[varispeed]

Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before.

Most like due to perceived niche, no standard format of laptop motherboards, not easy to buy laptop motherboard off the shelf.

Then also the technology was evolving, so manufacturers maybe didn't want to restrict themselves to the certain layout and way how components can be laid out and connected.

[ivan_gammel]

I would love to see an external monitor with embedded GPU/extra CPU etc that would serve as an extension to a laptop, tablet, phone or stick. If such devices were popular enough in remote-first offices, coworkings and hotels, it would be a game changer making computing more inclusive. Imagine having a $100 laptop with easily replaceable components that is transformed into $1500 workstation on demand.

[vel0city]

External Thunderbolt GPU enclosures exist and can behave as a dock. A friend has one at his place, I can just plop my own cheap laptop in and it gets a massively upgraded GPU, access to a few monitors, USB PD, a USB hub with all the peripherals plugged in, and wired networking.

Its not all built into the monitor, but IMO having the several hundred dollar GPU outside of the monitor gives really good flexibility. The dock isn't much larger than the GPU and a few hundred watt power supply which you'd need anyways.

The only thing really missing from that equation is the extra CPU power and it being integrated into the monitor. But having a powerful CPU that scales down to be power friendly when on the go seems easier than finding a powerful GPU that doesn't suck the battery dry just rendering a desktop and a browser window.

[acomjean]

Isn't that what "Display Link" usb monitors kinda are (without the powerful gpu and large screen real estate)

I've used a usb-> monitor adapter from time to time (with my own screen). The performance wasn't great, but its not bad and been more than usable for work and such.

with usb3 it should be better than the one I used.

https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/disp...

[ivan_gammel]

Well, the connector does not really matter, the key is the hardware at the extension. CPU+GPU+screen+network+camera+HDD with some software that you need only in workstation mode etc. The software could be sandboxed by the OS on your device, security of extra CPU and GPU is interesting, but probably solvable problem.

[zozbot234]

That's pretty much an all-in-one PC. E.g. an iMac, or a Surface Studio.

[ivan_gammel]

yes, if all components are present, it looks like an all-in-one PC. But again, I’m talking about an extension, where OS and your data belong to your portable device and run in trusted environment using extension resources when necessary.

[dijit]

I had the same idea before, its basically possible now if you pass through the SSD to a host computer.

I even thought about maybe having an external SSD module which you could swap out the SSD to a beast machine when you need it.

[ivan_gammel]

This solution will work even with good old HDD, but you need a whole host computer and you swap, not extend your hardware.

[usrusr]

Standing on the shoulders of giants is a pointless endeavor if the giants simply aren't there or if their abilities are too narrowly focused on the very hard problems.

Very fast (on a contemporary scale) mobile extension interfaces have come and gone before, but only PCIe in its USB-C and m.2 incarnations not only excels at high performance but also scales down nicely to things as pedestrian as plugging in a mouse or a non-exotic storage extension. PCMCIA for example was dead weight unless you happened to be one of the very few who had one of those super exotic cards. An unused lightning 4 slot? There can never be enough of those, the more the merrier. You might find yourself using it for things as simple as topping up your bike light battery when it's not running an external GPU.

[usrusr]

(eh, sorry for typing lightning when I meant thunderbolt)

[sh34r]

I strongly believe the tech just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to make a modular laptop, but making some ten billion smartphones (and the constant drive to make them ever thinner and smaller) made it so we can pack far more power into a smaller space.

Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements.

People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.

[jjice]

There was a short period where external GPUs that could connect to your laptop were kind of big a few years back. The never really took off though, and that was the only big component I saw that with.

[theWreckluse]

Any idea why they didn't take off?

[Jochim]

They often just don't justify the cost. The enclosures themselves are expensive, and there's a really rough performance hit, less than half the framerate of the same card connected via PCIe in some cases[0]. A decent gaming laptop probably costs about the same while having better performance[1].

They're not particularly portable either, so you'd be better off getting the gaming laptop, or building a desktop with a cheaper GPU for roughly the same price.

The size/power delivery of the enclosure can be a limiting factor as well, new GPUs have tended to be bigger and more power hungry, resulting in many enclosures just not being compatible with newer cards.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE

[1] https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbo...`

[mschild]

Guess on my part, but likely cost.

The cheapest egpu case I could find is 300 Euros and that's just the case with an internal PSU. You still need to buy an incredibly expensive GPU to put into it.

So now you're spending probably 1k just for the laptop, plus 300 for the case and an additional, let say, 350-400 on the GPU. For that amount of money, most would probably look for good laptops that have an integrated one, buy a handheld, a console, or just don't want to spend that amount of money on it.

[jerf]

"Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before."

Oh, they did, it was just a niche market you needed to go looking for, because they were and still generally are expensive. I remember my father once brought home a laptop from work to evaluate whether or not they wanted to use it to do data collection in car certification tests. It was a hardened laptop, so the entire thing was made out of sheet metal. I think you could literally run it over with a car and it would be fine. The most noticeable feature was that it featured 4 ISA expansion ports and the volume necessary to contain the cards. I think it was a 486/100 or so. They called these "luggables", but, yes, technically it fit on my lap. I wouldn't guarantee it would fit on everyone's lap, though; I'm quite tall. It was ~$8,000 in ~1995 dollars, and I'm pretty sure I had a Pentium 233MHz by then, and I was never cutting edge on that stuff, was always scrounging around. So, very expensive.

This sort of thing has been available for a while, you just had to go looking for them. A lot of advancements combine to make something like Framework possible, such as the fact that any such testing platform today would have all of its data gathering gear as a combination of USB at worst, bluetooth or wifi quite possible, and software driving the rest, leaving nowadays a GPU as just about the only thing you might want to wire to a laptop at such speeds, so the market has toned down.

A couple of years ago it lived on in the gamer laptop space where, at the very top end, the laptops are basically just desktops jammed into a luggable laptop shell with desktop GPUs in them. You paid through the nose for these things, though you did recover a bit of the price on the grounds that you were using off-the-shelf desktop parts and not paying the mobile premium. I'm qualifying that with "a couple of years ago" because I haven't looked since then, and the external GPU enclosures are getting steadily more practical and well-supported and I expect that will probably eat that market. Hauling around two bits of kit is nominally worse than one, but an external GPU enclosure can have such massively better cooling than trying to jam it in a case with everything else that it will probably be able to perform even better and at this level performance is everything.