200 USD is eye watering? Sure you can get a better newer complete machine for less, but that’s more a case of used thinkpads being cheap rather than this being expensive IMO. Seems like a deal to me, given that you’re paying for parts (mobo + cpu, which also need sourcing), BGA soldering and shipping.

My AirPod Pros have also worked perfectly on my Linux PCs - just as solid as connecting to an Apple device.

Exactly this. When you procure custom hardware, you’re paying (a lot) for the vendor to ensure that each unit meets the specifications you provide. If you validate off the shelf hardware like this, there is no guarantee that another batch of the same sku will also meet your requirements. Imagine training on these controllers then a certain batch of them has wildly different sensitivity.

Thanks for the correction. I was definitely out of date, what I said was only true during the USB 3 era.

So this is an optional part of the USB 4 spec, but from what I can tell this is required for PCs shipping with Windows 11 and USB 4 ports. Yes, this seems like more manufactured confusion courtesy of USB IF.

That’s a ThunderBolt port :)

That’s fair!

Sure, I use a ThunderBolt dock at home, but being docked 100% of the time is probably not normal.

The article says it’s a stock photo that has been edited with AI.

Interesting point about the KVM. To make it transparent the KVM would need to report the model of a real monitor in the display EDID data. Also if you’re monitoring the device, which is almost certainly a laptop, it would be suspicious if it was plugged in to a monitor 100% of the time.