfully and for the first time. And I have a few observations.

First up, I’ve switched desks. I’ve had some nice home office furniture in years past, but after moving to Pennsylvania four years ago, I switched to an inexpensive IKEA standing desk. It used a hand crank instead of a motorized mechanism, which means that I stopped using it quickly because it was so cumbersome to move up and down. Worse, the desk was wobbly because, well, it was made by IKEA and didn’t have very secure connections between the top and the legs. I never really liked it.

So I decided to replace it with a smaller IKEA desk that I’d been using as a sort of staging area this summer for the PCs and other devices I was getting rid of as part of our ongoing decluttering campaign. Once I had cleared out enough of the junk, that desk was free—I don’t even recall why we got it in the first place years ago, perhaps for one of the kids’ rooms—and since it was both sturdier and smaller than my standing desk, I made the swap.

The “new” (to me) desk, which I wasn’t able to find on IKEA’s website, sorry, but it’s one of the basic cheap units, is considerably smaller than the standing desk. The latter measured 63 x 31.5 inches, whereas the new desk is just 47.5 x 23.5 inches (based on a measuring tape measurement). So I lost a lot of room in both directions.

This is fine for the laptop setup: on the old desk, I had to pull the laptop on its Nexstand Laptop Stand forward when compared to the old desktop PC setup, but that works fine since the laptop’s display is smaller anyway. But there’s not a lot of room now behind the stand, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to use my 27-inch HP Z27n G2 display on this desk because it’s too short front-to-back. This has its own clarifying effect, however, since that removes that possibility. I’m basically stuck using a laptop and its internal display only. Which is fine. Like I wrote, I’ve gotten used to this setup over the past three weeks or so.

Not that there haven’t been hiccups, plus some necessary adjustments.

If you watch any of my podcasts, you may be aware that I’ve been struggling with the El Gato Facecam that TWiT was nice enough to send me this past summer. It won’t persist the settings changes I make, so I have to keep adjusting them for each show, which is maddening. And because it’s a rather large and heavy webcam, keeping it centered, and from wobbling, atop a 15-inch laptop’s open display lid is difficult. At some point, I hope to have a large enough laptop with a great webcam so I no longer need the external camera.

Speaking of which, I initially started testing my laptop-based setup with a year-old 15-inch HP Envy laptop, but since I’ve since switched to the thinner and more powerful Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 that will be my next-reviewed laptop. Both are Intel-based, and so both work well with the CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 dock that Intel loaned me. But this particular setup precludes me from experimenting with an M1-based MacBook or an AMD-based PC. And so I may pick up a USB hub, which is silly since I had some and gave them away as part of that decluttering push. I knew that type of thing would happen.

The smaller desk also caused some logistical issues.

On my older and larger desk, I was able to place more things, and so I had a desk lamp to the right and some smaller items, like a stapler, tape dispenser, and a pen holder. None of those fit on the new desk, so I moved my office lamp forward from the far wall so that it’s now right behind my desk. And I removed those items and put them somewhere else in the office.

I also got rid of the large speakers I’d been using. I miss them a lot—the laptop’s built-in speakers are tinny by comparison, especially since they can’t benefit from the bass effect of sitting right on the desk—but I need to get used to that.

And then there’s the portable display thing. I have three portable displays for testing, and I will be writing about those soon, as I keep promising, I know. But there are reasons for the delay, so let me explain.

First, I would like to replace my 28-inch gaming display with a portable display, and this is something I could use whether I continue playing games on my Xbox Series X or move to Xbox Cloud Gaming via my PC. (I wrote about that previously in More Mobile: Gaming.) But portable displays aren’t just smaller than normal displays, they also just sit on the desk, and I don’t want to look down at the display, I want it to be raised off the desk. And so I spent some time researching portable display stands and have bought two, in turn, neither of which worked.

There were two issues with both. They didn’t raise the display enough and they couldn’t support the weight of the portable displays, despite claiming to work fine. Basically, these kinds of things are really designed to hold an iPad, and since most people are just reading on such a device, they are likewise designed to either sit right on the desk or only lift up the display a few inches. That doesn’t work for me.

I was discussing this problem with my wife while we were walking the dog recently, in part because she was aware that I had been waiting on the delivery of the second one for three days—it kept getting delayed even though each day Amazon said it was out for delivery—and in part because sometimes I can’t help boring her with my work nonsense.

And in doing so, I suddenly realized I was overthinking things. This setup is designed to be mobile, and I’ll hopefully one day take it on the road and use it in various Airbnb’s or apartments or whatever as we move around. And rather than worry about a portable display stand, I could just do as I do when I record podcasts in hotel rooms: use whatever is in the room at the time to lift the device off the desk. A stack of books or a box or whatever would do just fine. This has the added benefit of removing a thing—the portable display stand—that I’d have to cart around every time we moved.

The other related thing that’s happened since the last post is that Surface Pro 8 has arrived for review. I’m very interested in this tablet/laptop hybrid, and I know a lot of you are as well. And I’d love to use this PC in place of the Samsung for a while, especially since I’ll publish the Galaxy Book 360 Pro review any day now and should move on. But the Surface Pro won’t work with my laptop stand because its keyboard cover/connection isn’t secure enough to hold the weight of the device at that angle. And the Pro is also too heavy for those portable display stands I’ve tested. I could use it as most people do, on the desk to the side, and with a desktop PC display in front of me. But, as noted, this desk is too small for that. Classic. So I’ll probably just have to use it normally and review it accordingly. Ah well.

Anyway, the second reason I’ve not yet discussed portable displays is that a hardware maker coincidentally reached out to me about a unique portable display solution that could remove yet another thing from the list of things I’ll need to cart around. But since I can’t write about that until mid-October, when it’s unveiled, I need to wait. And so there we are. Not to be mysterious about it, but this new gadget is pretty interesting and, I think, worth the wait.

Overall, I’m OK with where I’m at, but I’d like to make more progress. I’ve successfully switched over my daily-use PC to a laptop, something I’ve not been able to do since laptops were invented, despite multiple attempts. And that’s a big deal to me. But I’ve still not switched my gaming setup to use a portable display, and so I need to keep trying.

Time to stack up some books.