Cool features
None of what follows was necessary. A laptop works without a light that tells you a login is real, without a second screen for your notifications, and without a deck you can wipe down with a cloth.
We put them in anyway. They will be the reason people who use one will not want to go back, and they are the part of Bolt that is hardest to explain and easiest to miss on a specification sheet.
The Message Bar
A thin display sits along the top of the keyboard, below the main screen. Notifications arrive there instead of on the screen itself. So when you are sharing your screen in a meeting, the message from your partner, your bank or your doctor appears in front of you, and not in front of everyone else.
Everyone has had a message appear mid-presentation. The usual fix is to switch notifications off entirely and then miss the one that mattered. Here you get to keep them, because they never land on the screen you are sharing.
The Touch Bar replaced keys you could feel with a surface you could not. This takes nothing away. There is nothing to press on it, no function keys were removed to make room for it, and it never changes what your keyboard does.
Much of what a Bolt shows you is a session running in a data center. Things that belong to the laptop in front of you, like a battery warning or a message, make more sense somewhere that belongs to the laptop too.
A planned feature. It keeps notifications off the screen you are sharing, which is not the same as making them private: anyone beside you can read the bar. We will publish which kinds of notification can be routed to it before Bolt ships.
Made of the wrong material, on purpose
That is why Bolt's keyboard is one sealed sheet of soft silicone that you can wipe with a cloth. It runs across the whole keyboard, including the spaces around each key, so there are no gaps for crumbs and coffee to fall into.
Built to cope with everyday spills and to wipe clean. Bolt is not waterproof. Do not put it in water, and do not treat this as a promise that liquid can never get in.
Spill something and the first problem is not the liquid, it is that wiping a keyboard types. A cloth across the keys sends hundreds of keystrokes into whatever you had open, and you end up fixing the document as well as the desk.
So Bolt has a wipe mode. Ask for it and the keyboard stops sending anything for thirty seconds, which is long enough to wipe the whole deck and put the cloth down. A countdown shows on the Message Bar so you know where you are, and the keyboard comes back on its own. Nothing you do in those thirty seconds reaches what is on screen.
On most laptops the light leaks out around the edge of every key. Bolt's keyboard is one unbroken sheet, so the light comes up through the surface itself and looks even across the whole thing.
The light itself is white. What you see is that white light coming through your silicone, so a yellow Bolt glows warm and a blue one glows cool. The color is the laptop, not a setting.
Backlighting uses power. Bolt lets you set the brightness, and dim or switch it off on battery, because a long day away from a socket usually matters more than a lit keyboard.
Anywhere you take it
A laptop bought in one country usually stays there. The plug is wrong, the keyboard is wrong, and the language was decided in a factory. Bolt is put together so that none of those is permanent.
The system language is a setting, not something decided when the laptop was made. Change it, change it back, or change it because somebody else is using it for an afternoon.
Nothing to reinstall
Plug adapters for the charger that fit sockets around the world, in a zip case that goes in the bag with it. There is a power connector on each side of the laptop, so whichever side the socket is on, you are covered. The kit is not part of a Bolt order: it goes on sale after the laptop ships, and a Bolt arrives with a charger for the country it is sent to.
Available after launch
If you need a different layout, the illuminated keyboard comes out and another one goes in. You are not stuck with the layout the country of purchase decided you wanted, and you do not need a new laptop to change your mind.
The lighting works the same on any of them
We will publish the list of languages and keyboard layouts before we ship, and it will be shorter at launch than it is a year later. If yours is not on it, that is worth knowing before you pre-order rather than after.
Hardware you have not needed yet
A laptop is sealed on the day it is made. Anything left out is left out for good, and a decade is a long time to guess about. So there are a few things inside Bolt that do nothing on day one, because adding them later would mean asking you to buy another computer.
The same short-range reader your phone uses to tap and pay. One on each side, so whichever way the laptop is turned and whichever hand you use, there is one where you need it.
Does nothing at launch. It is there in case tapping a card, a phone or a key against a laptop becomes an ordinary way to do things.
A radio that measures distance and direction to the centimeter rather than just noticing something is nearby. It is what lets a phone unlock a car door as you walk up to it, and know which side of the car you are on.
Does nothing at launch. It is there in case knowing precisely where a device is relative to you becomes the ordinary way computers hand off, unlock and find each other.
A receiver listens to satellites and works out where it is, and a compass tells it which way it is pointing. Neither part can send anything: they are sensors, not transmitters, so nothing leaves the laptop because of the hardware itself.
Being honest about the rest of it: the Wi-Fi is a transmitter, and software that could read the sensors could send what it read over the connection. What protects you is not the hardware but the rule that these stay switched off until you turn them on. They do nothing at launch, and if we ever make them work they stay off until you decide otherwise and go off again whenever you say so.
A small separate chip that keeps secrets away from the rest of the computer. It is the part of a phone that holds your fingerprint, and it never hands the secret out, only answers yes or no.
Does nothing at launch. It is there so that if signing in, paying or proving who you are moves onto the machine itself, Bolt can do it properly rather than not at all.
We are not going to dress this up. None of these do anything the day your laptop arrives, and we are not promising a specific feature or a date. They are there because the cost of including them now is small and the cost of leaving them out is a laptop that cannot do something in 2031 that everything else can. If they turn out never to be needed, you have lost nothing.
Sold separately
None of these ship with a Bolt and none of them can be ordered yet. They go on sale after the laptop does, and a Bolt works without every one of them.
For drawing, marking up a document, or writing by hand. It works on the trackpad rather than on the screen, and charges from the laptop, so there is nothing else to keep track of and no separate cable for it.
Not needed. The trackpad works the same with a fingertip.
Plug adapters for the charger that fit sockets around the world, in a zip case that goes in the bag with it. There is a power connector on each side of the laptop, so whichever side the socket is on, you are covered.
Not needed. A Bolt arrives with a charger for the country it is sent to.
Not Bluetooth. They take the audio over Wi-Fi, which carries more of it and carries it faster, so the lag that makes wireless awkward for audio work and rhythm games mostly goes away. They are also the only headphones a K or T Bolt will pair with, because they take the volume cap from the laptop and honor it inside the headphones. They can also be locked, which is the part nobody else does. A pair can be tied to a household, to an organization, to one account, or to one machine, in any combination. Locked headphones play nothing anywhere else: not quieter, not tinny, nothing at all. A stolen pair is a paperweight, which is the only theft deterrent that actually works on something this easy to pocket.
Not needed. The built-in speakers work on every model, capped, out of the box.
A physical key that authorizes a new machine. Registering a second Bolt needs it, and so does signing in on somebody else's. It cannot sign you in on its own and it holds none of your files, so somebody who finds one has found a piece of metal.
Not needed to set up your first Bolt or to use it day to day.
Prices are not set. We will publish them before any of these go on sale, and none of them will ever be required to use a Bolt you have already bought.
Ports and wireless
Bolt has no USB-A, no USB-C, no HDMI, no Ethernet, no SD slot and no headphone jack. Headphones, speakers, phones and storage all connect over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or your cloud account, and there is no printing at all: anything you would have printed is saved as a PDF. The only thing you plug in is power, and there is a socket on each side so the cable never has to stretch across the desk.
Use one power socket at a time, whichever is closer. The second one exists so the cable never has to stretch across your desk. Do not plug in both at once.
Bolt uses the newest kind of Wi-Fi. It can carry more at once than most home internet connections can currently supply, and it holds up when several people are online in the same house. Most homes will not use all of it today, and that is deliberate. You cannot open a Bolt and put newer Wi-Fi in it, so it starts with room to spare.
Wi-Fi 7 class (802.11be) , preliminary
Bolt can never be faster than the internet you plug it into. Good Wi-Fi helps when your internet plan and your router are also good. On a slow connection it will not make anything quicker. We would rather not promise a number of years here, because that depends on your internet, not on us. What we can say is that the Wi-Fi is not the part of Bolt that will feel old first.
Bolt has no socket for wired headphones, so Bluetooth is how you listen on headphones and earbuds. It connects to speakers, keyboards, mice and game controllers as well, and it remembers several of them at once, so moving from your desk speakers to your earbuds does not mean pairing anything again. The exception is sound on a K or T Bolt, which only goes to Bolt Wi-Fi Headphones so that the volume cap cannot be got around.
Bluetooth 5.4 class, preliminary
Sound sent wirelessly arrives a fraction of a second late. You will not notice it for music, video or calls. You would notice it if you edit sound for a living. That is true of any wireless headphones on any computer, but on Bolt there is no wired option to fall back on, so it is worth knowing before you order.
The exact Wi-Fi and Bluetooth versions are still being settled and will be confirmed before Bolt is built. We are not claiming any official certification until we actually hold it.
No cellular radio
A Bolt has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and no cellular radio. That is a decision rather than a saving, and it is worth explaining because a laptop that works in a data center is exactly the sort of machine you would expect to have one.
A cellular radio has to be certified by every carrier and in every country it might connect to, which is a year of work and a bill per network before anybody can use it. It is also the part that gets a device restricted: transmitters are what the rules are written about at blasting sites, on aircraft, in hospitals and in secure facilities, and a laptop carrying one is a laptop somebody has to think about before you can bring it in.
Leaving it out keeps a Bolt in the ordinary category. It is a computer with Wi-Fi, which is something every one of those places already has a rule for, and the rule is usually to switch the Wi-Fi off rather than to leave the machine at the door.
If you need to be online away from Wi-Fi, use your phone's hotspot. You are already paying for that data, the phone is already certified on that network in that country, and it does not put a second cellular contract on your laptop.
Being precise: Bolt still has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and those are transmitters. Somewhere that bans all radio still means yours. What leaving out the cellular radio does is keep Bolt in the same category as every other laptop, rather than making it the one that needs a separate conversation.
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.