Correction, this is what allowed France to have a white elephant program of a breeder reactor plant, which most times was idling and constantly used power to keep the sodium melted. It produced less than 10 TWh over its life, and had an overall capacity factor of less than 10%. The reactor was slated to permanent shut down after a change of government in 1997. The preceding, smaller scale and non commercial (experimental) reactor was kept running until 2010.
Not sure if the technology was really that fucked up. Its main problem is the rationale for it (keep the nation running with lower availability of uranium) didn't materialize.
You do have some Asus options for instance but from a cursory look, you also have to worry about Atom and Celeron-branded Atom with soldered RAM (some machines with the Celeron Atom and one So-DIMM slot do exist, at least 14" ones). You can get 4GB soldered RAM, lousy but works. Some have a 500GB hard drive so you can just use any 2.5" SSD (or specifically a 7mm one) although perhaps you'll find Celeron N 3050/3060 to be too slow. In years coming new generations of AMD soldered CPU might be useful : they both compete with Atom / Celeron Atom and Celeron/Pentium that end in U.
Didn't help that OS/2 itself was expensive. Also, people upgraded to a PC with 4MB to run Doom ; it sounds like you could have use this cutting edge PC to safely multitask Solitaire and Paint after spending hundreds on software, and I fail to see what the point is. I don't ever remember Windows 3.1 crashing on home computers.
Now, some real linux on a phone with an Android sandbox that can be firewalled, deleted, updated etc. at will, I would like to see that. Just like running a whole Windows 7 VM with gigs of RAM to run a single, small application : to not pollute your real hardware with insecure and ugly crap. Just like the Windows 7 VM and OS/2, it would waste about half the RAM, storage and CPU but it would be a useful option. Preferably on low end well supported hardware, for which I'm not exactly holding my breath sadly. Listen manufacturers : please make a $100 phone with a weird OS that has 5 years minimum of support (in a contract you have to honor, like Windows support phases), that ungrateful people will try to break by doing weird things with, and I will get one and tell a handful neckbeards and basement dwellers to buy it.
I would have recommended something from Plugable, as I did read about tb3 docks and tb3 to multiple display adapters though I wasn't really looking for them. I liked how they explained things, even recommending the USB-C to dual hdmi adapter over USB-C to dual displayport if you don't need the bandwith or if you need VGA. They explained in detail what the dual displayport version does better or doesn't do and I just liked the way they did, although perhaps they're simply concerned about customers buying the wrong thing and returning it.
The website has changed already, different pages, Thunderbolt 3 docks removed and the dual hdmi adapter renamed to "Plugable Thunderbolt 3 Dual HDMI Adapter for Windows". good hint at what it doesn't run on! So, they still strive to be helpful and informative, but they had to double down on harsh technical realities. Not sure why the Mac is really incompatible, but the whole Thunderbolt display output on USB-C thing is a new fest of incompatible firmware and OS updates, and sometimes hardware limitation.
I would not be surprised if there are issues on some PC laptops running linux either. An article about woes with DisplayLink adapters i.e., actual USB 3.0. Otherwise this is a fallback if you don't mind a slower display. http://plugable.com/2016/09/21... And yes, what a stupid clusterfuck that the one thing the new macbook's connectors are supposed to be great for isn't working. Unexpected? the slashdot headline boasts about external displays, must be why it doesn't work.
Thanks, so RGB-only SCART was a French thing? Fun fact, there were never such a thing as composite SECAM. The classic consoles were wired for RGB in the French market at least. The NES couldn't do RGB, so the French NES uses a built-in composite to RGB converter. Only later did French TV support composite PAL, such that after a SNES that only did RGB, we got an N64 that only did composite.
True, the xgamma command brightens up about anything. Anything except my game of Open Arena, because that's what the bug does. Also, Quake 3 with Wine is broken, problems with input it seems. (I should not have gone with "devel" version of Wine, or I should have installed PlayOnLinux likely) Also when I quit dosbox, the desktop is at 640x480. lol I know, you didn't ask for that but it's amazing how some former bugs and quirks from the old Windows gaming days still are around but on linux instead. Quit to 640x480, crash or quit to the desktop with overbright gamma still applied, crash to 640x480 desktop with overbright gamma applied, alt-tab out of the game but can't alt-tab back in, alt-tab to a 640x480 desktop. ctrl-alt-right to go to workspace number 2 can be used sometimes when you can't alt-tab.
I'm curious if using Wayland will fix most things, but I fear to be dead before Wayland is ready for the desktop. Or maybe I'll play some game bugfree, while a compositor uses 80% CPU to copy from buffer A to buffer B. I'm completely making this up, but if I can waste CPU or framerate but still get something playable that would be better than nothing.
There used to be a MSN chat client written in Tcl/tk and that required only a small interpreter (likely is installed on your system as/usr/bin/wish) I miss it - because MSN itself was put to death and replaced with something else.
There's Skype, runs on start up like it's Real Player and wastes task bar space (at least in Windows). So there's a non-web client for Skype at least, but there's only one and you can't run something else. That's what web apps got us : the data/network access/user experience is siloed off. In that case, there's no freedom gained by the ability to run a desktop app. So the option left if you don't want to run some Microsoft crap is to not use Skype.
Weird. Can you swim up the Niagara falls? There's like a thousand tons of water landing on your head, but you could push on the water with your arms and propulse yourself.
The Quake 3 games aren't quite playable on linux though. The gamma correction or "brightness" slider doesn't work, so the game is dark and can't be brightened up. Perhaps the Quake engines did something wrong, this used to be an occasional issue with Quake 1 and 2 in Windows 15 years ago but you could fix it with a change of driver or setting higher system wide gamma. But to this day, you can launch Open Arena on some MESA based open source driver (which is all you will ever have on a lot of hardware) and the game is too dark to be played.
I wonder how many european countries or other had SCART, but I remember SCART to be the default, all 8/16 bit consoles used it and 1980s TVs would support only RGB not composite. PS1, PS2, N64 etc. then came out with composite cables and the RCA to SCART adapter, so the PS2 would display a worse pictures than Master System, SNES, Megadrive. (NES looked a bit weird, but quite good enough) RF was for Atari 2600, C64, Pong clones i.e. prehistoric cavemen stuff.
S-Video might have been useful but most experience with it was, you miss a cable, or it's set up wrong and displays black and white. Composite is not good for anything except video / movies. Well, PAL composite at least. It does the job of putting a picture out. On N64 composite is fine, since everything the console does is blurry - full featured, correct 3D rendering at low res and some very small textures.
Thanks for the reply, yes the multiple video output standards are the only serious issue. There is yet another option which may sound silly but not that much, use the USB 3.x itself for display output. Well, you hinted at it. Assuming the software or OS support is good, that works no matter the device (e.g. phone, tablet, or just using the wrong port on a PC or hub/dock). On desktop PC especially, the video standard for USB-C seems to be no video at all.
Thanks, you've pointed out the one real and considerable improvement. It makes me think of trashed Dell laptops, I know of one. The power supply died after a few years and then the replacement ordered on the ebay or amazon quickly died out too (no idea if the computer still reliably works).
A single USB-A on a laptop along two USB-C would be fairly decent. The problem with "get an adapter" : most existing adapters plug onto USB-A . So it's get an adapter for the adapter.
Let's consider : - you buy one $45 drive not two - you've spent $45 not $200 - at least it's better than USB 2.0. But it's not like you need super high performance for your media files. They're still fine even on IDE hard drives. - there is also the SD slot, and in future computers the UFS slot.
Netbooks came out in like 2008 quite disrupted the computer market. Suddenly, you paid LESS money for a more integrated, compact and smaller computer. A couple years later you got crappy $100 tablets, and a couple years later still, good enough $100 tablets i.e. the MORE it was integrated the LESS money you paid for it. Apple saves $2 on internal and external connectors etc. while allowing the laptop to be 1mm thinner, that's why it's very profitable for them.
Very likely because a high end laptop with low end specs must be pretty rare. Chromebook Pixel would be an example, although the CPU still is "too much" high end. The display is smaller than a 15" 16:10 and you make some severe and unclear compromise on software - which may bite even normal users, i.e. can it deal with that USB drive, a plain regular printer, an unsupported codec? So this is basically 100% idiot box or nerd machine, nothing in between.
Upcoming AMD "Stoney Ridge" CPU ought to be great. It's a proper low end design with single channel ddr4 and requires not much supporting hardware at all, whereas Intel has to cripple a dual core i7 and call it a Pentium, or sells those slightly crappy Atom. The GPU ought to display solitaire and minesweeper etc. in real 4K 60Hz without a problem, even on a UHD TV. Properly done, the laptop would have one So-DIMM slot (so you can put either 4GB , 8GB or 16GB RAM and replace it when it's bad, imagine that!) and one M.2 slot (takes PCIe 2x, or SATA if you want something actually affordable), while not needing a chipset. Wifi + bluetooth has been on a little card for what, over a decade? Someone just needs to have the "courage" to make a very slim laptop that's still serviceable that way.
Sell a $999 version with low end specs (CPU dialed down to 10W, 4GB RAM, whatever) but it would have an exquisite quality of keyboard, chassis, long term cooling, display and speakers. After that it's all a matter of software and OS, i.e. you're effectively stuck with the Windows 10 shit show else go buy Apple's inadequate hardware. You could ram a linux desktop down the user's display, but at a minimum Wayland should work - i.e. keep up with the god damn display subsystems of old Vista, Windows 7, Android 2 and iPhone 4 stuff at least. Also you need to spend dozens millions per year on software support and luring commercial developers in (perhaps Ubuntu Snappy and flatpak may allow a market for actual software, like Steam but without Valve and its "launcher").
Incidentally, the external PCIe that's effectively available on that stupid macbookpro might be useful - at worst, you'd use some ugly overpriced enclosure like those in the CP/M days before I was born, with PCIe and PCI cards in them. Thunderbolt to PC Card adapter looks possible too. They speak PCI underneath and I suppose you can use a PC Card card today on USB-C-Thunderbolt, through ridiculous means - adapter from the newer to the older Thunderbolt connector, Thunderbolt to PCIe adapter, PCIe to PCI adapter, PCI to PC Card adapter.
Of course I'm sure you'd better look for a PC laptop anyway. Well, now what about the real problem : still no way to have sound in DOS games. If you want to have PATA, USB mini, CD-ROM on modern systems you can have them. I don't think I've ever seen a USB 1.0 peripheral, but new USB 1.1 ones still come out.
Well in Europe that'd be a criminal offense. You can have cheap tobacco if you live near a border (needs to be the right one too) and buy it abroad, but don't get caught carrying moderately large quantities. There is also such a thing as street dealers selling cigarettes packs (now as expensive as the legal price used to be years ago, so not a very good deal). Yea right.
*Philip Morris* is the kind of company you will have the most of trouble boycotting. It would be slightly easier to boycott the beer companies, or the running water company, or hell it'd be easier to get off the internet altogether which will boycott all ISP and Silicon Valley giants. Hell, you can brew your own beer, carry water to your place or build your own networks but cultivating your own tobacco is illegal (or might be, I wonder how it is in US or Canadian States)
You missed the point too? 5K allows things to look more like print quality than monitor quality (well, supposedly) while still keeping a rather high "emulated" resolution of 2560x1440. (even then, I guess you can shrink down / zoom out things and still be able to read them even though the "logical" resolution is low)
Well, I haven't refuted what you said at all, and I won't or cannot. I think the point is, "high dpi" is overall fairly useless but on a 27" 5K, you have enough size/area and pixel count that it might be useful. I remember a comment about how a 13" (e.g.) high dpi display on a laptop wasn't that useful, because it's too small anyway, especially the screen height is useless because of 16:9 on 13".
The biggest issue is the need for all updated software anyway, you would need everything to use GTK3 or Qt5 and be compatible, or whatever MS and Apple use as toolkits. I'm curious whether recent Wine developments can do dumb pixel doubling for those 90s/00s apps and how the font rendering would look like. Other issue is Displayport 1.3 or 1.4 isn't all that common yet (and to boot, they don't make real low end graphics cards anymore)
The use case : people need to plug in a mouse, a USB2 drive, sometimes an SD card. The answer : you've got four external PCIe 4x / USB combo ports but you need two or three adapters or a USB hub and an adapter. That works but that sucks. Though you may get a USB-C mouse.
The docking functions can be on a standalone box, random vendors sell thunderbolt docks and you can look for the absolute best display you'd want but without the dock (the monitor can still have e.g. a USB hub that you can use as well) To think of it, a VESA compatible dock so that you can screw it behind the monitor would be more tidy, perhaps not the absolute best looking thing if you want people to ohhh and aahh and your desk is facing people, not a wall. But there wouldn't be a supid octopus box on the desk surface.
The thing is, if this computer uses LPDDR3 then you would need a whole different motherboard to put DDR4 on and thus have higher maximum memory capacity. If Apple had stuck to removable memory on So-DIMM, there would never have been a problem. Intel even has a solution called UniDIMM, not adopted by memory vendors but could have been if Apple laptops were to use it : it's yet another So-DIMM format, but it can takes either low voltage DDR3, DDR4 or LPDDR3. Thus solving that memory dichotomy. It's still-born, thanks to Apple's greed, so the dichotomy is between all-soldered laptops with LPDDR3 / LPDDR4 (i.e. smartphone memory) or laptops with one, two or four slots for "real" DDR3 or DDR4 memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction, this is what allowed France to have a white elephant program of a breeder reactor plant, which most times was idling and constantly used power to keep the sodium melted. It produced less than 10 TWh over its life, and had an overall capacity factor of less than 10%. The reactor was slated to permanent shut down after a change of government in 1997. The preceding, smaller scale and non commercial (experimental) reactor was kept running until 2010.
Not sure if the technology was really that fucked up. Its main problem is the rationale for it (keep the nation running with lower availability of uranium) didn't materialize.
You do have some Asus options for instance but from a cursory look, you also have to worry about Atom and Celeron-branded Atom with soldered RAM (some machines with the Celeron Atom and one So-DIMM slot do exist, at least 14" ones). You can get 4GB soldered RAM, lousy but works.
Some have a 500GB hard drive so you can just use any 2.5" SSD (or specifically a 7mm one) although perhaps you'll find Celeron N 3050/3060 to be too slow. In years coming new generations of AMD soldered CPU might be useful : they both compete with Atom / Celeron Atom and Celeron/Pentium that end in U.
Didn't help that OS/2 itself was expensive. Also, people upgraded to a PC with 4MB to run Doom ; it sounds like you could have use this cutting edge PC to safely multitask Solitaire and Paint after spending hundreds on software, and I fail to see what the point is. I don't ever remember Windows 3.1 crashing on home computers.
Now, some real linux on a phone with an Android sandbox that can be firewalled, deleted, updated etc. at will, I would like to see that. Just like running a whole Windows 7 VM with gigs of RAM to run a single, small application : to not pollute your real hardware with insecure and ugly crap.
Just like the Windows 7 VM and OS/2, it would waste about half the RAM, storage and CPU but it would be a useful option. Preferably on low end well supported hardware, for which I'm not exactly holding my breath sadly. Listen manufacturers : please make a $100 phone with a weird OS that has 5 years minimum of support (in a contract you have to honor, like Windows support phases), that ungrateful people will try to break by doing weird things with, and I will get one and tell a handful neckbeards and basement dwellers to buy it.
I would have recommended something from Plugable, as I did read about tb3 docks and tb3 to multiple display adapters though I wasn't really looking for them. I liked how they explained things, even recommending the USB-C to dual hdmi adapter over USB-C to dual displayport if you don't need the bandwith or if you need VGA. They explained in detail what the dual displayport version does better or doesn't do and I just liked the way they did, although perhaps they're simply concerned about customers buying the wrong thing and returning it.
The website has changed already, different pages, Thunderbolt 3 docks removed and the dual hdmi adapter renamed to "Plugable Thunderbolt 3 Dual HDMI Adapter for Windows". good hint at what it doesn't run on!
So, they still strive to be helpful and informative, but they had to double down on harsh technical realities. Not sure why the Mac is really incompatible, but the whole Thunderbolt display output on USB-C thing is a new fest of incompatible firmware and OS updates, and sometimes hardware limitation.
www.plugable.com/products/tbt3-hdmi2x
http://plugable.com/products/t...
I would not be surprised if there are issues on some PC laptops running linux either.
An article about woes with DisplayLink adapters i.e., actual USB 3.0. Otherwise this is a fallback if you don't mind a slower display.
http://plugable.com/2016/09/21...
And yes, what a stupid clusterfuck that the one thing the new macbook's connectors are supposed to be great for isn't working. Unexpected? the slashdot headline boasts about external displays, must be why it doesn't work.
Thanks, so RGB-only SCART was a French thing? Fun fact, there were never such a thing as composite SECAM.
The classic consoles were wired for RGB in the French market at least. The NES couldn't do RGB, so the French NES uses a built-in composite to RGB converter. Only later did French TV support composite PAL, such that after a SNES that only did RGB, we got an N64 that only did composite.
True, the xgamma command brightens up about anything. Anything except my game of Open Arena, because that's what the bug does.
Also, Quake 3 with Wine is broken, problems with input it seems. (I should not have gone with "devel" version of Wine, or I should have installed PlayOnLinux likely)
Also when I quit dosbox, the desktop is at 640x480. lol I know, you didn't ask for that but it's amazing how some former bugs and quirks from the old Windows gaming days still are around but on linux instead. Quit to 640x480, crash or quit to the desktop with overbright gamma still applied, crash to 640x480 desktop with overbright gamma applied, alt-tab out of the game but can't alt-tab back in, alt-tab to a 640x480 desktop. ctrl-alt-right to go to workspace number 2 can be used sometimes when you can't alt-tab.
I'm curious if using Wayland will fix most things, but I fear to be dead before Wayland is ready for the desktop. Or maybe I'll play some game bugfree, while a compositor uses 80% CPU to copy from buffer A to buffer B. I'm completely making this up, but if I can waste CPU or framerate but still get something playable that would be better than nothing.
There used to be a MSN chat client written in Tcl/tk and that required only a small interpreter (likely is installed on your system as /usr/bin/wish)
I miss it - because MSN itself was put to death and replaced with something else.
There's Skype, runs on start up like it's Real Player and wastes task bar space (at least in Windows). So there's a non-web client for Skype at least, but there's only one and you can't run something else. That's what web apps got us : the data/network access/user experience is siloed off. In that case, there's no freedom gained by the ability to run a desktop app. So the option left if you don't want to run some Microsoft crap is to not use Skype.
Weird. Can you swim up the Niagara falls? There's like a thousand tons of water landing on your head, but you could push on the water with your arms and propulse yourself.
The Quake 3 games aren't quite playable on linux though. The gamma correction or "brightness" slider doesn't work, so the game is dark and can't be brightened up. Perhaps the Quake engines did something wrong, this used to be an occasional issue with Quake 1 and 2 in Windows 15 years ago but you could fix it with a change of driver or setting higher system wide gamma. But to this day, you can launch Open Arena on some MESA based open source driver (which is all you will ever have on a lot of hardware) and the game is too dark to be played.
I wonder how many european countries or other had SCART, but I remember SCART to be the default, all 8/16 bit consoles used it and 1980s TVs would support only RGB not composite. PS1, PS2, N64 etc. then came out with composite cables and the RCA to SCART adapter, so the PS2 would display a worse pictures than Master System, SNES, Megadrive. (NES looked a bit weird, but quite good enough)
RF was for Atari 2600, C64, Pong clones i.e. prehistoric cavemen stuff.
S-Video might have been useful but most experience with it was, you miss a cable, or it's set up wrong and displays black and white.
Composite is not good for anything except video / movies. Well, PAL composite at least.
It does the job of putting a picture out. On N64 composite is fine, since everything the console does is blurry - full featured, correct 3D rendering at low res and some very small textures.
Thanks for the reply, yes the multiple video output standards are the only serious issue. There is yet another option which may sound silly but not that much, use the USB 3.x itself for display output. Well, you hinted at it. Assuming the software or OS support is good, that works no matter the device (e.g. phone, tablet, or just using the wrong port on a PC or hub/dock).
On desktop PC especially, the video standard for USB-C seems to be no video at all.
Eh, someone should make a laptop with a portrait screen, perhaps an OLED HiDPI one. Problem solved.
Thanks, you've pointed out the one real and considerable improvement. It makes me think of trashed Dell laptops, I know of one. The power supply died after a few years and then the replacement ordered on the ebay or amazon quickly died out too (no idea if the computer still reliably works).
A single USB-A on a laptop along two USB-C would be fairly decent. The problem with "get an adapter" : most existing adapters plug onto USB-A . So it's get an adapter for the adapter.
Let's consider :
- you buy one $45 drive not two
- you've spent $45 not $200
- at least it's better than USB 2.0. But it's not like you need super high performance for your media files. They're still fine even on IDE hard drives.
- there is also the SD slot, and in future computers the UFS slot.
Netbooks came out in like 2008 quite disrupted the computer market. Suddenly, you paid LESS money for a more integrated, compact and smaller computer. A couple years later you got crappy $100 tablets, and a couple years later still, good enough $100 tablets i.e. the MORE it was integrated the LESS money you paid for it.
Apple saves $2 on internal and external connectors etc. while allowing the laptop to be 1mm thinner, that's why it's very profitable for them.
Very likely because a high end laptop with low end specs must be pretty rare.
Chromebook Pixel would be an example, although the CPU still is "too much" high end. The display is smaller than a 15" 16:10 and you make some severe and unclear compromise on software - which may bite even normal users, i.e. can it deal with that USB drive, a plain regular printer, an unsupported codec? So this is basically 100% idiot box or nerd machine, nothing in between.
Upcoming AMD "Stoney Ridge" CPU ought to be great. It's a proper low end design with single channel ddr4 and requires not much supporting hardware at all, whereas Intel has to cripple a dual core i7 and call it a Pentium, or sells those slightly crappy Atom. The GPU ought to display solitaire and minesweeper etc. in real 4K 60Hz without a problem, even on a UHD TV.
Properly done, the laptop would have one So-DIMM slot (so you can put either 4GB , 8GB or 16GB RAM and replace it when it's bad, imagine that!) and one M.2 slot (takes PCIe 2x, or SATA if you want something actually affordable), while not needing a chipset. Wifi + bluetooth has been on a little card for what, over a decade? Someone just needs to have the "courage" to make a very slim laptop that's still serviceable that way.
Sell a $999 version with low end specs (CPU dialed down to 10W, 4GB RAM, whatever) but it would have an exquisite quality of keyboard, chassis, long term cooling, display and speakers.
After that it's all a matter of software and OS, i.e. you're effectively stuck with the Windows 10 shit show else go buy Apple's inadequate hardware. You could ram a linux desktop down the user's display, but at a minimum Wayland should work - i.e. keep up with the god damn display subsystems of old Vista, Windows 7, Android 2 and iPhone 4 stuff at least. Also you need to spend dozens millions per year on software support and luring commercial developers in (perhaps Ubuntu Snappy and flatpak may allow a market for actual software, like Steam but without Valve and its "launcher").
It's also easy mode for cleaning the crapper.
Incidentally, the external PCIe that's effectively available on that stupid macbookpro might be useful - at worst, you'd use some ugly overpriced enclosure like those in the CP/M days before I was born, with PCIe and PCI cards in them. Thunderbolt to PC Card adapter looks possible too. They speak PCI underneath and I suppose you can use a PC Card card today on USB-C-Thunderbolt, through ridiculous means - adapter from the newer to the older Thunderbolt connector, Thunderbolt to PCIe adapter, PCIe to PCI adapter, PCI to PC Card adapter.
Of course I'm sure you'd better look for a PC laptop anyway.
Well, now what about the real problem : still no way to have sound in DOS games.
If you want to have PATA, USB mini, CD-ROM on modern systems you can have them.
I don't think I've ever seen a USB 1.0 peripheral, but new USB 1.1 ones still come out.
Well in Europe that'd be a criminal offense.
You can have cheap tobacco if you live near a border (needs to be the right one too) and buy it abroad, but don't get caught carrying moderately large quantities.
There is also such a thing as street dealers selling cigarettes packs (now as expensive as the legal price used to be years ago, so not a very good deal). Yea right.
*Philip Morris* is the kind of company you will have the most of trouble boycotting. It would be slightly easier to boycott the beer companies, or the running water company, or hell it'd be easier to get off the internet altogether which will boycott all ISP and Silicon Valley giants.
Hell, you can brew your own beer, carry water to your place or build your own networks but cultivating your own tobacco is illegal (or might be, I wonder how it is in US or Canadian States)
You missed the point too? 5K allows things to look more like print quality than monitor quality (well, supposedly) while still keeping a rather high "emulated" resolution of 2560x1440. (even then, I guess you can shrink down / zoom out things and still be able to read them even though the "logical" resolution is low)
Well, I haven't refuted what you said at all, and I won't or cannot. I think the point is, "high dpi" is overall fairly useless but on a 27" 5K, you have enough size/area and pixel count that it might be useful. I remember a comment about how a 13" (e.g.) high dpi display on a laptop wasn't that useful, because it's too small anyway, especially the screen height is useless because of 16:9 on 13".
The biggest issue is the need for all updated software anyway, you would need everything to use GTK3 or Qt5 and be compatible, or whatever MS and Apple use as toolkits.
I'm curious whether recent Wine developments can do dumb pixel doubling for those 90s/00s apps and how the font rendering would look like.
Other issue is Displayport 1.3 or 1.4 isn't all that common yet (and to boot, they don't make real low end graphics cards anymore)
The use case : people need to plug in a mouse, a USB2 drive, sometimes an SD card.
The answer : you've got four external PCIe 4x / USB combo ports but you need two or three adapters or a USB hub and an adapter. That works but that sucks. Though you may get a USB-C mouse.
It's happening again with Windows 7. Some people have to download and install USB or ethernet controller drivers.
The docking functions can be on a standalone box, random vendors sell thunderbolt docks and you can look for the absolute best display you'd want but without the dock (the monitor can still have e.g. a USB hub that you can use as well)
To think of it, a VESA compatible dock so that you can screw it behind the monitor would be more tidy, perhaps not the absolute best looking thing if you want people to ohhh and aahh and your desk is facing people, not a wall. But there wouldn't be a supid octopus box on the desk surface.
The thing is, if this computer uses LPDDR3 then you would need a whole different motherboard to put DDR4 on and thus have higher maximum memory capacity. If Apple had stuck to removable memory on So-DIMM, there would never have been a problem. Intel even has a solution called UniDIMM, not adopted by memory vendors but could have been if Apple laptops were to use it : it's yet another So-DIMM format, but it can takes either low voltage DDR3, DDR4 or LPDDR3. Thus solving that memory dichotomy. It's still-born, thanks to Apple's greed, so the dichotomy is between all-soldered laptops with LPDDR3 / LPDDR4 (i.e. smartphone memory) or laptops with one, two or four slots for "real" DDR3 or DDR4 memory.