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Ask HN: What prohibits smartphones use as desktops

4 points by quietthrow 8y ago

I am interested in understanding your thoughts on what are the barriers today to turning your smartphone into your main and only computer. The idea of the carrying laptops when you have such powerful smartphones makes me curious about why are they not converged yet. What prohibits this convergence. Microsoft has continuum and Samsung/android has DeX. But they haven’t seem to catch on like the leap that iPhone made over traditional cellphones. Why? Is there just a lot of money to be made by companies by not converging and hence execution of this strategy is subpar or are there other genuine challenges that prohibit the convergence?

quietthrow 8y ago
Wishful thinking: It’d be great if Ben from Stratechery did a post on this.
dddddaviddddd 8y ago
If it's just the phone as a portable for use in the go, then lugging a keyboard, monitor, maybe storage, etc would be a hassle vs a nice laptop. If it's the phone used in a docking station, why not use a more powerful desktop plus some cloud syncing for files?
api 8y ago
OS inflexibity and lock-down, lack of ports, and heat dissipation for sustained CPU load are probably the big three. Low RAM and storage are also factors for many desktop use cases. It's really cars vs trucks. A phone is a car. A desktop is a truck. A workstation is a big truck / semi. Convergence between niches tends to result in something that is good for neither, like a car/truck that can neither seat many passengers nor haul big loads.
- ryacko 8y ago
  A phone is a bus seat. You don’t really own it.
PaulHoule 8y ago
Historically desktop computing has been about giving people a tool they can use to control the environment, whereas the smart phone is a tool that brands use to control you. The mindset gap between those two things is much larger than the technical gap. As for technical issues the devil is in the details. Often my hackathon kit has been a cheap android device with wireless keyboard and mouse. With an a ssh terminal and something like an RDP or VNC client you can do all kinds of software development. In fact many firms (e.g. the Bridgewater hedge fund) like to centralize people's desktop environment and if you do that a tablet is an option. My understanding is that iOS devices don't support the mouse, which I don't get because mouse support "just works" on Android. People expect a different software environment on the desktop as opposed to mobile. For instance, Windows can run on a tablet environment but it has a hard time being competitive because the Windows operating system is much larger than other mobile OSes. It may be true that "Windows is bloated" but more to the point, Windows has more features than Android or iOS. For instance there is Hyper-V virtualization, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and Microsoft IIS. Most people wouldn't care about those things but some of us do and you wouldn't have "it runs as Windows" as a selling point if they hacked away a lot of functionality. As for Apple, they have very profitable product lines in both the iPhone and the Mac. When you are expected to make money hand-over-fist the way that they are, they are not going to take the chance of raising the average selling price of a phone from $800 to $1200 by merging in "laptop" features and then lose to opportunity to sell you a $800 mac mini and a $1800 macbook.
ohiovr 8y ago
I want to know what prohibits someone from going to shenzhen and ordering a line of open bootloader android phones. Seems that would be a lot easier than what librem is doing.

4 points by quietthrow 8y ago

quietthrow 8y ago

Wishful thinking: It’d be great if Ben from Stratechery did a post on this.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago

If it's just the phone as a portable for use in the go, then lugging a keyboard, monitor, maybe storage, etc would be a hassle vs a nice laptop. If it's the phone used in a docking station, why not use a more powerful desktop plus some cloud syncing for files?

api 8y ago

OS inflexibity and lock-down, lack of ports, and heat dissipation for sustained CPU load are probably the big three. Low RAM and storage are also factors for many desktop use cases. It's really cars vs trucks. A phone is a car. A desktop is a truck. A workstation is a big truck / semi. Convergence between niches tends to result in something that is good for neither, like a car/truck that can neither seat many passengers nor haul big loads.

ryacko 8y ago
A phone is a bus seat. You don’t really own it.

PaulHoule 8y ago

Historically desktop computing has been about giving people a tool they can use to control the environment, whereas the smart phone is a tool that brands use to control you. The mindset gap between those two things is much larger than the technical gap. As for technical issues the devil is in the details. Often my hackathon kit has been a cheap android device with wireless keyboard and mouse. With an a ssh terminal and something like an RDP or VNC client you can do all kinds of software development. In fact many firms (e.g. the Bridgewater hedge fund) like to centralize people's desktop environment and if you do that a tablet is an option. My understanding is that iOS devices don't support the mouse, which I don't get because mouse support "just works" on Android. People expect a different software environment on the desktop as opposed to mobile. For instance, Windows can run on a tablet environment but it has a hard time being competitive because the Windows operating system is much larger than other mobile OSes. It may be true that "Windows is bloated" but more to the point, Windows has more features than Android or iOS. For instance there is Hyper-V virtualization, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and Microsoft IIS. Most people wouldn't care about those things but some of us do and you wouldn't have "it runs as Windows" as a selling point if they hacked away a lot of functionality. As for Apple, they have very profitable product lines in both the iPhone and the Mac. When you are expected to make money hand-over-fist the way that they are, they are not going to take the chance of raising the average selling price of a phone from $800 to $1200 by merging in "laptop" features and then lose to opportunity to sell you a $800 mac mini and a $1800 macbook.

ohiovr 8y ago

I want to know what prohibits someone from going to shenzhen and ordering a line of open bootloader android phones. Seems that would be a lot easier than what librem is doing.