It feels like devices have been cast in such specific roles for so long. It's exciting and suggestive to me to see some expansion & growth, see the roles blurre

It feels like devices have been cast in such specific roles for so long. It's exciting and suggestive to me to see some expansion & growth, see the roles blurred a little, see some interesting attempts at value add. Monitors seem like an interesting place where lines could be blurring. HP has this specific hook. Samsung and LG are both selling monitors with pretty comprehensive little pocket OSes built in. Apple's displays I think all have some generation of their cores on board. These kind of appliance-grade solutions I think have interesting propositions, but HP is tapping what I think is super powerful which is these appliances being connective tissue, being ubiquitous and pervasive computing hubs. I love it. Kind of longer term, I think the appliance-ization can and should eat itself though. Put a modest PC in or even better closely docked, and let anything talking to the monitor also route to that PC. Right now USB4 is ultra-premium, but it's so well suited to letting interesting highly advanced glue peripherals grow. A modest computer but gobs of USB4 io willing to intermediate. The problems with computing as a soft system, with a general purpose computer having unclear purposes make this emergence fraught with difficulty. Very few have the vision to tap such high potential. And these companies both see that & want to build something more tractably/distinctly useful (for narrower clearer ends), and it's - for now - in their interest to differentiate & distinguish by not being general purpose, by staying an appliance not an advanced general screen+computer. They want to keep control. But soft systems, software, the flexibility & malleability, the possibility of USB4 as a flexible interconnecter (as would be so useful here)... it feels like the slow wash of the future coming forward will slowly occur. Slowly. (Very side-note, what a fucking pity DisplayPort aux channel for USB or Ethernet never really took off. USB4 is better in every way but so expensive to do, for now, and we'd be much further along with interesting intermingling of systems if only DP has really some the things.)