8 ms·

I don't get it. This is a IBM PC moment right here. Imagine you could standardize the smartphone. Really divide it into block, standardize the communication bus

• jpm_sd 10y ago
  Nope. Sorry. Physics. Compared to a lightweight device that fits in your pocket, an IBM PC is huge. Colossal. All the space you could possibly need for modular interconnects, sheet metal sub-chassis-es, proper fasteners, etc. etc. A comparably-modular mobile phone cannot be anything but thick and heavy, unless you would prefer fragile and unusable.
  • onli 10y ago
    I don't believe that for a minute. While it won't be easy – otherwise Ara would have succeeded already – I don't think we are anywhere near a problem that physics make really infeasible. Where is the physical argument? Where is the formula that says that blocks that size can't stick? You "just" need well defined small intercommunication system for small blocks with one good system that holds it together. If that were impossible, Ara would have not come as far as it did, and the Fairphone 2 would not be as modular as it is.
    • jfoutz 10y ago
      Think of it this way. You could have one big board with spots to put in upgrades, camera, memory graphics, whatever. Soldering can get things pretty small, and pretty close together. Home soldering is possible, but requires some tools, and a steady hand. if you want people to solder, you'll probably need to make the connections a little bigger and further apart than what you would need for a nice smt with mask in a shop. Soldering is is also kind of hard to reverse. Any mechanical fastener is easy to undo, but much more bulky than soldering. i'm thinking little plastic clips, but there are alternatives. in any case, they're going to be bigger. That leaves maybe some kind of conductive epoxy and a solvent to remove it. that should be pretty comparable to soldering, but seems like it would have the same problems, you'd want bigger surface mount pads. mechanical fasteners are the way to go, you don't need any (or many) expensive tools to get it right. but mechanical fasteners are big, and that's space that could go to more battery, bigger screen or whatever. further apart means slower bus speed, and probably other problems. The other options require special tools. So phone plus $200 or whatever for the tools just isn't worth it. (and making the process super reliable for novices isn't easy)
  • wapz 10y ago
    I would think a 'modular' phone would have to be one that you could open up and swap out the parts like a pc. You could customize it easily because nothing would be soldered to the board but with onboard ram for boards I don't see how it would be replaceable. The camera lens, speakers, etc should be easily replaceable though.
    • rtkwe 10y ago
      There's still just not enough space in anything like a modern smart phone to fit all the interconnects to allow that to happen. A laptop sodimm slot is 3-5 mm thick by itself. Also in general you could replace cameras and speakers now they're often their own assemblies or boards.
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    That's not what makes a PC. A PC has a bunch of standard hardware, a VGA/VESA interface, a console, a legacy BIOS or newer UEFI. Android phones have NONE of this. Google could force this. Their "Open Handset Alliance" is not at all open. It's a closed lock in system to keep all their manufactures from ever making Amazon phones. Google has a vested interested in selling more phones. They could easily require standardization. They could ban binary blobs. They could require all manufactures to make their kernel patches and drivers upstreamable and meet Linux kernel standards. But they don't. You can take a 32-bit x86 Linux distro from today and run it on an old Pentium. You can take a really old 32-bit distro from years ago and run it on a modern machine (of course very little of the hardware will work, but it should boot in legacy mode...okay, okay it might not boot, but if it does boot you will get a console I/O). It has nothing to do with the phone and has to do with the fact that ARM is not an architecture. It's a SoC sold to tons of manufactures who all connect whatever they want to onto whatever pins they want to. Yes yes, there are things like Device Tree configs, but name a phone that supports them (no seriously, I'm asking. Are there any? Like I would want to buy/experiment with them if they exist). Every ARM device seems to have a totally different base image and this isn't maintainable. We need a standard device/IO configuration system so that you can install standard AOSP + drivers onto any phone just like we can with Windows: http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
  • sjg007 10y ago
    PCs were expensive which created the markets for upgrades and components. Phones are basically disposable.
    • Unai 10y ago
      One could say that's a good reason to push the modular phone.
    • autocorr 10y ago
      It seems likely they only appear that way because the initial cost is amortized into the contract for most people in the US. An iPhone 7 is around $700! And flagship android phones are up there too. I guess people have a lot of disposable income or just see the sign-up price?
      • kemiller 10y ago
        Starting price for the IBM PC was over $4000 in current dollars, for a dramatically less-capable device. It's not that upgradability wouldn't be nice, it just isn't as important as portability, reliability, battery life, or initial price.
      • intoverflow2 10y ago
        From what I've seem most people end up dropping and smashing them every 5 months, they're well aware of how much they cost because they'll happily slide their fingers across shards of glass to avoid paying again.
• smallnamespace 10y ago
  > Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers. I don't quite understand this point. PCs are inherently upgradeable, but it seems like consumers would rather treat them as disposable electronic devices, judging by the success of barely-upgradeable Macs and other laptops. And I'm not sure I blame them either, it's not like it's easy for a consumer with no techy knowledge to know whether they should upgrade the RAM, or the SSD, or the GPU, and research which components are compatible, best bang for the buck, etc. You're making out upgradeability to be the reason why PCs won and are super successful, but it seems more because there were a whole bunch of PC-compatible clones that could all run the same software. The hardware/peripheral compatibility between PC clones was never very particularly good until well into the 90s, well after the PC standard had already 'won', and the computers they replaced were also upgradeable.
  • bluedino 10y ago
    Exactly - and a bunch of companies built phones that can run Android, so Google has won, in a way
  • acchow 10y ago
    > PCs are inherently upgradeable, but it seems like consumers would rather treat them as disposable electronic devices, judging by the success of barely-upgradeable Macs and other laptops. Disposability is a side-effect of non-upgradeability - consumers don't explicitly want either of those, they just want a good product. And a good product can't be upgradeable. See Daring Fireball's article on this: http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage The money shot is, "Apple offers far fewer configurations. Thus MacBooks are, to most minds, subjectively better-designed — but objectively, they’re more designed. Apple makes more of the choices than do PC makers."
• bagrow 10y ago
  How many smartphone users even know how much RAM they have? Smartphones are eating everything because they just work. Even more than PCs, which are also heavily commoditized these days. It seems like almost everyone thinks of upgrading computers and phones these days the way I would think of upgrading my microwave: by buying a new one. Is this a very western-centric view? Maybe... But it seems like everyone wants things to just work and unless they are VERY price-conscious, they don't want to think about it much.
  • 21 10y ago
    Heck, I'm a software developer and I don't really know how much RAM my phone has.
    • flukus 10y ago
      I didn't until I discovered it wasn't enough to run pokemon go.
• toast0 10y ago
  The problem is connectors, there's no room in a phone to have connectors between the motherboard and smallish parts. Modular display and camera can make sense, but more as build time options. How has google not already beaten the iPhone? They have vastly more users, and have very small margins (the end state for PCs)
  • sjg007 10y ago
    The iPhone has a better ux and battery life. The software is also likely higher quality.
    • toast0 10y ago
      Modular hardware wouldn't improve ux or software quality. It would probably reduce battery life because there would be less space.
      • sjg007 10y ago
        I said that the iPhone was better.. modular is worse I agree.
• ebbv 10y ago
  Do you realize what percent of all IBM compatibles ever had any upgrades done to them internally? Almost none. It seems like a defining feature if you're a nerd like me who did it with all your PCs but most people and most businesses bought them in a configuration and used them in that configuration until they were replaced.
  • flukus 10y ago
    > Do you realize what percent of all IBM compatibles ever had any upgrades done to them internally? Many, especially in the 90's when compelling software often necessitated hardware upgrades.
• beambot 10y ago
  Full modularity never made sense. The system-level tradeoffs for battery, screen, and antennas are just too astronomical. But one or two expansion slots... now that would've been revolutionary. You could add whatever mattered to you: medical devices, specialized cameras, etc. etc. etc. Instead we're left with shitty USB or audio jack dongles or detached Bluetooth devices. Suck.
  • serge2k 10y ago
    > Instead we're left with shitty USB How is USB not a fantastic answer to the problem you described?
    • beambot 10y ago
      Dongles slapped on after the fact are a poor design. They ruin the ability to hold the device one handed, the ability to pocket the phone with the module attached, or add substantial bulk to cases that must be redesigned for every variant of phone. USB is a decent electrical interconnect and API standard... But not a good cellphone mechanical modularity standard.
    • voltagex_ 10y ago
      Possibly due to the placement of USB on most phones - at the bottom, where a drive would stick out awkwardly. Also, MicroUSB on a lot of devices doesn't seem like the most robust port ever - I think it would eventually wear out with more than just the nightly plug/unplug for charging.
    • nradov 10y ago
      USB by itself is a terrible answer. The connector is small and weak so you can't hang a peripheral device from it without risk of breakage. The only way this would work is if phone manufacturers agreed to add mounting rails or magnets at a standardized position near the USB port in order to provide a secure and robust mounting point. But realistically I doubt that the major manufacturers would ever cooperate on that type of standardization.
  • usrusr 10y ago
• losteric 10y ago
  I would argue that standardization in the PC markets is driven by overlap between enterprise server hardware, enterprise PC hardware, and (incidentally!) consumer PCs... Think about laptops, they've been around for a lot longer and are much closer to desktop PCs. Why hasn't modularization transformed that market? What about tables? Answer: Most consumers don't care. They won't upgrade their PC, their laptop, their phones, their tablets, they'll just check them out and get a new one every 5 years. Phones and tablets don't have enterprise demand. Laptops have some enterprise demand, which corresponds to some degree of customization/standardization.
  • bluedino 10y ago
    Modular design of PC's made the manufacturers all race to the bottom in price and nobody but Apple has made money from personal computer sales in 15 years.
    • Laforet 10y ago
      This is a good point. I've always wondered why PC components have always been priced with total transparency and razor-sharp margins unlike most other kinds of tech.
    • flukus 10y ago
      How much of that race to the bottom was driven by a handful of integrators like dell though? If they were on store shelves they might have other ways to increase profit margins. Spending $10 more on a better component is an easier decision than spending $100 on a packaged product that you don't know the internals of.
• femto 10y ago
  Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, or did the vast majority of PCs sold go to the dump with exactly the same configuration as sold? After a few years, it becomes a cascade of dependencies: Can't upgrade memory because the old motherboard won't support state of the art DIMMs, the bus used by current cards (ISA, PCI, AGP, PCIx) doesn't match the motherboard, power supply connector has different number of pins, and if you replace the motherboard to allow a newer component to be plugged in then all of the other old stuff needs to be replaced due to the new motherboard. The most success with longevity seems to be USB peripherals, with old/new stuff working together, and it's worth noting that USB is external to the PC. (I'd contend that that USB's success is largely due to the mechanical simplicity of USB, which is beginning to disappear.) With increased integration, there's also an aspect of the cost of a module being almost independent of its contents, meaning that the cost of making a device is roughly proportional to the number modules it contains. Under those circumstances, it makes sense to minimise the number of modules, the lowest overall device cost being a single integrated unit. In my mind, the key to long life is freedom to modify the software. It's amazing how far a well designed hardware platform can be pushed with software optimisation over time. I do embedded systems in my day job and our current product does things that weren't even thought of when it's hardware was designed, by virtue of the original design keeping the hardware simple whilst doing as much as possible in software, and current creative use the existing hardware resources. I think a fixed hardware platform can work well, provided an original design goal is to do as much as possible in software and there is complete freedom to rework the software going forward.
  • akozak 10y ago
    That the vast majority of people have a different relationship to technology than you is a critical insight for engineers transitioning into (consumer facing) product development.
  • swsieber 10y ago
    The boon wasn't that consumers could customize their computers - it was that competitors could easy compete on individual parts because of the standardization.
• lobster_johnson 10y ago
  PCs weren't successful because they were upgradeable or because you could build custom ones out of commodity parts -- all that happened because the PC was successful. The PC was successful because everyone wanted a computer that was like a PC, and two things happened: With the clone market, enough manufacturers could make the same thing, thus making computers affordable. Secondly, MS-DOS (and later, Windows) became a de facto standard preventing manufacturers from fragmenting the market with vendor-specific platforms. You bought a PC and it could run any DOS application. Now, the clone market happened because the PC had standard components, which allowed any vendor to compete. Why can't standard components drive a new revolution in phones? Because everyone already has cheap, disposable phones. As far as the consumer is concerned, the mobile phone's "PC moment" already happened, except without the modularity. If there's anything to disrupt today, it's the network. (Would a modular phone be nice? Sure, probably. Would it work, physically? Not if you want to keep the form factor of today's slim smartphones.)
• serge2k 10y ago
  > just like the PC ate up the homecomputers Ever increasingly cheap and plentiful clones made computers finally cheap enough for anyone to own? Phones are already way beyond that point. > where if a user needs more ram he would just add more, if he needs a new processor he would just replace the current, if he needs a higher resolution display the old just would get replaced. Why would I ever want to deal with that? No one wants to deal with that. Just works is way better than endless tweaking.
  • flukus 10y ago
    > Why would I ever want to deal with that? Because it's cheaper and easier than throwing out a phone and getting a new one. Phones could less 10 years with ad hoc upgrades instead of 2. I'd love to have been able to take my galaxy nexus (best phone ever) and add more ram and a faster processor.
    • alphakappa 10y ago
      It's possible that people get bored of their devices well before the devices stop functioning.
• mcphage 10y ago
  > I even think this is how Google would have beaten the iPhone. By market share, Google won years ago. By profit, commoditizing the phone hardware even further would drive android manufacturer profit down even further.
• kchoudhu 10y ago
  Who made cash from the IBM PC moment, though? It certainly wasn't IBM. Why would a privately owned company like Google seek to emulate this behavior?
• nine_k 10y ago
  In a PC, you have plenty of room for interconnect. A system board can easily dedicate 25% of the area to PCI slots, and another 25% to CPU and RAM slots. A typical chassis has plenty of empty space, for air cooling if for nothing else. A phone has nearly zero empty space. It has to be very compact, especially thin, it has to have a large battery, a large screen, and powerful chips. Also consider things like antennas, microphones, speakers, usb and headphone connectors that cannot be made smaller than physics and standards dictate. A phone has no room for connectors between major components that would be remotely convenient for the user. Many connectors, is placed in accessible ways, would also work against mechanical strength. Good connectors that won't break after 2-3 reconfigurations, aren't cheap. Thus a phone with connectors will need to be significantly larger and heavier, and also costlier. The PC argument does not work with mobile devices. At best, major components, like radio interfaces board, or a screen, or a battery can be made standardized and user-replaceable, likely requiring tools and skill. Batteries are easiest, but even these are far from standardized, and there are little incentive for manufacturers to work towards this. Users are content with glued-in batteries anyway.
• tomc1985 10y ago
  I think part of it is that none of the OEMs really want to be just a computing platform. Margins are razor-thin due to competitive pressure from both the markets and from suppliers. They see Apple and Google and Microsoft dominating the field with their tightly-integrated ecosystems, commanding what is essentially a royalty on all "app" economic activity (to say nothing of hardware sales and everything else). And they want some. Bad. Besides, public opinion on computing as a platform seems all but dead. This is a computers-as-appliance age, where everyone is punch-drunk on services and single-use apps. Power users seem to be disappearing; nobody wants to learn how to do anything and so much of what sells are just variations on a it-wipes-my-own-ass theme. Platforms don't work in that world; too few want to bother with them. Nobody wants to simply build computers anymore, it seems. Too boring. (edit: On the margins thing-- the big three enjoy greater margins because they offer greater services, insulating them from said pressure)
• digi_owl 10y ago
  The thing about the PC was that it was an accident of history. Being made largely out of off the shelf parts, and coming from a company with a massive brand recognition in the business world, the PC was ripe for cloning. The standardization only happened after the BIOS had been cloned, and the clones defended successfully in court. As Project Ara moved forward, it became more and more clear that Google would have none of that clone business.
• janekm 10y ago
  This actually already happened, to the extent that it ever made a difference in the PC ecosystem. The manufacturers of cheap phones in China use standardised modules: motherboard PCB, display with standardised connector, battery, "open mold" (a standard mold designed by a design contractor for the chipset vendor, open to many manufacturers). This allows them to quickly assemble low-cost phones with components from a large number of manufacturers, driving down costs. So the financial benefit that came from the open PC ecosystem has already been realised on cheap Android phones, the equivalent of the crappy PCs assembled from lowest bidder components of yesterday (Dell, Packard Bell, etc).
• pjc50 10y ago
  The standardization and cloneability of the IBM PC cost IBM a fortune. Nobody is going to make that mistake again. Allowing interoperability on your system allows other vendors to drive down your margins. That's why we're in the mess we're in. It's part of the problem with IoT, too. It would be great to have a secure, interoperable set of home automation parts, but every manufacturer wants you locked into their cloud and buying new devices every few years to maintain the revenue stream.