Using Bolt
Most of what is different about a Bolt shows up in ordinary moments rather than in a feature list: closing the lid, moving between machines, losing one.
None of your work is on the laptop, and almost everything on this page follows from that one fact.
Your account is your computer
Closing a Bolt signs you out straight away. Everything you had open is kept in your account, exactly as it was. Open it again, sign in, and it all comes back. Not a saved copy of your work. The same session, mid-sentence. For the short trip to the kettle there is the screen saver and a Quick PIN instead.
Sign in on any Bolt* anywhere and you get your machine, not a guest account. A friend's, one in a classroom, one at a desk you are borrowing for the afternoon. Close the lid and it is theirs again, with nothing of yours left on it.
Drop it down the stairs, leave it on a train, have it taken. The work is not in the laptop. Sign in on another Bolt* and carry on from the same sentence you stopped at.
No shutting down, no closing documents, no waiting for it to finish something before you can leave. Closing the lid does all of it, and that is the only thing you have to remember.
Stepping away for a minute: press the power key once and the screen goes to a screen saver. Come back, touch anything, and it asks for your Quick PIN. Everything is still open behind it. It does that on its own after a while too, if you forget. The Quick PIN is short on purpose and safe to give somebody you live with, so they can use what is already open without you handing over your password. It only ever unlocks the session in front of them. Turning it off properly: hold the power key down and a countdown appears, telling you how many seconds are left before it shuts down. Let go and nothing happens. Hold it again to turn it back on. Finished for now: close the lid and you are signed out. Your session waits in your account until you sign in again, on this Bolt or any other.
Your screen name and your password sign you in to your account, every time, wherever you are. On a Bolt already registered to you, that is the whole process. Putting your account on a machine it is not already on needs your Bolt Key. Registering a second Bolt needs it, and so does signing in on somebody else's. One key, several accounts. A key is not tied to a single account, so your own and any work or school seat you hold all live on the same plug. You carry one thing, not one per account.
Your files and your session live in your account, so Bolt reaches them over the internet. It needs a connection to work.
FamilySafe belongs to the laptop rather than to the account, so protection follows the machine and not the login. A K model stays a K model whoever signs into it. *Any Bolt that has not been reported lost or stolen. A reported machine stops accepting sign-ins until the owner tells us it is back.
Where your computing happens
Your Bolt does its work on a computer in a data center, and that computer is the one talking to the internet. So the sites you visit see the data center rather than your home connection. That is most of what people buy a VPN for, and on Bolt it is not a feature anyone had to add. It is just how the machine works.
No extra app, no monthly subscription, and no remembering to switch it on before you do anything. There is nothing to switch on. The computer doing your work has always been somewhere else.
Choose the data center closest to you, which is what we suggest, or a different one if you have a reason. It is a setting, so you can change your mind later without buying anything.
On a cafe network or a hotel connection, the traffic between your Bolt and the data center is encrypted, and the sites you use are reached from the data center rather than from the room you are sitting in.
It is not anonymity. We run the computer doing the work, so we can see the traffic it sends, in the same way a VPN company can see yours. You are choosing who to trust rather than removing the need to trust anyone.
The further your region sits from you, the further every keystroke travels before anything appears. The nearest one is right for almost everyone, and it is what we pick unless you say otherwise.
One thing we will not encourage. Picking a distant region to reach a service that is not licensed where you live is between you and that service, and plenty of them check. The region setting is there so your computing sits close to you, and so you are not paying for a VPN to do something Bolt already does. Regions are planned and not yet finalized.
Deletion
Every other computer keeps a shadow copy of your life. Clear your browser history and the DNS cache still lists every site you visited. Delete a file and the bytes sit on the drive until something else happens to overwrite them. Thumbnails, swap files, temp folders, index databases, all of it survives the delete key. Anyone with access to the machine and the right tools can pull it back.
Your session runs in an isolated environment that is built fresh and destroyed when you are done. There is no local sediment for anyone to sift through.
Your data is encrypted with keys tied to you and nobody else. When you delete something, we destroy the key. What is left is not a file waiting to be recovered. It is noise.
Delete on Bolt means deleted.
Two things worth knowing. Backups are encrypted with the same key, so destroying it covers those too, but a copy can sit in a backup for a short window before it rotates out. And none of this touches what you have put somewhere else: a document in Google Drive is Google's to delete, not ours.
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.