My experience has been that you will still need a few various adapter cables, and the zapi main cable , which costs the same (from zapi) as the handset that does not also require a laptop.
The only advantage to using the laptop is the ability to save more than 1 setup for cloning setups across truck fleets, where the handset saves only the last setup that was saved to the handset.
There are some NACCO products I am aware of (VNA) that use a zapi wire guidance system that can not use the software, and require the handset.