I thought the idea of a tiny computer that you carry around with you would have taken off more too. Whether a CPU module like with the flopped EOMA68 project (tl;dr for those who don’t want to read the whole mailing list archive, repeated manufacturing challenges caused the project to run out of money before products could ship and the guy running it seemed to have a mental health crisis not long after that) or in the format of the Intel Compute Stick or an all-in-one computer built into a monitor or keyboard.

As a side-note, I briefly worked at an MSP last year that used whatever scavenged computers for employee computers instead of actually spending money on its employees. I was initially given a single 20 year old VGA monitor to work from, and was tasked with pulling drives from computers to prepare them for recycling. I spotted an all-in-one PC with a decent 1080p display (it ran an i3-6100m and only had a single SODIMM slot for memory, so not a very cost-effective option for a Linux PC) and noticed that it had an HDMI input port, so it got a second life as my main computer monitor for the 5 months or so that I worked there. Honestly 6/10 monitor, there’s some really good 1080p displays available for about $100 these days, and being not primarily designed as a monitor, I had to hit the button use the passthrough mode every time I booted my work computer (and after every power loss the embedded computer would try to boot and kick off the passthrough mode), but it was a very acceptable display for the circa ~2016 it hailed from