10 ms·
It's quite interesting that with the power of today's mobile devices (multicore 1GHz+ CPUs, GPUs, 2Gb+ RAM) we still don't have a standardized interface to plug
by JorgeGT 9y ago
It's quite interesting that with the power of today's mobile devices (multicore 1GHz+ CPUs, GPUs, 2Gb+ RAM) we still don't have a standardized interface to plug them into desktop peripherals and launch a desktop OS/GUI.
One would thing that such an universal interface would quickly become a standard offering in airports, hotels, libraries, conferences, etc.
- baldfat 9y agoAT&T killed that idea fast 6 years ago. When the Motorola Atrix came out with the ability to do that AT&T charge a $20 tethering fee to use the laptop dock with the phone! That blew my mind. The phone wasn't tethering data to anything but itself. https://www.wired.com/2011/03/motorola-atrix/ https://www.wired.com/2011/03/motorola-atrix/
- KozmoNau7 9y agoTethering fees are another "brilliant" invention by the customer-hating American telcos. You get a set amount of data per month, for instance 20GB. Why should they care at all what you decide to use that data for?
- maxerickson 9y agoNah, they love their customers that happily shovel over large piles of money for whatever they happen to offer.
- Brakenshire 9y agoDoesn't seem to be a thing in the UK, at least it hasn't been an issue for the 2 telecoms companies I've used.
- ballade 9y agoAs it is with most countries in Europe and I think many in Asia as well (correct me if I'm wrong). This is just an example of America's hardcore capitalism where certain markets are dominated by a few key players and the only entity capable of stopping them from enacting these batshit insane anti-consumer tactics are congress who are more than happy to take their bribes whilst shafting the average American consumer.
- uncletammy 9y ago> hardcore capitalism crony capitalism
- ethbro 9y agochuckles I had an ex-gf who worked on the customer service side of Sprint and we went round and round about this. There must have been some serious corporate messaging to their employees to justify tethering fees. I will say, in the carrier's only defense: when the market demanded everyone sell vastly oversubscribed "unlimited" plans at rates that were far too low to support them... then prohibiting tethering had an argument. (As anything that promoted higher data consumption led to directly increased costs) Now? With "unlimited w/ cap" or "data-by-the-GB" plans? Absolutely a ploy to screw customers.
- jclardy 9y agoTethering fees made sense when the ability to tether was added to smartphones (officially.) The original "Unlimited" plan people signed up for was intended to be limited by the rate that the phone itself could use data, which was slow. Tethering fees on limited plans are incredibly stupid, and just a cash grab by carriers. Luckily most major carriers have eliminated them now.
- 0xFFFE 9y agoWhen I moved here I was surprised to know that I had to explicitly ask AT&T to enable tethering. In India, it is enabled by default and is part of your subscription, you just pay for the data depending on the plan you choose.
- djrogers 9y agoYou need a better carrier then. I have unlimited data and no tethering fee on Verizon, and similar plans are available on other carriers as well.
- jsight 9y agoI thought that tethering fees only applied to unlimited plans now? At least with Verizon, there is no such fee for the normal data-capped plans.
- thekaleb 9y agoI have unlimited data with T-Mobile and no tethering fee.
- tooltalk 9y agowith AT&T, there is tethering fee on everything. I'm glad that I'm no longer with AT&T though. I switched to Tmobile last summer -- my bill went down from $200/month to $130/month for three unlimited line with 10GB tether/month.
- digi_owl 9y agoThere kinda was, hdmi+usb, just look at what Motorola was up to with Android years ago. but then everyone got hung up on emulating Apple's dock plug, and things went backwards.
- pjc50 9y agoThere was: the Apple 30-pin connector. It was revolutionary and got built into plenty of hotels where you can still see them. And where it acts as a warning to not build tech into your furniture again. People keep building phone dock systems and they just don't really seem to take off. Maybe the best one available today is the HP Elite X3 .. running the discontinued Windows Phone.
- sametmax 9y agoHow was it revolutionary ? USB worked pretty well.
- pjc50 9y agoUntil USB-C it doesn't carry analog audio. Like the iPod itself, it's not a question of new functionality, but better usability/popularity of existing functionality. The revolutionary aspect was that you could just drop an iPod into the dock and it would start playing your music through the dock's speakers, while also charging. This didn't require the dock to be "smart", it was analog audio.
- sametmax 9y agoWhat you describe qualifies for "nice". Not "revolutionary". Apple's marketing is working a bit too well.
- LeonM 9y agoWhats the problem with USB3 not carrying analog audio? Instead of placing the DAC in the phone, we now place it in the audio device, it makes no difference. One could argue it's better, as we now have choice in the quality of the DAC, instead of being stuck on the one in your device.
- pjc50 9y agoThe Apple 30 pin connector was introduced in 2003 when USB2.0 was all we had, and it's a right pain to enumerate a device and persuade it to start sending you digital audio over USB2. Whereas two analog pins Just Work. Moving the audio to all-digital moves more NRE cost to the devices. It also means there's a potential for the "choice" of rubbish DACs to save cost.
- jon-wood 9y agoUSB-C is that standard interface - when working at my desk I can plug a single USB-C cable into my laptop and it gains two monitors, external audio, keyboard, mouse, webcam, and all the other things you'd expect.
- testfailure 9y agoI wish wish wish USB-C was that reliable across the spectrum https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c
- narrowtux 9y agoThese things take time. Remember that blue screen when they announced USB plug and play support in Windows 98?
- amigoingtodie 9y agoWindows 98 'Second Edition' supported USB. I just want to say that Windows 10 does feel like Windows Millenium (an 'incomplete' OS).
- nolok 9y agoI don't see how you can say that, unless you've not actually used Windows ME and/or 10 for any significant period of time. Windows 10 is very well polished. It's also the first windows where most of the user's gripes are stuff added on top of it (telemetry, simplified/restricted update system, ...). Windows ME, by comparison, was so bad that merely leaving it running would end up causing PC Health crashes.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago>Windows 10 is very well polished Well, aside from Windows Defender steadfastly turning itself off because it thinks I have a different AV package installed (I don't) and "helpfully" redirecting me to uninstall the offending software first. Only there is no other AV package to uninstall. I have so far been absolutely unable to find any sort of resolution to this issue, short of a full reinstall.
- snops 9y agoDisplay port over USB-C should be this, the Samsung Galaxy S8 was the first to support it. Unfortunately, while quite a few docks are on the market, compatibility is a bit iffy, and rival USB-C alt modes like HDMI and MHL muddy the waters.
- Maakuth 9y agoInteresting. Does this work for USB-C enabled laptops, say the latest MacBook Pros? Or does Apple only support Thunderbolt over USB-C for display connections?
- chrisper 9y agoIt works for Dell Laptops and their USB-C docking stations. But maybe it is not quite the same.
- TheCycoONE 9y agoThunderbolt 3 carries DP1.2, Display Port alt mode for USB-C carries 1.4. As long as your needs can be handled by 1.2 you will be alright.
- erikb 9y agoIt's the natural desire in a free market to gain monopoly status and the desire to decrease the support matrix. Therefore most smartphone companies will try to log you into their own choice of OS. It's not an asshole move, it's just the most logical conclusion given the context they are in. The way to get around that is supporting such kind of project (like fairphone, ubuntu mobile, linux on samsung) and gaining a true majority in the user base. However that is unlikely since for most people it's good enough to just run instagram, whatsapp and spotify. And for that the OS really doesn't matter. *edit: I thought about something one can do also. Not an expert about these, but these very flat laptops like macbook air, I think they are underneath the keyboard also a smartphone/tablet. Buying these may increase the desire to create smaller and smaller computers. If what is labelled "computer" gets as small as a smart-phone that's also fine for our usecase, but it may be easier to digest for marketing people of these big corps.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoWe are almost reaching tipping point here - my laptop is still more powerful than my phone, but only just. If USB-C can really support this connectivity (2 monitors, plus keyboard, mouse and a couple of usb ports), a really great implementation could work well. I think Apple are the only company that can pull this off right now, everyone else is too fragmented to get the hardware/software integration right, and popular enough for mass adoption. If they release it they could tigger a whole new era of computing. e.g. Imagine going to work without having to bring a laptop along.
- maccard 9y agoMy phone has already replaced what I used to use my laptop for, but it's not going to replace my work PC anytime soon. Compiling our work C++ proejct takes about 40 minutes on a 32 core workstation, and my mobile phone isn't going to replace that right now, even if I can connect some peripherals to it.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoI think you're a bit of an edge case though - most people don't need 32 cores, even for work.
- mschuster91 9y agoHmm something like eGPU, but for "real" CPUs, would be very nice... and interesting. For example, using a low-power ARM core for "daily" work on a laptop (e.g. browsing, text processing), and engaging a heavy-duty x86 CPU only when needed, e.g. by x86-only software...
- maccard 9y agomost may not, but many do. There are also many workloads that require a discrete GPU running at medium to high load constantly. Granted I have an older iPhone, but my battery life drops from ~1 day of normal usage to ~1hr of intensive usage, and generates an _incredible_ amount of heat.
- 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j45 9y agoIn addition to Samsung's own smart docks, Sentio is doing something like that with their superbook. http://www.getsuperbook.com http://www.getsuperbook.com. They had a dock as well for a while. Phones with 8gb of ram like the Oneplus 5 make this more and more appealing to try out.
- rsync 9y ago"One would thing that such an universal interface would quickly become a standard offering in airports, hotels, libraries, conferences, etc." My favorite computing peripheral form factor has always been the PCMCIA card. It seems to me that you could fit a minimum viable phone inside a PCMCIA card and then insert that PCMCIA card into a normal sized laptop when you choose. The laptop would have no CPU/RAM - it's just a big USB keyboard and monitor - and the phone would probably have limited battery life, given the size (although you could bump out the non-port end of the PCMCIA card with some extra battery, the same way that wifi cards had an antenna bump ...) Something like this was proposed ... there was some minor project where they had built an entire PC (not a phone) into a PCMCIA card (although with different pin-outs) and proposed using it as a portable "guts" for any laptop "host" but I can't find the URL for that project anymore ... I certainly would welcome a phone the size of a pc-card and a cable-less docking of the brain into the host laptop would be much better than either 2-3 USB cables or some weird, proprietary phone dock ...
- admax88q 9y agoI think you're thinking about the EOMA project. Boards are soon to go out for their production run. https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pcb-and-3d-printer-progress https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pcb...
- rsync 9y agoYes that is indeed what I was thinking of - it's a very interesting project. Imagine if that device was a fully functional, standalone phone ...
- evilDagmar 9y agoActually, on many if not most devices you can just 'cast' the entire display to a Chromecast, which is inexpensive enough that it's unlikely anyone's going to bother developing a replacement mechanism. The nearest thing to that is MHL, which is apparently encumbered by licencing issues and requires use of the USB port (which means that an OTG adapter for attaching mouse/keyboard is now out of the question).
- Humphrey 9y agoThat's what this Kickstarter project is trying to achieve. https://www.sentio.com/ https://www.sentio.com/ It looks like a MacBook Air, but is really just a screen, keyboard, touchpad, and portable battery bank for your Android phone. Hopefully my Kickstarter pledge pays off!!
- Kipters 9y agoThere is one: USB Type-C