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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.

When I grew up in the 90s and 00s, screens were definitely the most expensive part of any system they belonged to. And any gadget that came with its own screen attached to it was regarded as a delicacy only for the elite.

Living long enough to see "disposable" screens cheaper than literal candy getting attached everywhere makes me happy.

Can't wait to see Gemini-2.5 Pro-level LLMs embedded inside single post-it notes and thrown away like it's no big deal.

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> For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.

Like this?

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/new-ddr5-modu...

... I don't get why folks would want to use such ram sticks...

That said, I am very appreciative of my 'inline USB-C power draw monitor' from a standpoint of understanding what kind of draw a given device has (up to it's limit ofc)

> inline USB-C power draw monitor

I have a couple of those and I love them!

Mine support up to 100W power draw.

Before I got them, I hadn’t ever considered that a variable amount of power could be drawn by a laptop while charging.

For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the higher the battery charge is getting, the less power it’s drawing from the outlet.

The analogy I always use is the filling a water bottle one. In the beginning when the bottle is empty you can go full power and fill it up with high pressure. At the end you need to reduce the pressure to not spill the water. I know it doesn’t work like this with batterie cells but close enough. I had the same aha moment when realizing this. It’s one of the things no one normally thinks about in a world where everything is a given.

Or the opposite function of an audio potentiometer (logarithmic potentiometer).

Ages ago I measured how much power it took for the Start menu to open in Windows 7 on a Dell desktop that was fairly average at the time. In my somewhat crude measurement it was 20W for about 2 seconds.

Brilliant! Thanks for measuring this - I know it may be crude, but it’s also the best measurement I have ever heard of for this!

Assuming you like that kind of thing, maybe you can also test the power drain from displaying seconds in the taskbar in Windows 11. I know Raymond Chen posted an article about it, but I’d be interested whether you can spot a difference. If it really is on the order of 5 mW, then I assume you can’t detect it.

One of the downsides of only using a laptop is that you can’t see this level of detail because the battery acts as a buffer.

Imagine what the draw is for opening some bloated electron monstrosity like Teams or Discord these days.

I like those monitors for finding weird, surprising (to me anyway) things - like when I charge my Framework laptop from a USB port on my work laptop (because I don’t have another power socket handy to plug them both into the wall) the Framework laptop draws twice as much power when it’s asleep as when it’s awake. The opposite way around to what I need!

From memory, 5W when running (not enough to prevent the battery slowly draining), 10W when in standby.

I love my AMD framework, and I don't think my numbers are as terrible as yours (7-9 watts just chilling watts idle. However, the 'sleep' use is still, bad. I hunch it's a linux thing. I don't even bother, I just turn the thing off.

> For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the higher the battery charge is getting, the less power it’s drawing from the outlet.

This is because Li-Ion charging logic is known as "CC-CV", or constant current followed by constant voltage. You limit the charging current to some value (say 1A) until the cell attains the target voltage (almost always 4.2V, though some chargers limit it to 4.1V to prolong cell life), and then you hold it at that voltage until the current diminishes significantly (most chargers cut the cell off and indicate charge complete when the current draw drops to 10% of its max (during the CC phase) charge current, i.e. 100mA here).

Innovation at any cost.

On an SSD or HDD, it would occasionally be useful to have an eink display that indicates faults, wear, and thousands of hours operated.

Maybe also show the drive label and something about the partition table, although that requires inspecting the storage contents.

I wouldn't pay much more for that, though, and I don't know how many people would pay any premium at all.

There were a few USB drives which had a display that showed how full they were, but they weren't popular, likely quite fragile to filesystem implementation details, and AFAIK have mostly disappeared now.

I want one of these but with some kind of color grid showing what's going on in memory in real time

Remember when the future was each AA battery having its own thumb destroying built-in tester?

Imagine AA batteries with little LCD screens.

At some point your thumbs wouldn't activate the pads so you had to use your thumbnails and then it was just a matter of time before the tester strip quit working.

Technology Connections did a video about those very batteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsA3X40nz9w

It's interesting that he speaks of them as something very old, but such batteries were still widely available in Europe not too long ago. I have a pack of Duracell PowerCheck AAA batteries made in Belgium and labeled good until 03/2029, which suggests a manufacturing date of 2019.

you'll probably enjoy this tiny screen embedded in a LEGO brick

https://youtu.be/6wBrOV2FJM8

Yeah, I hope they put displays on more things. The trends are weird though, since some things that used to have displays no longer have them; you have to use the app on your phone instead...

Some things should never have had a display. Eg touch screen for car controls.

Controls are different from displays.

You're probably shaking your fist at touch controls ? Would you be mad if it was a button or knob with some display ?

I recently drove a Mazda with a knob in the center console that controlled the Android Auto display. It was surprisingly usable!

That's so they can charge a subscription

Nah to get you to give the “share location” permission while pairing, so they sell that telemetry to data brokers.

I wonder if the previous generation felt that way about the little unlit LCDs that used to be in everything (although, I bet they were more than $2 adjusted for inflation).

Side-lit multi-segment displays were so futuristic.

Reminds me of the short-lived Windows SideShow display on a few laptops (~2003):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow

It was only on Vista, so some time after 2007.

I remember working on the host software for a thing similar to the display we're discussing around ... 2012.

It never went into manufacturing though. Some combination of Win 7 dropping sideshow and ... some widget feature we also mirrored.

My first "job" between school and university was to assemble a bunch of keyboards for banking terminals. They used configurable key caps in that a printed sheet was snapped under a transparent keycap cover. I suppose I must have been working on a short production run for a small bank or a trial project, that didn't merit screen printing the keys.

As I worked through countless of those keyboards I mused that what it needed was a little screen on each keycap, so I could just do my job using software.

This was in 1982. Seems like we're nearly there.

[oops, double post]

That's actually been done in a few different products, I think the only enduring product though is the StreamDeck.

The most impressive was the Optimus Maximus someone else mentioned in a comment.

Unfortunately these are still a bit too expensive to e.g. have one on every key of a standard 101-key keyboard.

Admittedly at $2, thats within the cost bucket of an expensive keyboard.

I want them in arcade buttons to show the mapping for the currently playing emulator / game. You can get circular 0.71 inch LCD screens for under $1.50 (160x160) - which will fit all sizes of arcade buttons, but for some reason no one built this yet... :)

Takes me back. https://store.artlebedev.com/electronics/optimus-maximus/#51...

Think this was $1200. Honestly don’t think I would spend any extra money on dynamic keys- I never look at my keyboard.

That keyboard definitely had wow factor for me when it came out.

It was like: wow this is overkill... but it looks so nice with custom layouts that match the games.

I think they’d be functionally useless for my daily driver, but a keyboard that shows contextual hot keys to an app I’m learning (photoshop, blender, etc) would be a game changer.

AR glasses or VR passthrough could make some really cool hotkey graphics

If only Apple would have done that with the F keys instead of the touch stripe they tried...

The Elgato Stream Decks, although not keyboards proper, come very close

Funny you mention that. There's a lineage from one to the other: https://www.theverge.com/c/features/24191410/elgato-stream-d...

Makes sense that they moved from individual screens to one big one under a bunch of transparent keys.

Tell me you’re unaware of the artisan keyboard scene prices without telling me you’re unaware of the artesian keyboard scene prices

>For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.

Yo, dawg:

https://epomaker.com/products/epomaker-rt82

I wish my laserprinter had a screen like this.

Its menu is impossible to navigate.

Same for my office phone.

I would think driving the screen is a big part of the cost and complexity, so having a cheap SoC that can do it probably just as important.

I feel that the future may mean non-intrusive E-Ink displays where they are useful.

And not far from that are sentient toasters and doorbells.

My first job I had a Sun terminal with a Black and White monitor because it was much cheaper than the color one. Kids these days wouldn't understand.

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