At CES 2025, Intel let journalists into its “Innovation Expo,” where we saw things like prototypes of next-generation laptops and giant 3D gaming laptops.
And while I was there, I… also She spotted a heavy metal one carried on a table that didn’t seem… fully attached… to its screen. When I lifted the screen, it came out easily.
It felt suspiciously light for being an actual tablet, so I flipped it over and saw three connectors underneath:
Above him, on the shelf, was a laptop with a suspiciously sized piece of plastic at the bottom that looked like an exact match. A minute later, Intel gaming evangelist Colin Helms confirmed: I was looking at a modular PC.
This unit has a full Intel Lunar Lake computer, and all the guts you need to run a single device outside of the peripherals and display. It’s basically a reboot of Intel’s abandoned compute card idea, except that’s not all Intel does and you probably shouldn’t expect it to ship at all.
It’s a concept from Quanta, a company you don’t usually see its name on the laptops and tablets it makes, because Quanta is ODM (Such as Compal, Pegatron, Wistron and Apple’s most famous iPhone supplier Foxconn) which designs and manufactures devices on behalf of brand names.
Quanta calls the entire modular system “AI8A,” and the aforementioned module at its heart is the “Detachable AI Core.” It plugs into other computers, too, Helms told me, including an all-in-one desktop that Intel didn’t have to show off. Presumably, as with the account card idea, you can upgrade your computer just by putting a new unit in it.
The modular laptop has a lot of concept bells and whistles, too, many of which the Intel folks at CES haven’t ironed out all of them yet.
First of all, the laptop has motorized hinges, so you can Tell him To open and close its cover; It also claims to offer an eye-tracking feature that lets you navigate around multitasking windows by simply looking at where you want to be. It appears to come with a mouse built into a ring that you can wear.
More mundane: a Qi wireless charging pad built into the palm rest, with indicator lights to show remaining battery capacity.
I wasn’t able to try any of them, unfortunately, and I wasn’t able to ask what “AI8A” meant, because I mistakenly thought it said Aiba until I examined my photos more closely now. We also can’t switch the unit between the mobile device and the laptop, as the unit doesn’t seem to have a battery inside.
Again, this is a great computer concept car: it’s not likely that this computer will ever ship, even in a more practical/less gadgety form. Fortunately, we’re starting to see some real, working modularity in the laptop space since the death of Intel’s compute card. The frame just celebrated it Fifth anniversary This week, Dell took a smaller step forward at CES with its first repairable USB-C port.
Photos by Sean Hollister/The Verge
