The screenless laptop is two years old now, and still the most interesting one nobody bought

I keep seeing the Spacetop G1 posted as new. It is not. Sightful opened preorders at around $1,900 and it started shipping in October 2024, so anyone presenting it as a fresh launch is roughly two years behind. That is worth getting right, because the interesting question is no longer what it is. It is why almost nobody has one.

What it actually is

A laptop with a keyboard, a trackpad and no display. You wear Xreal AR glasses that project a virtual workspace, about 100 inches of it, visible only to you. Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon and 16GB of memory, running a ChromeOS-based system, with battery life in the region of eight hours.

The pitch is genuinely good and it is not really about size. It is privacy. Nobody in the seat next to you can read anything, which if you work on a plane or in a cafe is a real problem solved rather than a specification improvement.

Why it did not take over

A few reasons, and none of them are that the idea was stupid.

Two thousand dollars buys a very good conventional laptop, and the comparison is not against nothing. It is against a machine that does everything and does not require you to wear anything.

ChromeOS is the harder constraint. Anyone whose work depends on a specific desktop application is out before the AR discussion starts, and the professionals with the most to gain from a giant private workspace are frequently exactly those people.

Then there is the part nobody quite says out loud. Glasses are a commitment. Not physically, though an hour in is not the same as a minute in. Socially. Using one of these in an open office means being visibly the person wearing the thing, and hardware that requires a small act of public conviction sells to a narrower audience than its usefulness suggests.

What it got right anyway

The insight underneath it holds up. A display is the heaviest, most fragile and most power-hungry part of a laptop, and the reason you carry one is that you have no other way to see. That is a constraint of the current answer, not a law.

The version that eventually works probably will not be a laptop with the screen removed. It will be glasses good enough that the computer is whatever is in your pocket. Sightful shipped a real product against a real thesis several years before the components were quite ready, which is a specific kind of useful failure. Someone will do this properly and it will look obvious afterwards.

The reason I bring it up

I run a distributed team and I look at anything promising to make working from an inconvenient place less bad. My conclusion on this one is that it solves a problem I have, at a price and with a compromise I would not accept today.

But I would rather track the honest version of it than repost it as news, and the honest version is more interesting than the launch coverage was. A product that shipped and did not catch on tells you more about what people will actually tolerate than one that is still a rendering.