7 ms·

Since iPhone 4 I have been saying Apple should take over the office by replacing all but power users' desktops with an iPhone that when at the desk, runs a Micr

Since iPhone 4 I have been saying Apple should take over the office by replacing all but power users' desktops with an iPhone that when at the desk, runs a Microsoft Office/Exchange compatible environment (web, email, word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, etc.) connected to a bluetooth kb and wifi display which all autosyncs along with documents and state whenever within proximity as well as seamlessly integrating with the present office telephony. Anyway, this is the best thing I have seen in a while, but the demo video would have been more impressive with display sharing (with the vm fullscreen) and bluetooth kb&m, because it visually proves the viable pocket light workstation.

RamRodification 4y ago
> wifi display Can this ever be performant enough? I feel like even the tiniest amount of lag would be unbearable.
- ajconway 4y ago
  Of course, people stream VR games over wifi: https://www.theverge.com/22218827/oculus-quest-2-wireless-pc-vr-games-how-to https://www.theverge.com/22218827/oculus-quest-2-wireless-pc...
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    But does that work in a crowded office building with everyone doing it?
    - lynndotpy 4y ago
      A direct connection with 5GHz WiFi would be ideal and realistic. (And, coming up, WiFi 6E and the 6GHz band.) Contention on 2.4GHz is the main concern I think
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Even on 5GHz, your office router would quickly run out of bandwidth. A compressed 1080p stream is like 40mbps, so even if nobody in the office is using a HiDPI display, you'd connect maybe 5 or 6 displays before hitting some serious local congestion. You might be able to resolve it over ethernet, but if 'wireless' is the name of the game, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
        ac29 4y ago
        A high quality 1080P video stream is more like 5-10Mbps, and a typical desktop use case is going to be much, much more compressible.
        Maursault 4y ago
        > A compressed 1080p stream I was thinking more along the lines of 1024x768. Non-power users. And if it was an Apple enviro, the display would be a computer, and the connection would be vnc or nx.
        wlesieutre 4y ago
        They did say "direct" so the router wouldn't be a concern https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct
        swinglock 4y ago
        "Direct" Wi-Fi still shares the same spectrum though, so even without central points it's not equivalent to cables.
        wlesieutre 4y ago
        Right, that's the part of it I'm worried about in a crowded building
        bee_rider 4y ago
        But it is a fundamentally different type of problem. Going through a router imposes hard bandwidth limitations at a central point. With direct wifi, each monitor only needs to serve a single user, so the devices can be lower powered -- the broadcast only needs to serve ~a single desk. And they are centrally controlled by the IT department, so unlike a wifi router the in RF mad-max anarchy zone that is a modern apartment building, there shouldn't be concerns about noisy neighbors. I'm not sure there's a point to all this -- the phone being used as a computer is probably going to be plugged in, so why not push everything through USB-C/thunderbolt nowadays? -- but it is almost certainly possible.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I've used 3 different wireless VR implementations before, all of them require absurd amounts of bandwidth (50-130mbps), and send a highly-compressed image. It looks worse depending on the display you're using; on the OLED display of the Quest, the image ended up looking particularly terrible. Even with proper display stream compression, I doubt you could build a network robust enough to host more than 2 or 3 wireless monitors on one network.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      VR required like 90fps at something >1080p, right? Office work is fine with 30fps (can realistically drop lower). Also I suspect office workloads should be compressed more easily (think of a next editor -- lots of white-space, only a couple characters changing from frame to frame). And peer-to-peer rather than through the router would probably be the way to go. Since 5GHz drops off pretty quickly, it might be possible to exploit this if people aren't packed in too tightly. Which gives a nice, hard technological backing to requests not to be crammed in too tightly.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  Its probably quick enough now, but tbh, I'd rather it just run over USB-C. Maybe then it could keep the phone charged up at the same time too.
- narrator 4y ago
  Just leave a single dongle with a bunch of ports at the office. You need to plug in the power anyway and it's simpler than pairing.
bane 4y ago
Samsung has sorta been trying this for a while with DeX.
- Un1corn 4y ago
  Samsung DeX feels like a POC, sure it works and I've used it for about a week while my laptop was being repaired but it had lots of paper cuts, most applications were out of place, even some of their own.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Is DeX still being maintained? Like is it available on their new flagships too?
    - wollsmoth 4y ago
      Yup, tried it on a current samsung recently. It's basic but it works.
- sidpatil 4y ago
  And before DeX, there was the Motorola Atrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop).
astrange 4y ago
You can’t run a computer on a iPhone. If you could, it wouldn’t be iPhone shaped. The fact that you think you can comes from the incredible amount of work put into making them fast when being used as iPhones.
- jonhohle 4y ago
  How is a current iPhone significantly different from an iMac architecturally? Sure they are curreny running different variants of Apple’s operating system, but they share similar processors, similar wireless connectivity, etc. Edit: a slightly different way to look at it: the iPhone has always been a computer. Since iPhone 8 or so, it’s also had desktop class performance.
  - astrange 4y ago
    That’s the A7 SoC that had a “desktop class architecture”, not the phone it was in.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    current iphones actually use the same exact chips as the macbook air series - the base-tier M1 (although some laptops have the more powerful pro/ultra). the crossover between "high end phone" and "ultra-portable laptop" has been observed for a number of years now, that's really the space where chromebooks thrived even with inferior ARM reference cores, if you throw an actually-good M1 into it then you get an extremely solid ultra-portable. And the bigger laptops are just more of everything - more cores, bigger GPU, more memory.
    - MBCook 4y ago
      The phones do NOT use the M1, although the M1 is based on the chips in the phone. The newest iPad Pro does run an actual M1 though. Either way I agree a recent iPhone would be plenty for standard work (documents, spreadsheets, email, web).
- 58028641 4y ago
  Why not? An iPhone 13 has a similar single core score to all of the M1 processors and a similar multi core score to a MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2020) with an Intel Core i7-1068NG7 @ 2.3 GHz (4 cores). However, iPhones only have 4GB or 6GB of RAM which may be limiting.
compsciphd 4y ago
part of my phd dissertation was process migration for the desktop. I argued that MSFT or apple should make low powered portable devices (say phones/tablets) that were your computer, but could also be docked to more powerful computers. When docked, processes migrate off and run on the powerful hardware, when you want to undock, they migrate back. when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode. I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.
- e-_pusher 4y ago
  Surface Book was a step in this direction. The base of the computer had a discrete MVidia GPU, so you could run heavy GPU loads from the tablet section of the computer while connected to the base. If the base was removed, only the onboard Intel GPU was available.
- RulerOf 4y ago
  I did this back in 2013 I think. I had a desktop and a laptop that both supported IOMMU device passthrough. I used the Xen hypervisor at the time, and had a VM that I could migrate and then hotplug all the PCI devices to between the systems. I never got it past the "playing around with it stage," but I was just _so_ sure that the market was going to move that way... Imagine your phone and laptop just migrates out to the cloud every time you lock it, then live-migrates back in when you wake it up... Or at least between your tiny laptop and your beefy desktop. Because nobody would have just one computer! It sure sounds cool to me, but the reality is that it's too clunky. Virtualization and live migration are absurd solutions to consumer-level problems.
swinglock 4y ago
My laptop now connects to my monitor with a single USB-C cable, providing power, driving the 4K monitor and connecting to its built-in USB hub where the other peripherals are connected. It doesn't even have to be wireless because you'd want the phone connected to power anyway. I feel like any recent iPhone would be brilliant for this, though the RAM is on the short side, though with slightly more in recent Pros it could be a Pro only feature. Shame it seems like such an un-Apple move to not provide this value, that it will likely stay that way.
warning26 4y ago
The problem here is there's not a clear value proposition. It seems like a really cool concept, but who is it for? What situations exist where a potential user would have access to desktop peripherals, but also don't have access to a laptop?
- oarsinsync 4y ago
  I’ve just given up on my M1 Pro MBP in favour of my M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard case. I’m very excited to see if the rumours about a proper DE for iPadOS when attached to a monitor comes true. I don’t want to carry my laptop around. It’s too big and heavy. I want to carry one device that I can use as a portable device, but also use as a full fat device when I have appropriate peripherals, without having to worry about some kind of Cloud sync instead. I don’t want to have to wait for state to sync between multiple devices. I want a single device that can do literally everything. The M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard (Logitech Folio) and Pencil is dangerously close. Now if it could run a Linux environment that wasn’t horrifically slow due to Apple’s obscene limitations (see iSH, which is incredible, but unfortunately, slow), that would solve everything. For now, I depend on Cloud VMs instead, which falls over once my connectivity becomes poor.
Kipters 4y ago
What you're describing actually existed in the form of the Continuum feature on Windows 10 Mobile [0] or Ubuntu Touch's convergence

RamRodification 4y ago

> wifi display Can this ever be performant enough? I feel like even the tiniest amount of lag would be unbearable.

ajconway 4y ago
Of course, people stream VR games over wifi: https://www.theverge.com/22218827/oculus-quest-2-wireless-pc-vr-games-how-to https://www.theverge.com/22218827/oculus-quest-2-wireless-pc...
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  But does that work in a crowded office building with everyone doing it?
  - lynndotpy 4y ago
    A direct connection with 5GHz WiFi would be ideal and realistic. (And, coming up, WiFi 6E and the 6GHz band.) Contention on 2.4GHz is the main concern I think
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Even on 5GHz, your office router would quickly run out of bandwidth. A compressed 1080p stream is like 40mbps, so even if nobody in the office is using a HiDPI display, you'd connect maybe 5 or 6 displays before hitting some serious local congestion. You might be able to resolve it over ethernet, but if 'wireless' is the name of the game, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
      - ac29 4y ago
        A high quality 1080P video stream is more like 5-10Mbps, and a typical desktop use case is going to be much, much more compressible.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        > A compressed 1080p stream I was thinking more along the lines of 1024x768. Non-power users. And if it was an Apple enviro, the display would be a computer, and the connection would be vnc or nx.
      - wlesieutre 4y ago
        They did say "direct" so the router wouldn't be a concern https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct
        swinglock 4y ago
        "Direct" Wi-Fi still shares the same spectrum though, so even without central points it's not equivalent to cables.
        wlesieutre 4y ago
        Right, that's the part of it I'm worried about in a crowded building
        bee_rider 4y ago
        But it is a fundamentally different type of problem. Going through a router imposes hard bandwidth limitations at a central point. With direct wifi, each monitor only needs to serve a single user, so the devices can be lower powered -- the broadcast only needs to serve ~a single desk. And they are centrally controlled by the IT department, so unlike a wifi router the in RF mad-max anarchy zone that is a modern apartment building, there shouldn't be concerns about noisy neighbors. I'm not sure there's a point to all this -- the phone being used as a computer is probably going to be plugged in, so why not push everything through USB-C/thunderbolt nowadays? -- but it is almost certainly possible.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I've used 3 different wireless VR implementations before, all of them require absurd amounts of bandwidth (50-130mbps), and send a highly-compressed image. It looks worse depending on the display you're using; on the OLED display of the Quest, the image ended up looking particularly terrible. Even with proper display stream compression, I doubt you could build a network robust enough to host more than 2 or 3 wireless monitors on one network.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    VR required like 90fps at something >1080p, right? Office work is fine with 30fps (can realistically drop lower). Also I suspect office workloads should be compressed more easily (think of a next editor -- lots of white-space, only a couple characters changing from frame to frame). And peer-to-peer rather than through the router would probably be the way to go. Since 5GHz drops off pretty quickly, it might be possible to exploit this if people aren't packed in too tightly. Which gives a nice, hard technological backing to requests not to be crammed in too tightly.
_ea1k 4y ago
Its probably quick enough now, but tbh, I'd rather it just run over USB-C. Maybe then it could keep the phone charged up at the same time too.
narrator 4y ago
Just leave a single dongle with a bunch of ports at the office. You need to plug in the power anyway and it's simpler than pairing.

bane 4y ago

Samsung has sorta been trying this for a while with DeX.

Un1corn 4y ago
Samsung DeX feels like a POC, sure it works and I've used it for about a week while my laptop was being repaired but it had lots of paper cuts, most applications were out of place, even some of their own.
- ianai 4y ago
  Is DeX still being maintained? Like is it available on their new flagships too?
  - wollsmoth 4y ago
    Yup, tried it on a current samsung recently. It's basic but it works.
sidpatil 4y ago
And before DeX, there was the Motorola Atrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop).

astrange 4y ago

You can’t run a computer on a iPhone. If you could, it wouldn’t be iPhone shaped. The fact that you think you can comes from the incredible amount of work put into making them fast when being used as iPhones.

jonhohle 4y ago
How is a current iPhone significantly different from an iMac architecturally? Sure they are curreny running different variants of Apple’s operating system, but they share similar processors, similar wireless connectivity, etc. Edit: a slightly different way to look at it: the iPhone has always been a computer. Since iPhone 8 or so, it’s also had desktop class performance.
- astrange 4y ago
  That’s the A7 SoC that had a “desktop class architecture”, not the phone it was in.
- paulmd 4y ago
  current iphones actually use the same exact chips as the macbook air series - the base-tier M1 (although some laptops have the more powerful pro/ultra). the crossover between "high end phone" and "ultra-portable laptop" has been observed for a number of years now, that's really the space where chromebooks thrived even with inferior ARM reference cores, if you throw an actually-good M1 into it then you get an extremely solid ultra-portable. And the bigger laptops are just more of everything - more cores, bigger GPU, more memory.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    The phones do NOT use the M1, although the M1 is based on the chips in the phone. The newest iPad Pro does run an actual M1 though. Either way I agree a recent iPhone would be plenty for standard work (documents, spreadsheets, email, web).
58028641 4y ago
Why not? An iPhone 13 has a similar single core score to all of the M1 processors and a similar multi core score to a MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2020) with an Intel Core i7-1068NG7 @ 2.3 GHz (4 cores). However, iPhones only have 4GB or 6GB of RAM which may be limiting.

compsciphd 4y ago

part of my phd dissertation was process migration for the desktop. I argued that MSFT or apple should make low powered portable devices (say phones/tablets) that were your computer, but could also be docked to more powerful computers. When docked, processes migrate off and run on the powerful hardware, when you want to undock, they migrate back. when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode. I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.

e-_pusher 4y ago
Surface Book was a step in this direction. The base of the computer had a discrete MVidia GPU, so you could run heavy GPU loads from the tablet section of the computer while connected to the base. If the base was removed, only the onboard Intel GPU was available.
RulerOf 4y ago
I did this back in 2013 I think. I had a desktop and a laptop that both supported IOMMU device passthrough. I used the Xen hypervisor at the time, and had a VM that I could migrate and then hotplug all the PCI devices to between the systems. I never got it past the "playing around with it stage," but I was just _so_ sure that the market was going to move that way... Imagine your phone and laptop just migrates out to the cloud every time you lock it, then live-migrates back in when you wake it up... Or at least between your tiny laptop and your beefy desktop. Because nobody would have just one computer! It sure sounds cool to me, but the reality is that it's too clunky. Virtualization and live migration are absurd solutions to consumer-level problems.

swinglock 4y ago

My laptop now connects to my monitor with a single USB-C cable, providing power, driving the 4K monitor and connecting to its built-in USB hub where the other peripherals are connected. It doesn't even have to be wireless because you'd want the phone connected to power anyway. I feel like any recent iPhone would be brilliant for this, though the RAM is on the short side, though with slightly more in recent Pros it could be a Pro only feature. Shame it seems like such an un-Apple move to not provide this value, that it will likely stay that way.

warning26 4y ago

The problem here is there's not a clear value proposition. It seems like a really cool concept, but who is it for? What situations exist where a potential user would have access to desktop peripherals, but also don't have access to a laptop?

oarsinsync 4y ago
I’ve just given up on my M1 Pro MBP in favour of my M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard case. I’m very excited to see if the rumours about a proper DE for iPadOS when attached to a monitor comes true. I don’t want to carry my laptop around. It’s too big and heavy. I want to carry one device that I can use as a portable device, but also use as a full fat device when I have appropriate peripherals, without having to worry about some kind of Cloud sync instead. I don’t want to have to wait for state to sync between multiple devices. I want a single device that can do literally everything. The M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard (Logitech Folio) and Pencil is dangerously close. Now if it could run a Linux environment that wasn’t horrifically slow due to Apple’s obscene limitations (see iSH, which is incredible, but unfortunately, slow), that would solve everything. For now, I depend on Cloud VMs instead, which falls over once my connectivity becomes poor.

Kipters 4y ago

What you're describing actually existed in the form of the Continuum feature on Windows 10 Mobile [0] or Ubuntu Touch's convergence