<story><title>Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/19/apples-tim-cook-assures-employees-that-it-is-committed-to-the-mac-and-that-great-desktops-are-coming/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>What I really want is for my &lt;i&gt;state&lt;/i&gt; (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display).  I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of HID devices, and pick up exactly where I left off.  And, of course, one possible set of HID devices would be something like a present-day laptop so that I can continue working while en-route.  But there is no reason why the business end of a computer needs to be in the same enclosure as the HID, and a lot of reasons why it should not be.&lt;p&gt;I can do much of this now with a USB3 SSD, but the problem is that there is no way to &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot; such a configuration.  To change locations I need to shut down in one place and reboot in another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yakult</author><text>I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust.  I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa.  My device would have a cpu&amp;#x2F;gpu&amp;#x2F;etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones &amp;#x2F; untrusted terminals would just be screen&amp;#x2F;inputs&amp;#x2F;charger, but in better environments the terminal can optionally provide extra oomph if permitted.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/19/apples-tim-cook-assures-employees-that-it-is-committed-to-the-mac-and-that-great-desktops-are-coming/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>What I really want is for my &lt;i&gt;state&lt;/i&gt; (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display).  I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of HID devices, and pick up exactly where I left off.  And, of course, one possible set of HID devices would be something like a present-day laptop so that I can continue working while en-route.  But there is no reason why the business end of a computer needs to be in the same enclosure as the HID, and a lot of reasons why it should not be.&lt;p&gt;I can do much of this now with a USB3 SSD, but the problem is that there is no way to &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot; such a configuration.  To change locations I need to shut down in one place and reboot in another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patrickg_zill</author><text>Sun did something similar with their Sun Ray hardware and software.&lt;p&gt;You could close a session with a number of apps open, go to some other location, and login with a different Sun Ray located there, and your session just as you left it would be there, no rebooting or loss of state (assuming that the Sun Ray was somehow connected or federated to the same server that had your login details and apps).</text></comment>