Comment by wpm
17 hours ago
Why everyone wants to live in dongle/external cabling/dock hell is beyond me. PCIe cards are powered internally with no extra cables. They are secure. They do not move or fall off of shit. They do not require cable management or external power supplies. They do not have to talk to the CPU through a stupid USB hub or a Thunderbolt dock. Crappy USB HDMI capture on my Mac led me to running a fucking PC with slots to capture video off of a 50 foot HDMI cable, that then streamed the feed to my Mac from NDI, because it was more reliable than the elgarbo capture dongle I was using. This shit is bad. It sucks. It's twice the price and half the quality of a Blackmagic Design capture card. But, no slots, so I guess I can go get fucked.
For anything that's even somewhat in the consumer space rather than pure workstation/professional, the main reason is that dongles can be used with a laptop but add-in cards can't. When ordinary consumer PCs (or even office PCs) are in the picture, laptops are a huge chunk of the target audience.
The market segments that can afford to ignore laptops and only target permanently-installed desktops are mostly those niches where the desktop is installed alongside some other piece of equipment that is much more expensive.