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Comment by mihaifm | Hacker News Reader

Using the laptop monitor as a display for external sources (and the video input port) is a good idea, I'm not sure why nobody is implementing it these days. Are there any technical challenges to this, or is it a feature considered useless by all of the laptop producers?

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It's the latter. Displays of all types have been able to handle multiple sources since forever. The only people who want this are sysadmins trying to troubleshoot A/V systems or plug into a server and college students who want to use a laptop as a screen for a gaming system. Neither of those groups are large or make the laptop manufacturers much profit so they're not going to be catered to by the OEMs.

https://www.startech.com/Server-Management/KVM-Switches/USB-...

$560? What the hell is in that thing?

Just sold a non-rugged version on ebay for ~$250 IIRC. They're $320ish new.

Tiny market share. With USB3, at least you can have video capture dongles with reasonable resolution. I know for HDMI they're quite common, but I'd assume someone makes a VGA version too.

Searched a bit: USB3 VGA capture things are surprisingly expensive, but there's some cheap USB2 ones around. Presumably a sysadmin doesn't need high resolution, so those should work too.

This is the part of the design that struck me as particularly useful -- that the monitor, keyboard, and trackpad/whatever can all be plugged in to external sources.

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