~$900, and it takes ~3 seconds to switch...
I'll pursue this when "they" decide to get real and make this not suck. Until then, I have sufficient alternatives.
I appreciate the writeup. It convinces me that integrated KVM stuff ~~ except for fewer wires ~~ isn't much better than the mess that's prevailed for years now, and I'm not missing much.
I also have a $900 monitor (provided from work) which is also a built in kvm switch, and it can show two desktops, one HDMI/windows and one usb-c/mac, side by side or as an inset as well. There's no delay switching either.
It is supposed to hot-switch the inputs if I move the mouse to the edge, but it does not, I guess it's because one of them is HDMI.
I used to have a Lenovo dock that I used as a switch, but not anymore and there's definitely less clutter.
The ~3 second switch would definitely derail me.
Why does video input source switching suck so much?
Back in the old analog CRT days I could forgive the switching latency. With today's all-digital signal paths I feel like video input switching should be pretty close to instant.
Is the technology in a broadcast switcher really so exotic and expensive?
> Is the technology in a broadcast switcher really so exotic and expensive?
No. My characterization of the problem was precision flippancy; the demand for this is niche enough that optimizing for it is a low priority, so "they" simply don't. That failure is stack-wide; the specifications around display negotiation would need extension to manage the additional state necessary for the "agile" KVM use case, and then the hardware+firmware would need to exist and become cheap, somehow despite Imaginary Property laws, so that one could hope to find it in real products.
There is regulatory friction here as well: it would complicate power management. Not infeasibly so, but enough that unless a need appears of such import that it motivates people to dare to disturb that writhing ball of copulating tapeworms, it simply won't happen.
So don't hold your breath. Unless you're relatively young, you won't live to see it. More likely, some other paradigm will obviate the problem first.