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> People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. Or... what if the next big thing is the phone becomes the computer, i.e. there will be

by mojuba 4y ago

> People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. Or... what if the next big thing is the phone becomes the computer, i.e. there will be no laptops? Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use. Today it seems impossible or hard to build but I think the bottleneck here is not even the hardware as much as it's software. But that's a long conversation. Just an idea (kind of an obvious one) I wanted to share.

wbsss4412 4y ago
Convergence is something that’s been talked about for a long time, but I don’t see it being something the large consumer companies want to actually drive forward. Looking at the direction of Apple/Microsoft/Google, they’d much rather sell you more devices and keep your data synced in cloud services than let you own in all in one unit locally, so that’ll probably be the main direction we go in. The main exception will be in the indie/enthusiast/hacker space with devices like the pine phone/purism units.
dehrmann 4y ago
The problem you'll run into with this is a mobile CPU is $150 (at most), and the display panel and GPU will each cost more than a dedicated CPU. What you really want is a cross-platform roaming profile, but don't hold your breath for that.
ccouzens 4y ago
> Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use. You can do that with Dex on the higher end Samsung phones. My brief review of it is close, but lacking some finess with the browsers compared to other desktop operating systems.
int_19h 4y ago
This kind of thing has been around for a while, e.g. https://nexdock.com/ https://nexdock.com/ these days, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G 10 years ago.

by mojuba 4y ago

wbsss4412 4y ago

Convergence is something that’s been talked about for a long time, but I don’t see it being something the large consumer companies want to actually drive forward. Looking at the direction of Apple/Microsoft/Google, they’d much rather sell you more devices and keep your data synced in cloud services than let you own in all in one unit locally, so that’ll probably be the main direction we go in. The main exception will be in the indie/enthusiast/hacker space with devices like the pine phone/purism units.

dehrmann 4y ago

The problem you'll run into with this is a mobile CPU is $150 (at most), and the display panel and GPU will each cost more than a dedicated CPU. What you really want is a cross-platform roaming profile, but don't hold your breath for that.

ccouzens 4y ago

> Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use. You can do that with Dex on the higher end Samsung phones. My brief review of it is close, but lacking some finess with the browsers compared to other desktop operating systems.

int_19h 4y ago

This kind of thing has been around for a while, e.g. https://nexdock.com/ https://nexdock.com/ these days, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G 10 years ago.