It is possible they delayed this rise as they didn't want bad news in the run-up to going public; but the is absolutely no way this can touch their fundamental numbers.
Yes a very fun FPGA project; but you will end up more expensive and more power hungry then a Pi Zero W which is more or less perfect for this use-case.
Driving HDMI is way harder then you would guess; extremely fast timing to hit. A naive framebuffer alone won't fit in RAM, whilst not strictly needed it would make it a hard challenge.
What would be interesting is if they found a memory unsafe bug. Postgres is a perfect case study of 30 years of C with a bit of CPP; if rewriting in a safer language didn't find anything...
The writing was on the wall for Windows two decades ago; I am more impressed they dragged it out this long.
It was probably decisions around 2010 in the lead up to the Xbox One that have now eventually killed them.
Generic inkjet cartridges (including the nozzles) and ink are readily available. The head movement and is easier then a 3d printer, the will be some learning's for the paper handling but seems very achievable to me.
The color change of the button shows you succeeded in pushing it. If you don't do this instantly most people are conditioned to try again. This is especially valuable for people with reduced motor control.
It is completely independent of whether that push is a useful input given the current state of the software. Obviously when well written software knows it can't accept the input it should have disabled the button, and even moderately well written software needs to provide a near instant feedback that the action is processing or has been cancelled.