Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N700
Friday, 22 October 2010
There are a few things around to both cushion a laptop on your lap and shield your knees from the warmth – a rather more lavish version is this N700; a so-called ‘Lapdesk’.
While a cooling buffer on your knees is a good idea on a long and otherwise mindlessly boring plane trip, you might not want one of these – it’s big, for a start, but more cogently it has built-in speakers. You might love watching Cars the fourth time – your innocent aeroplane companion may definitely not. (Of course, you could plug headphones into your Mac instead.)
Sticking out a good 5 or 6cms either side of a MacBook Pro 15-inch, the N700 has a well-padded underside which stops it sliding around, and it’s certainly surprisingly comfy and usable on your knees – with the wider seats of Business Class it would certainly not be a problem, but in Economy? Verging on impossible.
It angled up from the front to give you a good viewing angle for lap or desk use and two little tabs lift up on the front to stop your MacBook sliding towards you off the slight incline. Apart from that, though, while the whole unit is fairly slip-resistant due to the textured cloth of the cushioned base, your MacBook is free to slide left and right across the N700 itself, as it’s just hard plastic on top and not rubberised – I guess in the interests of stopping heat building up.
However, you should insert the two supplied rubbery white stopper things where you prefer in two of four slots in the top. These certainly stop your MacBook sliding around.
A very low-noise fan is set into it underneath the centre. It’s surprising how much the noise level rises if you life your laptop up off the N700. That said, I detected no vibration – and that’s good – you don’t want your Mac being overly rattled. It draws in air from the back and floats it up under the laptop. It is all powered by one integral USB cable; it seems to work just as well plugged into a powered hub, by the way, but it must be powered – it will not work in a USB port on an external Apple keyboard.
Where the N700 comes into its own is really on the desk – especially in hot climates, or even in the inexplicably-far-off-seeming New Zealand summer.
I clocked my MacBook Pro’s temperatures with the iStat Pro widget after a couple hours’ normal use (email, web, surfing, podcasts playing in iTunes) at:
| One hour | 1:20 | N700 10 mins | N700 1hr |
| Hard drive | 31 | 31 | 30 | 30 |
| CPU | 76 | 77 | 88 | 62 |
| CPU Heatsink | 56 | 57 | 65 | 54 |
| Enclosure (base) | 32 | 32 | 31 | 33 |
| Enclosure (base) | 32 | 32 | 31 | 33 |
| Enclosure (base) | 31 | 31 | 28 | 29 |
| Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) | 62 | 63 | 73 | 60 |
| GPU Diode | 71 | 73 | 85 | 62 |
(The atmospheric temperature was 14°C).
This makes it look like it takes a while for the internal temperatures to even out and come down, but it eventually does so.
The internal MacBook Pro fan speeds also dropped from an average of a purring 2800 rpm to 2001rpm, so it will take some pressure off your internal processes
SoundOf course, the N700 also lets you direct sound through internal speakers that site just outside the confines of a 15-inch MacBook Pro – a 17-inch would overlap them slightly on each side, and indeed Logitech’s promo material specs say ‘“Up to 16-inch display” so it’s not for you Seventeeners.
You can set the internal speakers or not in System Preferences>Sound>Output.
There’s a handy volume control on the right-hand side of it, plus a mute in case the phone rings. If the mute is on, a small but intense red LED glows just below it as a visual reminder. The volume and mute feedback is represented on your Mac’s screen just as it is with your normal volume control operations.
Sound is immediately and noticeably better than the tinny internal speakers of the MacBook Pro, particularly with music. They’re a little less effective with vocals as the extra bass from the larger N700 units makes them sound ever-so-slightly muffled. Even so, it’s a much more pleasurable experiences than relying on your internals.
The speakers are 2 watts – my internal ones are … I dunno, Apple doesn’t publish the specs, although it claims there’s a subwoofer in there, too. That’s a little hard to believe. Anyway, I can pretty much guarantee they’re not as loud as 2 watts, going by the difference in volume.
Conclusion — I’m not 100% convinced your laptop Mac needs cooling, or even if this is an effective way of doing it, and the day I really clocked things was a particularly unseasonably cold Auckland late-October day – but it’s certainly a good working position on a desk, more comfortable on your knees and the speakers are definitely better – and much louder – than your internal ones.
What’s great — the sound is a vast improvement over a MacBook or MacBook Pro.
What’s not — big and cumbersome
Needs — someone with a hot knee problem or who lives in the tropics
3.7/5
What — Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N700, NZ$169.90 (a smaller unit is the N100 – without speakers but with fan, it’s just $49.90)
System — Plug and play with Mac OS and Windows XP, Vista and 7 (no software required).
Available from — most electronics retailers, some Apple resellers
