The guys at HP came up with the brilliant idea of ​​putting a PC in a keyboard, which made me wonder why no one had thought of doing this before.
The HP Eliteboard G1a PC is aimed at business, but I can see it being popular outside of business as well. The idea is to offer a thin, minimal PC setup that reduces clutter—what's better than putting everything into the keyboard so you only need one thing and only one cable on your desk?
Well…two things on your desk because you'll need a mouse. And I don't think everyone can get by with just one cord, unless you have a monitor that can provide enough power over USB-C to support a PC keyboard. But I think with the right setup this idea can be achieved.
Plus, there are other benefits beyond the desktop. Reduced shipping and packaging costs due to smaller product size and fewer accessories needed to deliver it, meaning an overall reduction in the use of plastic and cardboard. At the same time, HP says it used up to 75 percent recycled plastic in the chassis and up to 70 percent recycled plastic in the keycaps, so even the Eliteboard itself is somewhat eco-friendly.
Of course, HP has built a lot of AI capabilities into the Eliteboard, which sort of makes up for other forward thinking, given how energy and water-intensive AI data centers can be. I also have concerns about the repairability of the Eliteboard – I hope it's easy to open and replace all the parts that need to be fixed, but I haven't tried to find out in practice.
The Eliteboard features AMD Ryzen AI 5 or 7 series chips, integrated AMD Radeon 800 graphics capable of powering up to four 4K displays at 60Hz, an NPU with up to 50 TOPS AI performance, up to 2TB SSD, and up to 64GB RAM. The Eliteboard even features stereo speakers with Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7 support, and customers can choose a replaceable 32Wh battery.
Overall, the HP Eliteboard seems like a pretty good idea to me. Sure, it may have a more limited use case than other PCs, like a traditional laptop, but for many business systems, having the entire PC inside a keyboard can be a big win.
Image credit: HP
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