Ridge holds through the weekend
Forecasters expect four more days of nothing happening, which is the sort of thing a newspaper reports when nothing is happening.
The interface
No desktop to bury things on, no folders to lose work in, no menu bar, no dock, and nothing to install. Three thin rows at the top of the screen and the page underneath them.
Nothing can be installed, so nothing accumulates and nothing makes it slow. There is nothing to break and nothing to tidy up, which is as useful on a machine somebody works on as it is on a child's first computer.
Everything below is real and you can use it. Type an address, open a tab, change the FamilySafe level and see what it refuses.
The interface
No menu bar. No task bar. No dock. Nothing along the bottom of the screen and nothing down the side unless you ask for it. Two slim rows at the top, and everything underneath them is what you actually came to look at.
The four controls anyone already knows, in the order they have been in for thirty years. Nothing here needs explaining to anybody.
A star and a bookmark sit next to refresh. Favorites and bookmarks are both kept per workspace.
A readout, not a control. It shows the rating of the page you are on, or the part of its range this machine is entitled to, so a K-T page reads K on a machine built at K.
Personal, Business, Private, or one you made. Each keeps its own sign-ins, tabs, history and notifications. Switching asks for your password.
Far right, and the only thing on screen that opens anything. Press it again and the screen is entirely the page.
The second row. Capture, zoom, edit, save, find and save as PDF, as icons with their names on hover. It applies to whichever tab is in front, so it never has to be found in a menu.
The third row. Everything you have open is here, each carrying the color of the site it belongs to, and dragging one moves it.
Sites built to work well on a Bolt show the Bolt symbol next to the address, and the address field turns yellow. It means the people who made that site have done the work: it behaves properly at the resolution you are running, it handles being open alongside a dozen other tabs, and it does not assume things about your machine that are not true here. A site without the symbol still works. It just has not been checked.
At the foot of the sidebar, with the battery and the time below them. My Files opens a file browser organized by workspace; Lock wants your Quick PIN back, and Sign out wants your password.
No menu bar, no task bar, no dock, no system tray, no notification center stacked over your work. Three thin rows at the top. On a 13 inch screen that is most of an inch of page you would not otherwise have.
Renderings of software still in development. The finished interface may differ.
Try it
This demonstration shows how the interface works, not how it will look. Open tabs, type an address, dig through the sidebar, switch workspaces, change the FamilySafe level and watch what it refuses. Every control behaves the way it will on a Bolt.
This is a rough working model, not the finished product. It is here to show how the interface behaves. The real one will be visually refined, and it will open the sites you already use rather than the invented ones in here.
1 of 9
Machine FamilySafe level
Trust light
| Name | Type | Size | Date modified | Date downloaded |
|---|
Nothing here.
That is not the PIN.
In this demonstration the Quick PIN is 1234.
A screen name if the account is your own, an email address if a school or a company made it for you. Signing back in opens your default workspace; a work seat is a separate account, reached by signing in to it instead of this one.
Check the screen name and password.
In this demonstration the screen name is jones1 and the password is password.
Business
Each workspace keeps its own sign-ins and history. Bolt asks before it opens one.
That is not the password.
In this demo the password is password.
Two things this demonstration is not. It is not the finished look: the real interface will be considerably more refined than the rough version here. And it does not browse the real web, because a page in a demonstration cannot load somebody else's site. On a Bolt it opens the sites you already use, the same ones you open today. The handful of sites inside this demonstration are invented, and they are here to give the controls something to act on.
Tuesday
Everything you had open is where you left it. Nothing needed updating overnight.
Nothing positive filed under this topic today. That is the honest result of the filter, not a failure of it.
The address field is yellow because this page was built for Bolt. It is the only part of the interface that ever changes color.
Help
Everything on the screen, what it does, and the parts that are not obvious. Nothing here is hidden behind a menu you have to find first.
Three thin rows at the top and the page underneath. There is no desktop, no dock and no system-level menu bar, and nothing can be installed, so nothing accumulates over the years.
A second page beside the first. At the right edge of the page there is a thin strip. Drag it left and a second pane opens, with its own row of tabs to choose what shows there. Drag it back to the edge to close it, or press Escape.
Applies to whichever tab is in front. Every button names itself if you rest on it.
Select all, cut, copy, paste, paste and match style, undo and redo. Paste and match style drops the formatting text arrived with, so it takes on the style around it.
Save page, copy address, view code, emulate a device, find on page and save as PDF. Emulating a device gives the page the width of a phone or tablet, which is what decides how it lays out; the browser underneath is still this one and a site that asks will be told so. Find highlights as you type.
A Bolt does not print directly. Where another machine would say Print, this one says PDF. The dialog is the same one you know — paper, orientation, margins, scale — with one thing to press at the end, and the file lands in My Files. If you need paper: many Wi-Fi printers have their own email address, so sending the PDF to it is enough, and otherwise send the file to your phone and print from there.
The color reader turns the pointer into a crosshair and reads the color under it, text or background, as a hex value. Press it again or press Escape to stop.
Capture holds three things. Screenshot can be taken now or after three, five or ten seconds, with a countdown so you can arrange the screen. Screen snippet dims the screen and lets you drag a rectangle, which you can then move or resize by its handles before pressing Enter to take it. Record screen turns the icon into a red dot until you stop.
In and out in tenths, to fit, and full screen.
The camera is a mirror for checking how you look before a call, with a framing grid and a mirror toggle. Nothing is recorded or sent. The calculator takes typed keys as well as clicks. The timer and the stopwatch report into the right end of this row while they run, and only while they run.
One thing you are half watching: a game, a flight, a package, an auction ending or an election result. It reads out next to the button and updates itself. An auction inside its last two minutes turns yellow.
Drag to reorder. Each carries the color of the site it belongs to. A tab playing something carries its own controls: previous, pause and next for music, or back fifteen, pause and forward fifteen for film, so you can pause without leaving what you are doing.
Opens from the right. Drag its edge to resize it.
Underneath: My Files, then Settings, Lock and Sign out. Lock wants your Quick PIN to come back; Sign out wants your password.
Everything this account has downloaded or made, organized by workspace. It is stored in your cloud account rather than on the laptop, which is why a lost Bolt loses nothing.
A folder tree at the left, a sortable table at the right, and a path you can click any part of. Search filters as you type.
Select multiple turns on tick boxes. Select range takes a first and last item and takes everything between. Cancel selection clears it.
View, convert, get info, copy, cut, duplicate, compress, extract, print, rename and delete. Drag one file onto another to combine them. Every button is an icon; rest on it for its name.
Open one and a row of controls appears: undo and redo, crop to one of ten shapes, rotate, flip, remove background, upscale, downscale to a file size you name, and tile across a grid. An SVG can have its background and its objects recolored; a PNG can have a transparent background. Once a background has been removed, a border control appears for the edge that is left.
Every color picker has the nine defaults plus four ways past them: an eyedropper that reads a color from anywhere on screen, a search that finds CSS colors by name (typing yellow finds gold and khaki too), a star for your favorites and a clock for the ones you used recently.
Save Copy appears only once something has changed, and it never touches the original.
New file in My Files makes a document, a presentation, an image or a data visualization. More file types holds a code file, a contact card and a calendar event. All of them open in the same window: the name and a pencil at the top left, Close without Saving and the save button at the top right. Closing without saving asks first, but only if you changed something.
Edit with AI. The document, the presentation and the image editor each carry an AI badge in the toolbar. It opens a box where you say what you want changed rather than hunting for the button that does it. It runs where the processing runs, so it is the same speed on a five-year-old machine as on a new one.
Saves as .docx. The page has a header and a footer as well as a body, and formatting applies to whichever of the three you last typed in.
Put the cursor inside a word and press bold. The whole word takes it. You do not have to select the word first. The same is true of italic, underline, double underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, text color and highlight.
It only happens when the cursor is genuinely between two letters. Resting against a space, or at the start or end of a line, behaves as it always has, and a real selection always wins. Hyphenated words come through whole, and trailing punctuation comes with the word, which is what you want when you are coloring something.
Double underline is not something browsers can normally do. Here it is a real option, alongside the ordinary one.
Click into either one and a second toolbar appears with settings for that zone. Page numbers can be off, the number alone, or the number and the total. Start at page 2 shifts the count so a title page is not numbered, and adjusts the total to match. Reduce opacity drops the zone back the way a running head usually sits. The header and the footer keep separate settings.
The number itself is generated rather than typed, so it cannot be half-deleted by accident.
Insert puts a shape or an image on the page and you drag it where you want it. They sit on a layer over the text, and the layer ignores clicks except on the objects themselves, so you can still type underneath. Selecting one opens a second toolbar: bring to front, forward, backward and to back; rotate in fifteens or type an exact angle; flip either way; opacity; a border with a thickness and a color; and remove.
Undo, redo and print. Cut, copy and paste. Font and size. Four alignments. Line and letter spacing. Text color and highlight. Zoom in, out or back to normal.
Saves as .pptx. Slides run down the left with live thumbnails, and the current one fills the right. New slide inserts after the one you are on rather than at the end.
A text box has no resize handles, and that is deliberate. It is exactly as big as its words, so the font size is the only thing that changes it. Hovering the edge says so. There are Smaller and Larger buttons next to the size list for stepping through quickly.
Eight handles, and Lock aspect ratio is checked for a picture and clear for a shape. Stretching a photograph is usually a mistake; stretching a rectangle usually is not. With it locked, an edge handle drives its partner and a corner follows whichever way you moved further.
Selecting an object opens the second toolbar: layering, rotation with an exact angle, flips, opacity, a border, and remove. A shape also gets a fill color.
A border on a text box follows the letters, not the box. It is a stroke on the glyphs, so an outline on a word traces each character. It is drawn behind the fill, so the letters keep their shape rather than closing up. The widths are finer than the ones offered for a shape, because a heavy stroke would swallow the type.
The Background button asks where before it asks what: this slide, or all slides. One click on a color then finishes it. Choosing a dark background turns text light automatically, unless you gave that text a color of its own.
Double-click a text box to change its words. Each slide keeps its own background, so the thumbnails show which slides differ.
Type the canvas size or take one of eight presets. Insert a shape, a line of text or a picture. Zoom in, out or to fit. Set a background color, or no background at all.
Save and Close As offers PNG alone when the background is transparent. Of the four formats it can write, PNG is the only one that keeps transparency, so offering the others would be offering to throw it away.
Nine defaults, and four ways past them. An eyedropper reads a color from anywhere on the screen, text as well as background, and tells you which it read. A search finds CSS colors by name, and it matches families rather than only spellings, so typing yellow finds gold, khaki and goldenrod. A star holds your favorites and a clock holds the last eight you used, whichever route you chose them by.
Aliases work too: grey, amber, mustard, lilac, cream and rust all land somewhere sensible, and a hex value typed straight in is accepted as itself.
A pivot over a table of transactions, in tabs along the bottom. The eye, the chart and the barrel at the top right switch between the table, a column chart and the raw data every tab is built from.
Rows chooses what the lines are: salesperson, location, city, metro, division, state, region, country, product, and the managers and leaders above each of them. Columns chooses the period, from days to years, with a picker for which day a week ends on. Values chooses revenue, quantity or gross profit.
Cumulative turns every cell into a running total, and the last column then holds everything, so the row total reads To date rather than Total.
Show Map appears when the rows are cities, states or countries, and puts the numbers on a map of the United States as hotspots. The circles are sized by area rather than by radius, so twice as much looks twice as big rather than four times.
Filters follow the level the rows are already at. Put regions on the rows and you can filter by anything narrower — states, metros, cities — and by any person from the region leader down. Places have to be narrower, because filtering regions by region asks the same question twice. People do not: regions on the rows and the leader who runs one is a real cut.
Sorting. Rows come biggest first, because a table nobody has sorted is a table nobody reads. A to Z is there for looking one thing up, and low to high for finding what is not working. Columns stay in time order unless you ask for them by size, which answers a different question: which month was the biggest rather than what happened in March.
Ungroup, on the chart, collapses it to one member at a time so a single region can be read without four others competing with it.
Compare Time Periods, on the table, replaces the date range with two period pickers and adds a change and a change percent column.
Fiscal start renumbers everything. Choose Calendar Q2, Q3 or Q4 and quarters and years are relabelled as fiscal ones throughout, named for the year they end in. Changing it clears a comparison, because the periods it pointed at no longer exist under the new names.
Numbered lines that renumber as you type and scroll in step with the text, a tab width the Tab key honours, and a live line count. Save and Close As offers nine kinds from JavaScript to plain text.
Both show the file as you type it. A .vcf and an .ics are plain text with a rigid shape, so the panel beside the form is the actual file. Nothing about what gets written is hidden from you.
The name of the file fills itself in from the contact or the event title until you rename it by hand, at which point it stops guessing. Saving refuses a card with no name, an event with no title, or an event that ends before it starts.
Content limits built as a physical part rather than a program. There is no setting to find, nothing to uninstall and no password to guess, and the rating is engraved on the module’s own plate, on the underside of the machine.
Sites can carry a range rather than a single rating, so a K machine opening a K-A site is served the K part of it and nothing else. If a rating looks wrong, the badge in the address bar and the refusal page both offer to have it reviewed.
Changing the rating as a child grows up is a part rather than a switch. The chipset and the plate that names it are fused into one small module behind a cover on the underside. The account payer orders a replacement for $149, we build it against that laptop’s serial number, and it comes in the post. Two screws and it is done; the laptop never leaves the house. A module cut for one Bolt does nothing in another, so there is nothing for a determined teenager to buy.
Nothing of yours moves either, because nothing of yours was on the machine.
On a K or T machine only Bolt Wi-Fi Headphones will pair, because ordinary headphones have their own amplifier and would defeat the volume cap.
Headphones can be locked. A pair can be tied to a household, an organization, one account or one machine, in any combination. Locked headphones play nothing anywhere else — not quieter, nothing — so a stolen pair is a paperweight. Set it in Settings, under Connected Devices.
An account can carry a cap. Whoever pays chooses a FamilySafe level the account may not exceed, and chooses it when the account is created. A capped account signs in on any Bolt anywhere, and that machine runs at the capped level for the session. What holds the cap in place is that a capped account cannot become its own payer, and only a payer can lift a cap. The check happens in the data center, which applies whichever is stricter: the rating on file for that serial number, or the cap on the account.
A K or T machine cannot create an account, and cannot take over paying for one. Setting one up is fine: hand a child a sealed box and they can do the whole first run themselves. They sign in with an account made beforehand on an A or U machine, or with a school or work seat issued at the K or T level. What the machine will not do is mint a new account or accept payer status onto whoever is using it — a child who could become the payer could raise the plan and order a module that changes the rating.
Messages are off on a K machine. Everything else is limited by what a site is, and a site can be rated. A message cannot: the risk is whoever is at the other end, and nobody can rate a stranger in advance. A T machine has messages.
Still stuck? Support is a person, not a form. The address is on the Support page, and there is no telephone tree.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Region | Units | Price | Revenue | Margin | Rep |
| 2 | Northeast | 1,240 | 799 | 990,760 | 31% | D. Whitfield |
| 3 | Southeast | 2,105 | 799 | 1,681,895 | 33% | M. Bell |
| 4 | Midwest | 1,876 | 799 | 1,499,124 | 30% | P. Raman |
| 5 | Southwest | 1,402 | 999 | 1,400,598 | 35% | D. Whitfield |
| 6 | Northwest | 988 | 999 | 987,012 | 34% | M. Bell |
| 7 | Mountain | 612 | 999 | 611,388 | 32% | P. Raman |
| 8 | Pacific | 1,744 | 999 | 1,742,256 | 36% | M. Bell |
| 9 | Total | 9,967 | 8,913,033 | 33% | ||
| 10 | ||||||
| 11 | Assumptions | |||||
| 12 | Growth | 4.5% | ||||
| 13 | Return rate | 2.1% |
The menu bar belongs to the spreadsheet, and it is inside the page. The Bolt Interface has none of its own. Forty thousand rows sit behind this view, recalculating without the fan coming on, because there is no fan.
The third quarter closed ahead of the forecast we set in June, largely on the strength of the Pacific and Southeast regions. Neither result was planned for and neither should be assumed to repeat.
Unit volume rose 8.4% against a forecast of 4.5%. Margin held at 33% despite the mix shifting toward the larger machine, which carries more cost.
The Mountain region remains half the size of the next smallest and has been for four quarters. We have now tried three approaches there and should stop trying a fourth.
Approval to move the Mountain budget into the Pacific for two quarters, and to revisit the decision in April with actual numbers rather than an argument.
Nothing installed to write this. Nothing to license, nothing to update, and nothing to migrate when the machine is replaced.
3 unread · Nothing installed to read it.
Lose the machine and you have lost a machine. The mail was never on it.
Tuesday · Late edition · Weather 71°
After ninety minutes of public comment, most of it about parking, the council approved the thing. The lone dissenter said she would have voted for a smaller thing.
Construction is expected to begin in the spring, assuming the money arrives, which is the assumption every sentence in this article rests on.
The thing will be the largest of its kind in the county, a distinction the county has held twice before and lost twice before.
Forecasters expect four more days of nothing happening, which is the sort of thing a newspaper reports when nothing is happening.
The ovens were the problem. They are no longer the problem. The queue on Saturday ran to the corner and stayed there until two.
Every Thursday for thirty-one years, in a folding chair, with a notebook nobody had asked to see until now.
An ordinary site. The address field stays plain, and everything works exactly the same.
A thin client is a computer that depends on another machine to do most of its work. The idea is older than the personal computer and has returned roughly once a decade, each time on the argument that networks have finally become fast enough.
Early timesharing terminals in the 1960s were thin by necessity: computing was expensive and had to be shared. The personal computer inverted this, putting a whole machine on every desk, and the terminal was declared dead several times over the following thirty years.
The standard objection is dependence on the network. A thin client without a connection is generally not useful, a trade-off its advocates describe as acceptable and its critics describe as disqualifying.
Timesharing · Remote desktop · Terminal emulator
A long page, scrolling under three thin rows of interface instead of four thick ones.
Home to the office
22 min 7.4 miles · light trafficThe rendering is happening in a data center. What arrives here is the picture.
904 pictures. None of them stored on the laptop.
Saturday
Last month
Lose the machine and you have lost a machine, not the photographs.
Mathematics · Lesson 6 of 12
One half and two quarters are the same amount. Here is why, and how to spot it every time.
Which of these is the same as three quarters?
This Bolt is rated K, so every page it can reach is rated K. Nothing was installed to make that true and nothing can be uninstalled to undo it.
Fieldwork
$148
★★★★☆ 412 reviews
Waxed cotton, brass hardware, and a base that does not sag when you put a laptop in it. Made in the same shop since 1974.
Free delivery Thursday
An ordinary shop, on an ordinary site, working the way it always has.
Checking · •••• 4417
Available now. Two payments scheduled this week.
Rated A. On a Bolt built at K or T this page does not open, which is the point of putting the rating in the hardware.
Now playing
Slow Water The Harbour Lights · Long Way RoundNothing downloaded, nothing taking up room, nothing to move when the machine is replaced.
Forty minutes of sanding compressed into nine. The webbing is the part everyone gets wrong, so that section is real time and unedited.
Video decoded in a data center and delivered as pictures. The machine in front of you never gets warm.
What is the difference between a thin client and a virtual desktop?
They overlap, but the emphasis differs. A thin client describes the hardware: a machine deliberately built without the processing power to work alone. A virtual desktop describes the software: a whole operating system running elsewhere and streamed to you.
You can run a virtual desktop on a thick laptop, and you can build a thin client that streams something other than a desktop. Bolt is the first case with neither a desktop nor a task bar at the far end.
Which one needs a better connection?
A streamed desktop, usually. It sends the whole screen as video whether or not anything changed. Sending a page and letting the client draw it moves far less.
The model is not on the laptop, which is why a laptop this thin can reach one this large.
Your number · (813) 555-0148
One number, no handset. It rings here because the number belongs to the account, not to a phone.
“Hi, it's Dana, calling about the Pacific number in the forecast. Nothing urgent, but before you send it on I want to check where it came from. Call me back whenever.”
“This is a courtesy call regarding your—” Marked as spam
Rated A. On a Bolt built at K or T this page does not open, because an unrestricted line is not a child's tool.
The conversation lives in the account. Sign in on another Bolt* and it is already here.
A 60 megapixel file, edited without the fan coming on. The image never leaves the data center; what travels to the laptop is the view of it.
Twenty three minutes of 4K, cut on a laptop with no fan in it. The footage is in the data center and the render happens there too.
Thirty two tracks with plug-ins on every one of them, none of it running on the laptop. Nothing to install and nothing to license per machine.
An adults-only site, standing in for the sort of thing a FamilySafe rating exists to refuse. If you can read this, the level is set to Unrestricted.
Set the badge in the bar to K, T or A and come back to this address.
Your files
Bolt does not ask you to move your documents anywhere. Whatever you use today works the same way it does now, because it is reached the same way it is reached now.
Anything that runs in a browser today runs on a Bolt. There is no Bolt-only storage service you have to adopt, and nothing to migrate if you ever stop using one. Bolt Cloud Storage exists if you want it, and it is one more option rather than the only one.
Workspaces and accounts
A workspace lives inside one sign-in. You might keep Personal, a side business, and Private, each with its own tabs, sign-ins, favorites, bookmarks, history and notifications. Nothing crosses between them on its own, so two accounts on the same service stay open at the same time without signing either one out. Switching between them asks for your password.
Files can be copied between your own workspaces. They are all yours, and the wall between them is there to keep things tidy and private from a glance over your shoulder, not to keep you out of your own work.
An account is a different person, or a different organization. Your employer's seat is not a workspace inside your account: it is its own sign-in. To use it you sign out of yours completely and sign in to theirs. Nothing carries across, and files cannot be copied between accounts in either direction.
That line is deliberate and it runs both ways. Your employer cannot see anything in your personal account, and nothing from your personal workspaces can be moved into theirs. On a shared machine at home the same rule applies to each person who signs in.
Coming soon
Bolt is in development. Leave an address and we will tell you when there is something real to see.
We will not sell your address or pass it to anybody, and will not send you anything except news about Bolt.