I’ve been very interested in All in One PCs for a while now. The thing that put me over the edge in terms of interest was playing around with the HP Envy Touchsmart Recline, which is a special kind of design-lovely. The stand is the thing that really makes it, but the whole thing is kind of perfect in design terms.

In hardware terms, however, not so much. AIOPCs are very much glorified (or unglorified, depending on your perspective) laptops, and the hardware suffers for it.

But now there are a few interesting companies coming out of the woodwork with products that aim to open up this emerging form factor to the more traditional PC builder culture. The most interesting one I’ve found so far is the QuietPC mono, which is a clunky-looking beast that is nonetheless an incredibly compelling first stab at it.

I mean, I’d like a 4k panel. Well, really I’d like a swappable panel, but that’s another beast altogether for these systems. But post-1080 – and 4k in particular – are the logical target resolutions for this kind of system. If you can put in a dedicated graphics card, you need to be able to put in a display worthy of the card.

Nonetheless, interesting to see someone’s already working on it.