I'm confused by the use case for this. The keyboard gets a cable running to a monitor. Might need a power cable as well but let's assume usbc covers both.
An alternative is a raspberry pi on the vesa mount, or attached to the monitor arm. The cable to a keyboard is now optional, wireless USB being much easier than wireless displayport.
Keyboard can now be flat too.
When is this a good idea?
> The keyboard gets a cable running to a monitor. Might need a power cable as well but let's assume usbc covers both.
Unfortunately it doesn't cover both. You do, in fact, need at minimum 2 cables connected to it - one for display & one for power. And one of those cables is, unfortunately, micro-HDMI. A super fragile port that you almost certainly don't have a cable lying around for as well.
The marketing blurb that's linked makes it quite clear that this targets retro hobbyists, who want a modern take on the C64. It's not really meant to be a practical design.
It still is a more practical design than a flat keyboard, which only masochists would use willingly.
It gives me somewhat more Amiga A500 and A500+ vibes... ;)
I see it as a spiritual successor to my much loved childhood Amiga A500 which partially spurred my life long love of computing.
The GPU pins on the back are nice, as is the fact that all IO is cleanly at the back of the device.
That being said, my only real desk is almost entirely consumed by workstation/gaming PC and it's associate monitors that ironically this more convenient form-factor is less convenient for my use cases.
I have a bunch of Pi4s at home they work well as I can power them over PoE, don't spit out too much heat, have a well supported stable OS and are great for running small personal projects and workloads. (Home assistant, DNS, a few other docker containers that power things internal to my network) - sure a NUC would be more powerful, but then I have to find a way to route power in to it, and I'm running out of wall sockets!!
I think this is a wrist geometry thing. A macbook dock that lifted the back, putting the keyboard on a slant, did serious damage to my wrists over the period of a year or so. That was the better part of a decade ago.
They've slowly partially healed since changing to a keyboard parallel to the desk surface. There are climbing moves I still cannot do because of it. Ymmv.
So if they had made one change, it would be fantastic as a throw-in-the-backpack computer.
That change would be to support display port alt-mode on a USB-C port, rather than only having mini-HDMI. If they'd done that, you could plug AR glasses like the XReal One straight into it, and not need a separate screen. Your entire compute becomes a keyboard+power, glasses, and wireless mouse. That would be really nice: two cables, total, one for power to the pi and one from the pi to the glasses.
As it is, you need an hdmi to usb-c converter, which also needs to be powered, another couple of cables, and more of a setup faff each time. It sounds minor, but it's a missed opportunity. For me it turns it from "take my money" to "eh... I can do better."
and if you want to be extra sure, you should throw in a monitor into your backpacl
and tada, you made a laptop
The point being that it's not a laptop. It's a proper no-compromises keyboard (ok, ish) with a cinema-screen-sized display that nobody can look over your shoulder at.
good news, you can connect your laptop to cinema-screen-sized.
I thought these kinds of ~affordable computers in keyboards were obviously aimed at families/young users plugging into an existing TV in the living room, like a modern take on the C64.
> wireless USB being much easier than wireless displayport
I'm sure you meant bluetooth but just so we're all clear: Wireless USB isn't easy at all. Hardware availability for it is very limited and you'll need adapters on both ends. Frankly there's more hardware to wirelessly transfer HDMI than USB.