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When will I finally live a life where my work iPhone is plugged into a USB4 dock with mouse, display and keyboard and it makes my whole work desktop? M2 is alre

When will I finally live a life where my work iPhone is plugged into a USB4 dock with mouse, display and keyboard and it makes my whole work desktop? M2 is already here, why can't we do this?

sneak 4y ago
Heat dissipation mostly, phones aren’t designed to shed wall powered thermals. You can do this today with an iPad Pro with keyboard cover. Also, pretty much nobody wants this. Most people who use work computers have them provided by the workplace. The workplace does not want the employee phones running the call center apps with customer data, etc. I for one do not want any work data physically present on any personally-owned device.
- JBiserkov 4y ago
  > Heat dissipation mostly In the dock the phone is sandwiched between 2 cooling fans?
- dijit 4y ago
  I hear you, but ubiquitous "phone booths" where you can have a quiet call or type up an email with a physical keyboard and large screen would be amazing. Don't let the decline of the telephone system fool you, when phones booths were widely used they were not disgusting toilets that you found in the late 90s-early-00s.
  - sneak 4y ago
    I don’t want to type secrets on a keyboard I don’t own, and I don’t want to display secrets on a display I don’t own. YMMV. I would assume any public keyboard is basically the password equivalent of an ATM skimmer.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  You could do this on a work provided phone, so the data could be managed the same way they do on a PC. Also, BYOD is still a thing, so there's that. Regarding heat dissipation, you have a point. But I think it depends on the use case, which is the reason why we also have laptops going from paper-thin under-powered models all the way to models requiring a forklift to move around. I think many "office jobs" could be done within the dissipation capabilities of a smartphone. Most of my days are spent answering emails and typing away in a terminal over SSH. My geriatric iPhone 7 could probably handle that without issue.
  - sneak 4y ago
    Secure BYOD is mostly unsolved wrt most common/popular Android phones. (Windows is also “a thing” but that didn’t stop Maersk or whoever from getting ransomwared, did it?) Most serious orgs prohibit BYOD unless you are on Pixel or iPhone where MDM can actually work securely. There is no meaningful way to secure corporate data on an employee-owned Galaxy, for example. It is the rare corp that can do BYOD securely. The best practice is issuing corporate iPhones to all staff with universal MDM and keeping all corp data physically separate from personal devices. This also saves your employees’ nudes in a subpoena/discovery situation during a civil action against the corp, which is all too common.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      I don't know about Samsung, but even some random Chinese smartphones pass the MDM checks these days. I had Unihertz Atom XL as my BYOD work device for quite a while with no issues.
JBiserkov 4y ago
It has been possible, in different forms for 7 years now... 2015 Microsoft Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock 2017 Samsung DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX
- phh 4y ago
  2011 Motorola Atrix https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-ubuntu-powered-webtop-experience/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-u...
  - IgorPartola 4y ago
    To be fair, I owned the Atrix (or I should say four of them) and it’s build quality was absolute garbage. The fingerprint sensor on the back, when touched, would cause the touchscreen on the front of the phone to glitch out. I had exchanged several of them and all had this issue. Oh and after a very short bit Motorola said they won’t support any more upgrades to it with new Android versions and you couldn’t install anything open source on it either as the bootloader was locked. This phone is why I’ve been using iPhones since.
capableweb 4y ago
Since none of the other comments currently suggest it, the PinePhone can currently do this! I got the PinePhone to evaluate if it could be used as a daily phone. It cannot, it is way too early for that. But as a portable laptop? Works excellent! Not for programming big programs, but it's surprisingly effective as a terminal-on-the-go and even vim is not that difficult to use with it. Then when I come home, I can plug it into my display+mouse+keyboard and use a normal laptop to finish off whatever I wanted, push it to my git repository and then continue from my proper desktop machine. Another not as portable setup is the Steam Deck. Ships with a proper linux distribution and works with the same docking stuff you have for the PinePhone, so basically connect a hub that has HDMI+USB and you're up and running with a proper Linux distribution, and with better heat dissipation than the PinePhone. Not as portable obviously, but more powerful than the phone. Both setups are pretty open, as both of them can run basically the same operating system you use on a desktop computer (non-macos obviously, and no Windows on the PinePhone)
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  I use my Pinebook as an on-the-go dumb SSH/web terminal with some offline text processing functionality. It's got extremely weak hardware that makes it unusable for anything else, but then, that's exactly the tasks I need to do on the go so I'm happy enough with it.
fsflover 4y ago
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

When will I finally live a life where my work iPhone is plugged into a USB4 dock with mouse, display and keyboard and it makes my whole work desktop? M2 is already here, why can't we do this?

sneak 4y ago

Heat dissipation mostly, phones aren’t designed to shed wall powered thermals. You can do this today with an iPad Pro with keyboard cover. Also, pretty much nobody wants this. Most people who use work computers have them provided by the workplace. The workplace does not want the employee phones running the call center apps with customer data, etc. I for one do not want any work data physically present on any personally-owned device.

JBiserkov 4y ago
> Heat dissipation mostly In the dock the phone is sandwiched between 2 cooling fans?
dijit 4y ago
I hear you, but ubiquitous "phone booths" where you can have a quiet call or type up an email with a physical keyboard and large screen would be amazing. Don't let the decline of the telephone system fool you, when phones booths were widely used they were not disgusting toilets that you found in the late 90s-early-00s.
- sneak 4y ago
  I don’t want to type secrets on a keyboard I don’t own, and I don’t want to display secrets on a display I don’t own. YMMV. I would assume any public keyboard is basically the password equivalent of an ATM skimmer.
vladvasiliu 4y ago
You could do this on a work provided phone, so the data could be managed the same way they do on a PC. Also, BYOD is still a thing, so there's that. Regarding heat dissipation, you have a point. But I think it depends on the use case, which is the reason why we also have laptops going from paper-thin under-powered models all the way to models requiring a forklift to move around. I think many "office jobs" could be done within the dissipation capabilities of a smartphone. Most of my days are spent answering emails and typing away in a terminal over SSH. My geriatric iPhone 7 could probably handle that without issue.
- sneak 4y ago
  Secure BYOD is mostly unsolved wrt most common/popular Android phones. (Windows is also “a thing” but that didn’t stop Maersk or whoever from getting ransomwared, did it?) Most serious orgs prohibit BYOD unless you are on Pixel or iPhone where MDM can actually work securely. There is no meaningful way to secure corporate data on an employee-owned Galaxy, for example. It is the rare corp that can do BYOD securely. The best practice is issuing corporate iPhones to all staff with universal MDM and keeping all corp data physically separate from personal devices. This also saves your employees’ nudes in a subpoena/discovery situation during a civil action against the corp, which is all too common.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    I don't know about Samsung, but even some random Chinese smartphones pass the MDM checks these days. I had Unihertz Atom XL as my BYOD work device for quite a while with no issues.

JBiserkov 4y ago

It has been possible, in different forms for 7 years now... 2015 Microsoft Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock 2017 Samsung DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX

phh 4y ago
2011 Motorola Atrix https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-ubuntu-powered-webtop-experience/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-u...
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  To be fair, I owned the Atrix (or I should say four of them) and it’s build quality was absolute garbage. The fingerprint sensor on the back, when touched, would cause the touchscreen on the front of the phone to glitch out. I had exchanged several of them and all had this issue. Oh and after a very short bit Motorola said they won’t support any more upgrades to it with new Android versions and you couldn’t install anything open source on it either as the bootloader was locked. This phone is why I’ve been using iPhones since.

capableweb 4y ago

Since none of the other comments currently suggest it, the PinePhone can currently do this! I got the PinePhone to evaluate if it could be used as a daily phone. It cannot, it is way too early for that. But as a portable laptop? Works excellent! Not for programming big programs, but it's surprisingly effective as a terminal-on-the-go and even vim is not that difficult to use with it. Then when I come home, I can plug it into my display+mouse+keyboard and use a normal laptop to finish off whatever I wanted, push it to my git repository and then continue from my proper desktop machine. Another not as portable setup is the Steam Deck. Ships with a proper linux distribution and works with the same docking stuff you have for the PinePhone, so basically connect a hub that has HDMI+USB and you're up and running with a proper Linux distribution, and with better heat dissipation than the PinePhone. Not as portable obviously, but more powerful than the phone. Both setups are pretty open, as both of them can run basically the same operating system you use on a desktop computer (non-macos obviously, and no Windows on the PinePhone)

selfhoster11 4y ago
I use my Pinebook as an on-the-go dumb SSH/web terminal with some offline text processing functionality. It's got extremely weak hardware that makes it unusable for anything else, but then, that's exactly the tasks I need to do on the go so I'm happy enough with it.

fsflover 4y ago

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.