I was throwing out hypotheticals with a couple of friends a few days back. One problem that I felt things like Samsung DeX and Windows Continuum were trying to

I was throwing out hypotheticals with a couple of friends a few days back. One problem that I felt things like Samsung DeX and Windows Continuum were trying to solve was the fact that all your devices are ultimately separate computers. Your currently open apps, configuration, even things like your wallpaper - are still ultimately different across your devices. Each device has its own state, and while with things like cloud file syncing and Pushbullet and etc, you can make your devices at the very least aware of each other, in the end, they still have separate states. The endgame would be to just have a single state, period. Your computer would be every device you have. You would be able to drag a window from your phone to your desktop to your HoloLens. Every file you have in your life, is always with you. But that's the faraway future. Something possible with today's hardware (but not software), however, would be to have phones with smart docks. Instead of just being hubs to connect the phone to a screen and a keyboard, they would also have processing power, and be proper computers in their own right to which the phone would be able to offload complex computations. But I'm thinking it should be less like an external GPU dock, and more like a server for remote compilation or video rendering. This way, for example, you'd even be able to do things like starting to render a video while your phone is docked, then undocking while the video is still rendering on the dock, or you could launch a game that runs on the dock and is controlled from your phone - something like AirPlay, but the processing takes place on the dock. So ultimately, while you still have multiple computers, there is only a single state, which is on your phone. The software is the hard part here. We can build a smartphone and a smart dock, and have a fast enough data protocol to transfer content between each other through USB-C. But who will write the OS? Where do you get the apps? Why would Adobe bother porting After Effects to run on a phone of all things, and then also restructure it to be aware of the whole smart dock concept, when After Effects can do something like this today as it is? Why would game developers bother writing their games in a way that specifically supports this dock paradigm when they can get the same general idea on the Nintendo Switch for free? And so on. This, just like OP's idea, would take a reboot. The problem with a reboot is that it's a reboot. You cannot do that. Microsoft cannot do it, which is why Windows 10 still runs very old software. Apple can't do it, which is why Carbon was a thing. Linux can't do that, because Red Hat and Canonical will not throw their customers under a bus. But still, it's fun to daydream. Being told to stop even imagining the impossible is not exactly going to help innovation.