Lapdocks are Stuck at 1080p (but why?)

Hey, I also made a ranty video about this topic, check it out to see what exactly I'm complaining about. Link at the end of this post.

I am a classic poster child for the mobile-as-computer lifestyle.  I have 4 monitors on my desk.  Two of them are 24" 4K monitors mounted on an arm on the upper deck of my desk and the other two are 15.6" touchscreen monitors that sit directly on the desk underneath them.  I have had much of this setup ever since the COVID-19 pandemic when my previous employer, like many others at that time, sent us out of the office to work from home full-time.  I never went back to the office as they gave us the opportunity to choose to be full-time remote and I opted for the full work-from-home experience.  I used the two touchscreen monitors for my work laptop and the larger monitors with Samsung devices equipped with Samsung DeX (https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/).  I have a Galaxy Z Fold3 with some minor screen damage that has been connected to one of the monitors for more than two years now and the other device has always been a Samsung Tab S tablet, upgrading over time to the S9 11" I use now as a semi-permanent attachment to the other larger monitor.  With Samsung's multi-control, I'm able to use one mouse and one keyboard with both of those devices, so the experience of using them feels mainly like using one device across two screens. And since my employer allowed for mobile access for my devices, I was able to have whatever I needed for work on up to 4 screens at a time.

Nowadays, I have the DeX screens mainly showing news, Bluesky, and Mastodon feeds.  One of my two touchscreens is used much less often, as a beastly Samsung S9 Ultra usually sits in front of it for casual YouTube watching and other quick hits throughout my day.  The other touchscreen is connected to my daily driver PC, a OneXPlayer Pro 2.  I intended for that machine to be my 8-inch tablet, but it's mainly my general-purpose PC now.  It's the device I use to surf the web, write blog posts, and edit video. I could connect it to the other monitor as I had for my work laptop, but I've found using the Ultra better in many situations, especially when I want to use internal speakers instead of headphones or when I want to write on the screen.  Both of my touchscreen monitors are also Wacom AES pen-enabled, but I prefer Wacom EMR and the ability to arrange the Ultra's screen in whatever position is most comfortable.  It's harder to do that with the portable monitors as they aren't as adjustable.

When I travel, I take my OneXPlayer, my Tab S9 Ultra (it doubles as a monitor for the PC), my phone (a Galaxy Z Fold5), and a portable Bluetooth keyboard.  But realistically, I could have taken a lapdock instead of the Samsung tablet and keyboard. With a lapdock, I could have a portable monitor and keyboard for both the phone and the PC.  But unfortunately, lapdocks haven't been a real viable solution for me because it has become impossible to find a lapdock with more than 1080p resolution.  1080p is a downgrade over the native resolution on my both my 8" PC and my 14.6" Samsung tablet.  It used to be that you could get a 2K or 4K lapdock, but even UPerfect - who, at one point, seemed to make a lapdock in every size - moved away from high-resolution lapdocks.  I'm not sure if this because people shied away from the higher prices these higher resolution lapdocks required or if I'm just strange for wanting the higher resolution screen, not just a bigger screen.  It may be that people are just happy enough to have larger screens for their phones and tablets and aren't terribly concerned with cramming as much data onto the screen as possible.  I have always preferred using my screens at the highest density possible for my vision.  And although I'm aging and this density is therefore necessarily shrinking, I still tend to want to run even my 8" PC (2560x1600) at 125% if I can manage it, although sometimes I do give up and jack it up to 150%.  I lament the loss of data density every time, though.

So, I rarely use the lapdock even though it would save me a bit of room in my bag when I travel.  I'll continue to take my phone, my tablet, a keyboard, and probably some other stuff until someone invents a better system for me.

But I probably won't stop complaining.