It's not much cheaper than an equivalent laptop, so who's this for, exactly?

It’s not much cheaper than an equivalent laptop, so who’s this for, exactly?

  • scutiger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    56 minutes ago

    The one cool thing about this is that it’s intended to run off a single cable plugged into the monitor for both power and display. That’s where the interesting part ends.

  • CannedYeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    59 minutes ago

    Here’s a random use case for this: retirement homes. A laptop is too unergonomic for an old person. But they don’t want to take up the space in their little apartments with a big desktop setup. They’re happy to go to a computer lab. But a shared computer introduces complication. But I have to admit it’s a pretty narrow slice of that population that is sufficiently motivated to use a computer. Also they’d be better served with ChromeOS than Windows. You could have a ChromeBox that runs by plugging in a single USB cable and plug it into a monitor with a built in hub and a normal keyboard.

  • CannedYeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    I’ve thought about this dual desker problem. It always seemed wasteful lugging around a whole laptop and not really needing the battery and carrying around an extra inferior keyboard and screen.

    My thought is to run off a live SSD. My idea was also to introduce a layer of virtualization and a copy-on-write filesystem with FS level syncing for backup. Then you’d have a full disk image backup so you could pick up right where you left off in a VDI if you lost the SSD.

  • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nzEnglish
    26·
    5 hours ago

    “Ooh, look who’s fancy now?” – Atari and Commodore.

    A laptop is just a PC crammed into a keyboard… with a monitor crammed on top.

      • kaidenshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Before the RAM and storage pricing nightmare, the performance vs price for a Pi 400/500 would be an acceptable trade off for some people. These days, it’s cheaper to buy a laptop with a busted screen on eBay and remove the top half. You get the performance of the HP keyboard at the Raspberry Pi price point.

        Thanks, AI overlords, I guess.

        • CannedYeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          A raspberry pi is not a serious replacement for PCs in the enterprise. There’s nothing the pi does that HP and Dell couldn’t do if they wanted. The Pi just seems cheap because it can cut corners that don’t matter to hobbyists but that enterprises would never accept.

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteEnglish
    9·
    4 hours ago

    I like the concept because it’s reminiscent of the early computers I grew up with (Tandy CoCo, Commodore 64) and I basically just dock my laptop with its lid closed anyway (screen is too small and resolution too high for my old person eyes).

    But considering it’s literally a keyboard PC, you’d think they’d have put more effort into making it a nice keyboard. I hate those “chiclet” low travel keys. Put a PC in a good mechanical keyboard or at least a membrane keyboard where the keys have some travel, then we’ll talk. Until then, it’d be a tad ridiculous to plug a good keyboard into my keyboard PC lol.

    It’s not much cheaper than an equivalent laptop, so who’s this for, exactly?

    I guess if there were an LCD shortage instead of memory and SSD, it would have a lot more potential.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I would have considered this over a mini pc. Most ergonomic setup is keyboard and mouse in a drawer. Fairly small USB monitors that are placed at edge of desk is a field of view similar to 30+" at end of desk, and even closer than a laptop monitor. These are also fairly portable, lighter than a smaller tablet. Mini PCs have much more ports including 4 monitor support, that this may not have.