Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Sorry, Apple: THIS is the First Laptop with Mini-LED

- Most people understand that while Apple does

many things incredibly well and some things better

than anyone else, they're usually not the first

to do that thing.

So it shouldn't be a big surprise that despite rumors

for over a year now that Apple is moving

to mini-LED screens,

the first laptop to feature one isn't a MacBook.

Introducing the MSI Creator 17, a powerful

mobile workstation with a 4K, 1,000 nit mini-LED

display complete with full array local dimming.

How did they make this thing so thin?

And how are we gonna learn about our sponsor Elgato?

From me.

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What is a mini LED display?

Well, most displays, especially thin ones,

like on a MacBook or other laptop, are edge lit.

That means that their light originates

from LEDs at the edge of the screen that are diffused

and then reflected towards your eyes.

The main drawbacks of this approach are

that it's very difficult to spread the light out evenly,

resulting in hotspots, and it also limits the contrast

of the image.

Then there's your direct LED displays,

where the lights are right behind the pixels,

shining through them, well, directly.

This can address uneven lighting.

But to improve the perceived difference

between the darkest and brightest parts of the scene,

manufacturers need to go one step further

with a feature called full array local dimming.

Here, the display can tune individual zones

of these direct backlights depending on the scene,

allowing an object like the moon to be bright

without turning the entire screen into this grey

and washed out mess.

Mini-LED like on this laptop takes this concept

to the next level by enabling more and smaller

dimming zones, increasing contrast and reducing

the bloom or halo effect around bright objects.

Now, this puppy has 240 zones,

which might not seem that impressive

when you consider

that there's TVs out there with between 500

and 1,000 zones, but then you consider the density.

On just a 17-inch display,

each of those zones is under two centimeters wide.

Now, we've covered mini LED displays

on this channel before,

but they're usually found on thick desktop monitors,

and the fact that this display,

made by AU Optronics, has been integrated

into a totally normal-looking laptop lid is pretty cool.

Or, well, warm, because there's no cooling fans

behind the backlight like we found

in those chunky monitors.

Honestly, I can accept it, though,

considering we're getting 1,000 nits

of VESA DisplayHDR certified brightness

in a laptop form factor.

That is a first.

It also means we can expect a larger color volume

than your typical creator laptop,

as it has wide coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut

across more brightness levels, at least in theory.

While the screen's color accuracy was decent in SDR mode,

with HDR enabled, it's kind of all over the place.

And that's because of, well,

no real surprises here, Windows.

Apparently with inbuilt displays like on a laptop,

the HDR appearance varies according to both

the brightness setting with your keyboard shortcut

and the HDR/SDR balance setting

in Windows, so you can end up with more detail

in dark areas or more detail in light areas depending

on where you place the slider.

Unfortunately, nothing that we did to the slider got

us to a place where we felt like we could trust

the colors enough to create an HDR video on this thing,

even if the specs look great on paper.

In other, more promising news, though,

firing up a movie or game or really any other kind

of HDR content for consumption is

a much better experience.

I didn't find that, again,

with some tuning of the windows HD color slider,

that the colors were so far off that I wasn't able

to enjoy the content, and in fact, to my eye,

without having a reference display side by side,

it's not the kind of thing that I would notice.

So even though we only managed 45 frames per second

at the native 4k resolution

in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that's fair enough,

since a 60 hertz panel anyway.

There are four variants of this machine,

each with a different GPU and storage configuration,

but all of them are very capable with strong

graphics cards and a 10th gen Core i7

Intel 10875H, boosting up to 5.1 gigahertz.

Ours put up very respectable numbers

in the usual benchmarks and sports an RTX 2070

Super Max Q, 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM, and one terabyte

of NVMe storage.

The two M.2 slots make storage easily upgradeable

once you pass the chassis's 14 screws,

but to max out your memory to 64 gigs,

you are gonna have to peel off this huge amount

of shielding, remove the motherboard,

and replace the existing SO-DIMMs with two 32 gig sticks,

as there are only two sockets.

But hold on a second,

because last time we complained about this issue,

MSI just flipped the whole motherboard over,

which resulted in the ethernet jack being

on the mouse hand side.

So pick your poison, I guess?

For video editing performance,

we're using an in-house benchmark

that we're calling MARKbench where we encode

high-resolution content with some basic effects

and Lumetri Color using Premiere Pro.

Our Creator 17 was able to do it in under eight minutes,

a strong result.

Speaking of strong, the I/O offers a ton

of flexibility for a laptop in 2020.

On the left, you've got RJ45, one USB 3.2,

a UHS3 microSD card reader,

and separate mic and headphone jacks.

That is a nice inclusion for something

that's focused on creators.

And then on the right you've got

HDMI, Thunderbolt 3 with 15 watts of power delivery,

two more USB As, and a non-Thunderbolt USB type C

that can carry DisplayPort and deliver 27

watts of charging.

Oh, and who could forget the battery reset pinhole?

On that subject, MSI advertises seven hours

of productivity, but our machine

and PCMark's office battery test measured just four

and a half hours,

and that's with the brightness turned down to 100 nits,

which is pretty dim.

With that said, this result isn't entirely unexpected,

so road warriors need not apply here.

The chassis has a sandblasted finish in a color

MSI calls Space Gray, which apparently is not

on Apple's trademark list.

And like many an MSI laptop,

it's a little on the flexy side.

But that's kinda the trade-off of getting hardware

as thin as possible in a package

that's as light as possible.

The trackpad is large with an integrated

fingerprint reader and very usable as far

as PC trackpads go,

although it can tend to get clicked by your right

palm when you're typing,

and the palm rejection only saves you some of the time.

I mean look at this.

You can even register a click just by pressing

on the chassis here.

The typing experience is decent as long as you don't

type like a triggered Karen.

There's 1.9 millimeters of key travel,

a full numpad and normal arrow keys,

so you shouldn't have much trouble getting up

to speed right away.

And this battery indicator light that you can still

see when the lid's closed are deserving of a fatherly nod.

Above the keyboard is a speaker grill that houses

the world-class Dynaudio sound system that frankly

sounds very much like the crap you get on any

ordinary laptop and is a far cry from the actually

decent audio coming out of the latest 16-inch

MacBook Pro, which you might say, well, that's not fair.

The MacBook Pro is so expensive.

But so is this.

Finally, there's the 720p webcam,

which shares the forehead bar with IR gear

for Windows Hello alongside otherwise slim side bezels.

So, the subject of price,

should you spend anywhere between 1,800 and $3,500

on this laptop?

Not before hearing my top three gripes in ascending order.

One, it's pretty loud.

Not taking a whole lot of marks off here though

because it's designed to get stuff done first

and foremost, and MSI seems to have put a lot

of thought and effort into cooling this thing

with three fans, seven heat pipes,

and perforations on just about every side of the machine.

So it is what it is.

Two, far less excusably,

why does it have a microSD card reader instead

of a full sized one?

It's much easier to convert down than up.

And again, guys, this is supposed to be

a mobile workstation.

Finally, three.

Is this 1,000 nit HDR screen even necessary for you?

For content consumption, actually, I get it.

Movies and games look sweet on this thing,

and there's nothing else like it on the market.

But this is not only supposed to be for creators,

but creators on the go.

And you square that with the fact that not

that many people are making HDR content,

the workflow to make it is complex and kludgy,

the colors in HDR mode are less than trustworthy

thanks to Windows, there's blooming,

and there's a lack of the granular control

that you get on an external monitor,

and then suddenly all those things combine to make

this product come off as early adoptery at best

and at worst a marketing ploy to sell panels

that really should've been on gaming laptops, except for,

sorry, guys, we couldn't make a high refresh rate one.

So, I'm not not recommending this laptop.

Like I said, there is nothing else like it.

I'm just saying if you're gonna buy it,

buy it for the right reasons,

because you want a capable SDR workstation laptop

that's also great for watching HDR movies

on your extremely long daily train commute.

Speaking of commuting,

the Massdrop Objective 2 Headphone Amplifier,

aka the O2 amp, is really not very portable at all.

The amp was designed and created with feedback

from over 500 Massdrop members and serves

as an ideal baseline reference amplifier

powering everything from in-ear monitors to HD 800s.

You can adjust the input, output,

and power arrangement in two different gains,

medium and standard, and it delivers big, clear,

and accurate sound.

Check it out at the link in the video description.

If you guys enjoyed this video,

you might also enjoy our recent video on the future

of TVs that takes a bit of a deeper dive than usual

into the display technology that's gonna be powering

your big screen home movie watching experience

for the next few years.

Actually, probably more than that.