I got mine today. A few initial impressions.
First off, it weirds me out that they sell these things for $30, but they're cheap enough to give away for sitting through a boring presentation. OTOH, my wonderful wife, who went for me, since I had to work, said that it still wasn't worth it, but that the breakfast was reasonably nice -- ham and sausage biscuits, fruit, orange juice, coffee, etc. Another friend of mine who also went, who is about 6'3" tall and weighs, I'd guess, 220 lbs. said he filled up on it.
My wife actually just came home (not from there -- from doing some other stuff) and she tells me that it really was very executive oriented, with desks and stuff, not just like an auditorium full of people like I'm used to for this sort of thing. She says that there were only about a dozen people in attendance and that she was very uncomfortable about being there (for which I'm sorry
) because she went solely to get the cable for me and wasn't able to blend into a crowd -- so be prepared.
It's not some stripped down version of the cable. It's the real thing, in retail clamshell packaging, which shows it as the
PNoteKL5.
It seems to be of high quality. It's a six foot long 5mm thick steel cable coated in a reasonably thick layer of transparent grey plastic. One end is looped on itself and held with a metal crimp (it doesn't actually seem to be a crimp, but you get the idea), which is itself covered with different opaque black plastic. The other end is terminated in a metal ring attached to the cable inside which sits the locking mechanism, allowing it to rotate on the one axis without restriction.
Actually, the ring is attached to the cable in a floating manner, so it can spin that way, too, which is a perpendicular axis, so it moves quite freely. The locking mechanism is a typical cylinder lock.
Having never used a laptop cable or even really seen one up close before, I was surprised at how it attaches to the ``laptop'' (read empeg). There's this little nut-type thing that is a fairly large, shaped cylinder, about half an inch tall and about half an inch in diameter. Out of one side of the cylinder extends a flat hook and the other side is a thumbscrew. When you tighten the thumbscrew, the hook pulls back into the cylinder. So what you do is extend the hook, slip it into the laptop's security hole and then tighten it down.
The locking mechanism fits over the nut and when the lock is locked, three ball bearings get forced inward and fit in a slot in the nut, much like the way many quick change drill chucks work. There are also six symmetrical keys on the nut, apparently to keep the lock from spinning. I'm not sure how that helps, but there you go.
The key is required for both locking and unlocking, which seems annoying, but also means you can't accidentally lock your empeg to something and be unable to remove it because you left your key at home. Also, you can't remove the key while the lock is unlocked, and there's no spring to push it back to the locked position, so you have to intentionally do everything.
The idea is that you leave the nut attached to the laptop at all times. Then the locking mechanism fits over it and clamps onto the nut. When I first realized this, I was bummed, because it's a real pain to put this nut on and take it off, and I figured I'd have to cut a hole in the back of the sled in order to make it work. But it turns out I was wrong. It doesn't stick as far off the back of the empeg as the docking connector, so it'll fit in the normally empty space at the back of the sled just fine without any modifications at all.
When attached, the nut definitely doesn't stick past either edge of the empeg case, even all the way up there in the corner.
However, there is one thing that will require modification. The nut won't clamp down tight enough to grab onto the sheet metal of the empeg's case. It won't come off, but it floats and rattles a little bit. It seems that fabricating a small metal or hard plastic disc with a slot in it, to effectively make the empeg's case thicker, will do the trick. But I haven't done that yet.
It looks like it shouldn't take more than one more empeg-case-thickness to do it.
Despite the fact that it seems like a quality product, there's still no way I'd pay $30 for it, especially to APC. But I'm glad I've got it now. I think I'll have to kowtow to her for weeks. But that's not totally a bad thing.
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