The stronger AI gets, the less hardware should stay silent

First time posting here, so a quick hello! I'm Wilson, founder of Pexar.

Two years ago, I was the PM lead behind the Lexar Professional GO Portable SSD with Hub (4,933 backers on Kickstarter). Now, I’m building a Thunderbolt dock with a built-in display — which, full disclosure, makes me completely biased about everything below.

Here’s how I got there anyway:

For twenty years, consumer hardware was obsessed with one question: "Is it fast enough?"

That question is basically settled. Almost everything on your desk is fast enough today. What isn't settled is that most of it remains completely blind and silent. A dock today is just a black box behind your monitor. You only find out something is wrong when your display blinks, a transfer crawls, or you notice your laptop quietly stopped charging an hour ago.

That was tolerable when the machine was just moving your bits around. It’s far less tolerable now that AI agents are running in the background doing actual work — where checking their status means dropping what you’re doing and tabbing back to a terminal. Hands stop. Focus breaks.

Here’s my thesis: The more work we delegate to background systems, the worse it is for physical hardware to stay silent. Ambient status isn't a gimmick — it's the missing half of the user interface.

Now, the obvious counter (and a very fair one): You already have a screen. Two, probably. Why does the metal need a face?

My honest take: Anything on your main display competes for your active focus. Having status glanceable on physical hardware — without window switching — feels fundamentally different from just having another widget somewhere on screen.

But I’d genuinely love to hear the counterarguments.

Where do you land? Does hardware that reports on itself solve a real problem for you, or is this something software already handles fine?