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What’s the advantage of a thin terminal over a dumb monitor with a thunderbolt/usb-c cable to hookup to your laptop? At least personally I feel like In the last

What’s the advantage of a thin terminal over a dumb monitor with a thunderbolt/usb-c cable to hookup to your laptop? At least personally I feel like In the last 5-6 years laptops have become powerful enough and have sufficient battery life that most companies I know besides Google have dispensed with desktops. If we did want smart monitors, I think table stakes would be coming up with a great input experience (fumbling around to find a remote or playing with the few buttons on the bottom/back don’t seem ideal) and figuring out how to do peripheral discovery/control better. Today, my Samsung tv sometimes forgets what is plugged into it and goes into a weird “detecting your device” mode for a very long time so that it can try and let me control it via the remote.

throwaway4good 5y ago
It is a bit like asking 20 years ago what is the advantage of wifi compared to a cable when it is so slow and unstable? Once the tech is ironed out connecting wireless to your display will be cheaper, far more convenient and in practice just as stable as a wired connection.
- tuckerman 5y ago
  Wireless connectivity and being a smart display seem different to me though. Being able set my laptop down and not have to worry about cable routing seems amazing; being able to have my monitor run apps, show me ads, or require a remote to operate doesn’t seem appealing. Edit: I think we’d also need to figure out wireless power delivery then?
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    A lot of thinking comes from the way that technology works right now. But as tehnnology grows cheaper and better a lot of constraints that used to be taken for given disappears. You mentioned wireless power delivery. What if in the future displays become so power efficient that they don't need wired power at all? Why does a display have to be connected to a single computer? It could be connected to multiple devices; some showing windows from my computer underneath my desk together with a video call in another window that goes through my phone. And the weather widget that I configured on desktop computer, why not that keep running on the display, even after I disconnect the desktop computer? These ideas are not new; they have been in distributed computing for ages. What's new is that they now are being explored commercially.
jayd16 5y ago
If you're just using google docs and email, maybe you don't even need the laptop most of the time?

throwaway4good 5y ago

It is a bit like asking 20 years ago what is the advantage of wifi compared to a cable when it is so slow and unstable? Once the tech is ironed out connecting wireless to your display will be cheaper, far more convenient and in practice just as stable as a wired connection.

tuckerman 5y ago
Wireless connectivity and being a smart display seem different to me though. Being able set my laptop down and not have to worry about cable routing seems amazing; being able to have my monitor run apps, show me ads, or require a remote to operate doesn’t seem appealing. Edit: I think we’d also need to figure out wireless power delivery then?
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  A lot of thinking comes from the way that technology works right now. But as tehnnology grows cheaper and better a lot of constraints that used to be taken for given disappears. You mentioned wireless power delivery. What if in the future displays become so power efficient that they don't need wired power at all? Why does a display have to be connected to a single computer? It could be connected to multiple devices; some showing windows from my computer underneath my desk together with a video call in another window that goes through my phone. And the weather widget that I configured on desktop computer, why not that keep running on the display, even after I disconnect the desktop computer? These ideas are not new; they have been in distributed computing for ages. What's new is that they now are being explored commercially.

jayd16 5y ago

If you're just using google docs and email, maybe you don't even need the laptop most of the time?