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wolrahtoday at 3:16 PM2 repliesview on HN

> great for kiosks and shared workstations.

Absolutely not.

For a kiosk, I want everything the user is touching to be effectively disposable. Keyboards and mice are cheap and trivial to replace, this design integrates the most important part of the system in to one of the easiest parts to damage/steal. It's possibly the worst way to do a kiosk.

For a shared workstation, likewise if I'm the user I want to be able to bring my own keyboard and mouse, both for sanitary reasons (have you seen the way people treat their own keyboards, much less shared ones?) and for personal preference. This design integrates the most important part of the system with the part most likely to get gunked up.

Even for the idea of a shared docking station where each user has their own keyboard PC, it's a crappy keyboard. Perhaps if it were a nice mechanical board with swappable keyswitches that might not be terrible, but as it is it's all of the downsides of a laptop without the ability to actually use it undocked.

Whatever use cases may exist where this is actually an improvement are very specific niches.


Replies

nxobjecttoday at 3:59 PM

As someone who's wrangled IT in college libraries before, that's slightly unfair - they do have a Kensington lock for the keyboard.

It's locking up the rest of the cables that'll be the issue, as well as a preference for ethernet. Mice and ethernet cables were stolen the most... inevitably the mice ending making cheapo Chromebooks less miserable, and the ethernet cables ended up at LAN parties.

The users we trusted got laptops anyway.

boobsbrtoday at 3:54 PM

> For a kiosk, I want everything the user is touching to be effectively disposable.

Or built like a tank that is easy to powerwash.