> What makes you 100% sure that your dismissals are correct?

Nothing. I said in my first comment that I could be wrong. I'm pretty confident that this is not anything but a niche product at best, but I could be missing the use case.

> I can argue that you're ignoring problems I bring up just because it doesn't apply to you personally. Having to carry a laptop everywhere is a real pain point which increases depending on where you live. Just because it isn't a problem for you personally it doesn't mean that it's not a real problem that a lot of people face, even in the US. It's hard to understand this if you've never lived in a dense urban metro. People don't usually go straight home to their closet sized apartment. They stay out for hours before going home and usually they don't have a car.

This device doesn't solve that problem at all. Unless you assume you're going to buy two of these things, one for the office and one for home, at which point you're clearly talking about people with significant amounts of disposable cash who could solve this many other ways. A cheap desktop/laptop at home and remote desktop to work solves this for work stuff. So does OneDrive or Office 365 or Google Drive or DropBox or Box or a number of other services that you can definitely afford if you would even consider buying two of these just to avoid carrying your laptop home because you want to hang out in a bar for a few hours.

> It's like arguing headphones are bad because you can't use them without an audio device. This is just a bad argument. Both headphones and this dock augment the products that they pair with; not being an independent product doesn't make it bad.

It makes it bad when the alternative is a standalone device that solves all the same problems and delivers many extra features for little extra money.

A better analogy than regular headphones might be noise-cancelling headphones. You can buy a set of noise-cancelling headphones that operate by themselves. A hypothetical set of headphones that cost $30 less but can't be used by themselves because they rely on the phone to pick up the ambient noise would be a terrible option. It's not enough cheaper to justify the need to tether to a phone for functionality that the standalone product delivers better.

> Yet the price eventually came down and now they're a force to be reckoned with even though they still have most of the weaknesses that pundits complained about. It's still possible to buy a real laptop for a little more cash. I'm pretty sure this favors my side of the argument and not yours.

It doesn't favor the argument that this specifically is a good product. If you can pick up one for $30 in a few years, I might feel differently.

> How can you be so sure about this? Installing an app is much easier than syncing two or more devices. Besides this isn't only issue preventing sync, which again you're conveniently ignoring.

If you can install an app and use it for this, you can install an app and use it for sync. Sync isn't rocket science. You're also conveniently ignoring the other issues with this device, such as the fact that most apps don't support, e.g., resizeable and multiple windows.

> I was speaking about the long term potential of the device, and not short term, initial quarterly sales figures. Chromebook wouldn't exist if Google made its decision solely on the 1st year of sales.

I actually don't think it has much long-term potential either, because by the time this device hits a reasonable price point, chromebooks and laptops will still be close.

> And phones with installed movies and video games don't?

No moreso than laptops/chromebooks with the same videogames and movies installed. If you mostly want to watch movies and play games, you can also buy a tablet for $50 and probably be happier than you would with either of these options.

> Yes it totally makes sense for them to market a Chinese product for American Kickstarter backers. /s rural China isn't the only part of the developing world either. You're thinking in too limited of a time frame and too small of a geographic area as well as demographic, it doesn't have room for vision.

I was using your example. If you rephase it in terms of any other developing area, the same criticism applies, because there's no developing area I'm aware of using North American plugs and an English qwerty keyboard. I get that you think this product will develop into something useful over time, but I think a standalone laptop will always be right there costing barely more and delivering more value.

I think they're targeting the US audience because you've got to market something like this to people with significant disposable cash because it delivers little actual value beyond novelty.

> The iPhone wasn't a good product. It was a revolutionary one with lots of flaws. The same goes for the iPad and a lot of devices that made a major impact. This one included. Whether or not this company succeeds is another matter, but I fully believe that this class of device will be part of the future.

Could be, but I doubt it. We'll see.