another small screen and a whole separate computer

Like having a lapdock and its associated cable adapters, the rollout screen (unless you want a fragile as hell screen made of thin plastic on your phone, and the associated space within the phone’s frame for the rolling mechanism) doesn’t count as an additional item just because you connect your phone to it.

The lapdock itself provides the base for the keyboard + trackpad + the display connection. All one would need to do is connect the phone. I don’t understand why the concept seems so complicated.

Im not suggesting it’s complicated, I’m saying there’s a reason it didn’t take off; it serves the function of being worse than the device it’s designed to replace by having less features.

Much the same way an LLM does every job you give it worse than a real human being, because it’s not smart, just designed to mimic a human well enough to convince middle management to hand over their wallets lest they miss out on the new tech du jour.

Developers are not exclusively working through agent CLI/TUI, but the majority of the work on tech (regardless of being big corps or small startups) involves code development via LLM-assistance.

And how’s that going for them?

Everyone using it is agreeing that it’s the best thing since sliced bread?

The token system is costing more than human staff would?

Qualified users are complaining they have to do twice the work just checking the outputs?

It’s gone rogue and deleted entire databases?

For those people we already have tablet computers, but none of these things are inproved by having a screen that rolls out to wide, especially if a phone or tablet with some peripherals is enough for them to do their job.

Any software developer worth their qualifications isn’t ‘coding’ with an LLM, and they surely aren’t accessing terminal through their phone.

Lapdocks are alright until you need to actually plug into a device where there isnt a desk to put all the accessories needed to do the function of an actual computer. Imagine trying to access a piece of hardware that needs you to run a virtual windows 95 machine just to communicate, not going to happen if you’re on android or a mobileOS

But you’re already describing having an additional screen and keyboard dock.

For argument’s sake, the laptop’s cpu is cooled properly thanks to its larger form factor, the storage is removable and therefore upgradeable, and the ability to run full windows/PC programs without relying on cloud compute or absolutely nuking your battery by trying to run an emulated or mobile version.

For me the argument of “A phone can do everything my job needs” doesn’t work for anything but email jobs, because a lot of them require a physical computer with USB, cat5, hdmi etc to connect to hardware that phones simply cannot talk to through some tangle of docks stuffed into one USB C port.

Yeah if you work from home why would you need a laptop if you have a desktop, but then we’re back to “Why would you need a roll out screen?”

It seems like putting a massive weakness into your laptop screen for the sake of a gimmick.

I see your point but at that point you’re carrying around a screen, the keyboard dock and your phone to do the job of one laptop

I would imagine trying to use a phone as the inputs and trying to have it do both kb and mouse could get tricky, that and phones already get real hot just running their standard operations, let alone doubling the resolution with a bolt on screen and cables which you’ll have to protect with its own case, probably one that doubles as a stand.

That and I’m pie in the sky-ing a laptop that will never be built.

I’m not sure what the point of a rollable display is other than a company throwing money at “the next big thing” to see what sticks

How about a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than a day, isolation switches that physically disconnect power to the wifi, camera, microphone, trackpad, keyboard so that you can add peripherals and not worry about the cat typing for you, or for a program to decide to scan for wifi and eat your battery, replaceable hardware for when it inevitably outlives its old components, and built out of a material that can survive being put into a work bag and the the scratches/dings associated with being a portable device.