You might seriously wait though since this uses a propriety connector that works only with current Alienware laptops. No idea about the future w/re to USB 3 and their plans.
Yeah, you want a thunderbolt 3 computer. The Dell XPS 13 and 15 should work, but we don’t actually know that for sure. The only machines currently guaranteed to work with razer’s core are the stealth, new blade, and the intel skull NUC (which isn’t a laptop).
It has to be supported in BIOS, so, it’s up to each laptop manufacturer if they’ll add it. Dell’s been kind of mum.
As far as I can tell, nobody other than intel has said they’ll support it so far.
I’m going to take this to mean that we will probably not see it until the next spec bump in the line.
The Razer Core still hasn’t shipped to anyone, so it’s too early to make that call. It may “just work”.
So apparently the core works with the dell xps15 but it requires some witch craft to get it to work. Still results are promising.
Is it actually shipping? I signed up for email alerts on Razers site for it but got no emails about it.
I don’t have one myself but the website says it ships in August.
Some dude on the HardOCP forums got his like 2 weeks ago so yes, it is shipping but perhaps not in quantity.
The witchcraft with the XPS15 is due to its discrete 960M GPU. Laptops without a discrete GPU should be plug n’ play, once you have the proper thunderbolt drivers and firmware.
Or a hard drive that you can dock into your laptop and desktop with no need to install separate OSs or extra cables, just plug and play.
USB is plug and play. There are hot-pluggable drive slots for desktops available, and laptops had PCMCIA slots awhile back too. I don’t see getting rid of the cable as a big win, honestly, because it means you have to compromise on design for an add-on many people won’t need.
Not a lot of hotpluggable operating systems unless you count Linux live disks.
Is this technology getting any closer to mass-market reality outside of the Razer Blade Stealth? Are there any roadmaps published or expectations as to when it’ll be common?
It is certainly not looking good at this time.
However, due to some research done by LinusTechTips, it looks like the Razer dock may well work well enough on non-Razer systems, and moreover, it unofficially works with other PCI-Express devices (not just graphics cards). And it seems to work as the last device in a Thunderbolt daisychain (it doesn’t have two TB ports, so it can’t initiate a daisychain itself).
Alienware and MSI have these types of docks as well if I’m not mistaken but I don’t know if they’re compatible with 3rd party laptops. And I’m too lazy to check.
I’ve always been a desktop person and never thought I’d ever bother with a laptop, but this new technology has piqued my interest. I still doubt I’ll ever buy one, but now there’s a slim chance!
The alienware and MSI docks are proprietary.
I still expect to see chinese knockoffs of the razer core. The core is extremely well-built, and priced accordingly.
Asus, Gigabyte, and Powercolor have all shown versions at shows in the last few months claiming late 2016 delivery.
I am tentatively planning on picking one up.
The only requirement with the laptop is Thunderbolt 3, correct? Is TB3 becoming common on laptops?