The £85 NexDock laptop uses your phone or even a Raspberry Pi as a brain

In one way, a laptop is a single entity; it’s just a standalone computer. Another outlook is that it’s a combination of PC components and peripherals stuck together for portability. That’s the beauty of laptops; we don’t need to carry our monitor and keyboard around with us. One company is taking this point of view to its extreme by imagining a future where your computer is the phone in your pocket and a laptop is just the thing that lets you take your desktop PC anywhere.

The NexDock looks very much like a MacBook but costs around £85 instead of £1000. It has a 14″ screen, a decent sized keyboard, a big battery, speakers, and ports for everything useful. The absurd price difference comes from the fact that it isn’t really a computer. There’s no processor or RAM. For all intents and purposes, it has no brain. Instead, it connects to your smartphone and uses it as the computer.

If you connect most smartphones, like iPhones and Androids, the screen can be mirrored on the laptop display and the keyboard can be used for productivity using Bluetooth. The NexDock becomes much more useful with phones like the Lumia 950, which runs a stripped-down version of Windows 10. The Continuum feature on the newest Windows phones lets them connect to monitors and peripherals for almost full PC experience.

The product won’t make sense to some people and that might be because it’s thinking ahead. The creators image a world where we always carry our computers around with us in the form of our smartphone. When you want to get work done, you just sit at your desk and plug the phone/computer in to be more productive. Some people already carry small Bluetooth keyboards around so they can work on the train using just their smartphone but it’s hardly an ideal solution to be typing on such a tiny screen. The NexDock tries to make it more comfortable to use your phone as your computer.