5 ms·

this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet, but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most

this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet, but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop. I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen. theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.

mushufasa 1y ago
in a sense apple is already doing this, since there's shared chip tech in the laptops and phones. I still will prefer the form factor of a laptop for anything serious though; screen, speakers, keyboard. Yes you can get peripherals for a phone, yes I have tried that, no they're not good. Though perhaps with foldable screens this could change in the future.
- microtonal 1y ago
  Apple is intentionally hampering the desktop experience on the iPad and is very late in brining Stage Manager to the iPhone (the rumor is now iOS 19). Until there is serious competition (this and/or improvements to DeX, Apple will drag their feet because they want to sell you three compute device categories (or four if you count the Vision Pro).
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    So true! I have experimented with plugging an iPad Pro into an Apple 7K Studio Monitor with keyboard and an Apple Trackpad and Stage Manager: close to being generally useful, but I also get the idea that Apple is purposely holding back to prevent reducing Mac sales. That is why I am rooting for Samsung DeX and what Google is offering: Samsung and Google can make money for their own reasons making a universal personal digital device.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Also, stage manager is not a good way of doing real work. It's with good reason that people abhor it on the Mac. On an iPad with no better alternative it's workable but not great.
- logic_node 1y ago
  True! Apple’s already ahead with the shared chip setup between Macs and iPhones. But yeah, for real work, nothing beats a proper laptop — big screen, keyboard, good speakers. I’ve tried using a phone with accessories too… not the same vibe. Maybe foldables will change that someday!
  - justincormack 1y ago
    A desktop then, or a laptop plugged into a proper screen, real speakers etc. A laptop is still a compromise.
- MBCook 1y ago
  They have the hardware. They don’t provide ANY software for this kind of thing though. And there is a very real chance it could cannibalize some Mac sales. I’ve always wondered if this kind of thing is actually that useful, but it’s not even an option for me because of the above. Seems surprising Google didn’t act on this earlier. But maybe they didn’t want to cannibalize the Chromebooks? I get the feeling very very few people know this exists at all on some Samsung phones. I’ve asked some tech-y people with Samsungs about it before and they didn’t even know it existed.
reaperducer 1y ago
this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor. Obviously, it didn't take off. Perhaps it was ahead of its time. Or, as you say, it wasn't done well at the time. Phones accepting Bluetooth keyboard connections was very common back in my road warrior (digital nomad) days, but the screen was always the annoyance factor. Writing e-mails on my SonyEricsson on a boat on the South China Sea felt like "the future!" Slightly related, I built most of my first startup with a Palm Pilot Ⅲ and an attached keyboard. Again, though, a larger screen would have been a game changer.
- Tijdreiziger 1y ago
  > I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor. There have been multiple attempts at this over the years. https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-smartphone-like-a-notebook/ https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-sma...
- jerf 1y ago
  AIUI, the main problem in the cell phone era is that by the time you create a notebook shell with an even halfway-decent screen, keyboard, battery, and the other things you'd want in your shell, it's hard to sell it next to the thing right next to it that is all that, but they also stuck a cheap computer in it (and is therefore no longer a dock). Yeah, it's $50 more expensive, but it looks way more than $50 more useful. What may shift the balance is that slowly but surely USB-C docks are becoming more common, on their own terms, not related to cell phones. At some point we may pass a critical threshold where there's enough of them that selling a phone that can just natively use any USB-C dock you've got lying around becomes a sufficient distinguishing feature that people start looking for it. Even just treating it as a bonus would be a start. I've got two docks in my house now; one a big powerful one to run the work-provided laptop in a more remote-work-friendly form factor, and fairly cheap one to turn my Steam deck into a halfway-decent Switch competitor (though "halfway-decent" and no more; it's definitely more finicky). We really ought to be getting to the point that a cell phone with a docked monitor, keyboard, & mouse for dorm room usage (replacing the desktop, TV, and if whoever pulls this off plays their cards right, the gaming console(s)) should start looking appealing to college students pretty soon here. The docks themselves are rapidly commoditizing if they aren't there already. Once it becomes a feature that we increasingly start to just expect on our phones, then maybe the "notebook-like" case for a cell phone starts to look more appealing as an accessory. We've pretty much demonstrated it can't carry itself as its own product. That would probably start the clock on the "notebook" as its own distinct product, though it would take years for them to finally be turned into nothing but shells for cell phones + a high-end, expensive performance-focused line that is itself more-or-less the replacement for desktops, which would themselves only be necessary for high-end graphics or places where you need tons and tons of storage and you don't want 10 USB-C drives flopping around separately.
lynndotpy 1y ago
> the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop. Really, the compute on a phone has been good enough for at least a decade now once we got USB C. We're still largely doing on our phones and laptops the same things we were doing in 2005. I'm surprised it took this long I'm happy this is becoming a real thing. I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad. It wouldn't be ideal, but there's no reason the touchscreen can't be a fully featured input device. I'm fully agreed with you on the wasted processing power-- I think we'll eventually head toward a model of having one computing device with a number of thin clients which are locally connected.
- bsimpson 1y ago
  This concept has been floating around for a long time. I think Motorola was pitching it in 2012, and I'm sure confidential concepts in the same vein have been tried in the labs of most of the big players.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad. It wouldn't be ideal, but there's no reason the touchscreen can't be a fully featured input device. I might have misunderstood but do you mean as an input device attached to your desktop computer? Kdeconnect has made that available for quite some time out of the box. (Although it's been a long time since I used it and when I tested it just now apparently I've somehow managed to break the input processing half of the software on my desktop in the interim.)
  - lynndotpy 1y ago
    Yes! I enjoy KDEConnect a lot for that :) With the phone being the computer, the latency can probably be made low enough that it just feels like a proper touchpad
- 627467 1y ago
  Last time I used DeX you phone does become a TouchPad for the desktop when plugged to a monitor
dzdt 1y ago
The future of personal computing is being dictated by the economics of it, which are that the optimal route to extract value from consumers is to have walled-garden software systems gated by per-month subscription access and/or massive forced advertising. This leads to everything being in the cloud and only fairly thin clients running on user hardware. That gives the most control to the system owners and the least control to the user. Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  I've heard so many "The future of personal computing" statements that haven't come true, so I don't take much stock in them. I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.) > Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices. IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.) We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
    - eru 1y ago
      Well, the MacBook Air is pretty much an iPad that swapped its touchscreen for a keyboard (and trackpad). > I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover". I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop. I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet. The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with. (Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)
bongodongobob 1y ago
A laptop wins everytime because I don't have to carry around all my peripherals and set em all up again. Unless there's going to be dock setups in every conference room, coffee shop, table in my house, airplane, car, deck, etc, a laptop makes more sense.
- jml7c5 1y ago
  The peripherals need not be anything more than a clamshell screen + keyboard, same as a laptop.
  - eru 1y ago
    Than what do you save? Only the system-on-a-chip (CPU, GPU, RAM). And the hardware to get an SoC with phone-like performance in a laptop or desktop form factor is relatively cheap, just because you have so much more space and power and cooling to work with. (Your laptop-shell definitely needs its own power supply, whether that be a battery or a cable, because the screen alone will take more power than your phone's battery can provide for any sustained period of use.)
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Those would be the most expensive parts of the laptop. You're basically just saving on a mobile SoC which isn't much of a cost.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Right but if it's the same as a laptop why not just use a laptop? The only things I can think of are you really want to keep all the data on your phone and don't want to use cloud sync solutions (Dropbox etc.), or you really want to save a couple of hundred dollars getting a (probably terrible) laptop without a motherboard. Not very compelling IMO.
    - stackskipton 1y ago
      Ease of use and clamshell should be cheaper if vendor would promise 10 years of support so clamshell bought today would still work with iPhone 22.
taeric 1y ago
To be clear, compute on a phone has been good enough for what most people do on a desktop for a long long time. That is not at all a new thing.
pcchristie 1y ago
Since Windows has started this iteration of their move to ARM, I wondered if Microsoft would be the first to do this properly, by building an adaptable/mobile Desktop/UX to Windows 12 (or 13), pumping up the Microsoft Store, and then relaunching the Windows (Surface, I guess) Phone with full fat Windows on it. In a way it's the same strategy that Nintendo used to re-gain a strong position in gaming (including the lucrative Home Console market where they'd fallen to a distant last place) - drafting their dominance in Handheld into Home Console by merging the two.
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Windows Phone had this ability, it was called Continuum: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Also Ubuntu phone had it and it worked well. Better than on the phone itself due to lack of good small-screen-capable software.
eru 1y ago
> I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen. I don't see that at all. That's because I think over time the processing power of a eg laptop will become a small fraction of its costs (both in terms of buying and in terms of power). The laptop form factor is pretty good for having a portable keyboard, pointing device and biggish screen together. Outsourcing the compute to a phone still leaves you with the need for keyboard, pointing device and screen. You only save on the processor, which is going to be a smaller and smaller part. > theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others. Even in your scenario, most of your devices will be idle most of the time anyway. And they don't use any energy when turned off. So you are only saving the cost to acquire the processor itself. Desktop computer processors that can hit the computing power of a mobile processor are really, really cheap already today.
- zigzag312 1y ago
  You are ignoring data location and software installs. Having all your data always with you stored locally (on your phone) is simpler than syncing and more private than cloud. One OS with all your software. No need to install same app multiple times on different devices. Don't need to deal with questions like, for how many devices is my license valid for. However, apps would need to come with a reactive UI. No more separate mobile and desktop versions. Example, you take a photos on your phone, dock it at your desk or laptop shell, and edit them comfortably on a big screen, with an app you bought and installed once. No internet connection is required. A docking station could be more than just display and input devices. It could contain storage for backing up your data from the phone. Or powerful CPU and GPU for extended compute power (you would still use OS and apps/games on your phone with computations being delegated to more powerful HW). This could replicate many things cloud offers today (excluding collaboration). No need to deal with an online account for your personal stuff. IMO, it would probably be less mystical than cloud to most users.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
hulitu 1y ago
> but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop. The compute power yes, but the OSs and UX are shit.
- gf000 1y ago
  Well, they are a generation ahead in many perspective than desktop UIs, so. E.g. android/ios has better security than Windows/GNU Linux/MacOS, much more reliable suspend/wake functionality, much better battery management, etc. Like it's a 50/50 chance my laptop with Win 11 will wake up fully charged or fully discharged in the morning, and whether it will be kind enough to actually be ready for work, or I can go brew a coffee before it's ready..
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GenshoTikamura 1y ago
There's no need to stop there, why not just generalize that already to the WEF-approved "there's not a great reason for an individual to own anything"
Gareth321 1y ago
I strongly agree, and have felt this way for a long time. We are being sold many processors, each placed into their own device. The reality is our phone processor could be used to run our TVs, streaming devices, monitors, VR glasses, consoles, laptops, etc. That's less profitable, however.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  With cables, yes. And LG did that for a while in fact, they had a VR headset that would plug into the phone: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-360-vr-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-360-vr-review/ It wasn't a success but this was more software-related and also some hardware-skimping. It was a good idea, it just seems like the devs forgot to actually try using it before declaring it a finished product. But wireless the lag is so bad that it's not really usable. Like Wireless DeX. Definitely not good enough for processor-less VR glasses (even the wireless VR streaming from meta does require significant processing power on the glasses end).
fsflover 1y ago
> this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085

mushufasa 1y ago

in a sense apple is already doing this, since there's shared chip tech in the laptops and phones. I still will prefer the form factor of a laptop for anything serious though; screen, speakers, keyboard. Yes you can get peripherals for a phone, yes I have tried that, no they're not good. Though perhaps with foldable screens this could change in the future.

microtonal 1y ago
Apple is intentionally hampering the desktop experience on the iPad and is very late in brining Stage Manager to the iPhone (the rumor is now iOS 19). Until there is serious competition (this and/or improvements to DeX, Apple will drag their feet because they want to sell you three compute device categories (or four if you count the Vision Pro).
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  So true! I have experimented with plugging an iPad Pro into an Apple 7K Studio Monitor with keyboard and an Apple Trackpad and Stage Manager: close to being generally useful, but I also get the idea that Apple is purposely holding back to prevent reducing Mac sales. That is why I am rooting for Samsung DeX and what Google is offering: Samsung and Google can make money for their own reasons making a universal personal digital device.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Also, stage manager is not a good way of doing real work. It's with good reason that people abhor it on the Mac. On an iPad with no better alternative it's workable but not great.
logic_node 1y ago
True! Apple’s already ahead with the shared chip setup between Macs and iPhones. But yeah, for real work, nothing beats a proper laptop — big screen, keyboard, good speakers. I’ve tried using a phone with accessories too… not the same vibe. Maybe foldables will change that someday!
- justincormack 1y ago
  A desktop then, or a laptop plugged into a proper screen, real speakers etc. A laptop is still a compromise.
MBCook 1y ago
They have the hardware. They don’t provide ANY software for this kind of thing though. And there is a very real chance it could cannibalize some Mac sales. I’ve always wondered if this kind of thing is actually that useful, but it’s not even an option for me because of the above. Seems surprising Google didn’t act on this earlier. But maybe they didn’t want to cannibalize the Chromebooks? I get the feeling very very few people know this exists at all on some Samsung phones. I’ve asked some tech-y people with Samsungs about it before and they didn’t even know it existed.

reaperducer 1y ago

this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor. Obviously, it didn't take off. Perhaps it was ahead of its time. Or, as you say, it wasn't done well at the time. Phones accepting Bluetooth keyboard connections was very common back in my road warrior (digital nomad) days, but the screen was always the annoyance factor. Writing e-mails on my SonyEricsson on a boat on the South China Sea felt like "the future!" Slightly related, I built most of my first startup with a Palm Pilot Ⅲ and an attached keyboard. Again, though, a larger screen would have been a game changer.

Tijdreiziger 1y ago
> I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor. There have been multiple attempts at this over the years. https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-smartphone-like-a-notebook/ https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-sma...
jerf 1y ago
AIUI, the main problem in the cell phone era is that by the time you create a notebook shell with an even halfway-decent screen, keyboard, battery, and the other things you'd want in your shell, it's hard to sell it next to the thing right next to it that is all that, but they also stuck a cheap computer in it (and is therefore no longer a dock). Yeah, it's $50 more expensive, but it looks way more than $50 more useful. What may shift the balance is that slowly but surely USB-C docks are becoming more common, on their own terms, not related to cell phones. At some point we may pass a critical threshold where there's enough of them that selling a phone that can just natively use any USB-C dock you've got lying around becomes a sufficient distinguishing feature that people start looking for it. Even just treating it as a bonus would be a start. I've got two docks in my house now; one a big powerful one to run the work-provided laptop in a more remote-work-friendly form factor, and fairly cheap one to turn my Steam deck into a halfway-decent Switch competitor (though "halfway-decent" and no more; it's definitely more finicky). We really ought to be getting to the point that a cell phone with a docked monitor, keyboard, & mouse for dorm room usage (replacing the desktop, TV, and if whoever pulls this off plays their cards right, the gaming console(s)) should start looking appealing to college students pretty soon here. The docks themselves are rapidly commoditizing if they aren't there already. Once it becomes a feature that we increasingly start to just expect on our phones, then maybe the "notebook-like" case for a cell phone starts to look more appealing as an accessory. We've pretty much demonstrated it can't carry itself as its own product. That would probably start the clock on the "notebook" as its own distinct product, though it would take years for them to finally be turned into nothing but shells for cell phones + a high-end, expensive performance-focused line that is itself more-or-less the replacement for desktops, which would themselves only be necessary for high-end graphics or places where you need tons and tons of storage and you don't want 10 USB-C drives flopping around separately.

lynndotpy 1y ago

> the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop. Really, the compute on a phone has been good enough for at least a decade now once we got USB C. We're still largely doing on our phones and laptops the same things we were doing in 2005. I'm surprised it took this long I'm happy this is becoming a real thing. I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad. It wouldn't be ideal, but there's no reason the touchscreen can't be a fully featured input device. I'm fully agreed with you on the wasted processing power-- I think we'll eventually head toward a model of having one computing device with a number of thin clients which are locally connected.

bsimpson 1y ago
This concept has been floating around for a long time. I think Motorola was pitching it in 2012, and I'm sure confidential concepts in the same vein have been tried in the labs of most of the big players.
fc417fc802 1y ago
> I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad. It wouldn't be ideal, but there's no reason the touchscreen can't be a fully featured input device. I might have misunderstood but do you mean as an input device attached to your desktop computer? Kdeconnect has made that available for quite some time out of the box. (Although it's been a long time since I used it and when I tested it just now apparently I've somehow managed to break the input processing half of the software on my desktop in the interim.)
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  Yes! I enjoy KDEConnect a lot for that :) With the phone being the computer, the latency can probably be made low enough that it just feels like a proper touchpad
627467 1y ago
Last time I used DeX you phone does become a TouchPad for the desktop when plugged to a monitor

dzdt 1y ago

The future of personal computing is being dictated by the economics of it, which are that the optimal route to extract value from consumers is to have walled-garden software systems gated by per-month subscription access and/or massive forced advertising. This leads to everything being in the cloud and only fairly thin clients running on user hardware. That gives the most control to the system owners and the least control to the user. Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.

gwbas1c 1y ago
I've heard so many "The future of personal computing" statements that haven't come true, so I don't take much stock in them. I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.) > Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices. IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.
- lmm 1y ago
  > we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.) We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
  - eru 1y ago
    Well, the MacBook Air is pretty much an iPad that swapped its touchscreen for a keyboard (and trackpad). > I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover". I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop. I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet. The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with. (Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)

bongodongobob 1y ago

A laptop wins everytime because I don't have to carry around all my peripherals and set em all up again. Unless there's going to be dock setups in every conference room, coffee shop, table in my house, airplane, car, deck, etc, a laptop makes more sense.

jml7c5 1y ago
The peripherals need not be anything more than a clamshell screen + keyboard, same as a laptop.
- eru 1y ago
  Than what do you save? Only the system-on-a-chip (CPU, GPU, RAM). And the hardware to get an SoC with phone-like performance in a laptop or desktop form factor is relatively cheap, just because you have so much more space and power and cooling to work with. (Your laptop-shell definitely needs its own power supply, whether that be a battery or a cable, because the screen alone will take more power than your phone's battery can provide for any sustained period of use.)
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Those would be the most expensive parts of the laptop. You're basically just saving on a mobile SoC which isn't much of a cost.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Right but if it's the same as a laptop why not just use a laptop? The only things I can think of are you really want to keep all the data on your phone and don't want to use cloud sync solutions (Dropbox etc.), or you really want to save a couple of hundred dollars getting a (probably terrible) laptop without a motherboard. Not very compelling IMO.
  - stackskipton 1y ago
    Ease of use and clamshell should be cheaper if vendor would promise 10 years of support so clamshell bought today would still work with iPhone 22.

taeric 1y ago

To be clear, compute on a phone has been good enough for what most people do on a desktop for a long long time. That is not at all a new thing.

pcchristie 1y ago

Since Windows has started this iteration of their move to ARM, I wondered if Microsoft would be the first to do this properly, by building an adaptable/mobile Desktop/UX to Windows 12 (or 13), pumping up the Microsoft Store, and then relaunching the Windows (Surface, I guess) Phone with full fat Windows on it. In a way it's the same strategy that Nintendo used to re-gain a strong position in gaming (including the lucrative Home Console market where they'd fallen to a distant last place) - drafting their dominance in Handheld into Home Console by merging the two.

stackskipton 1y ago
Windows Phone had this ability, it was called Continuum: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Also Ubuntu phone had it and it worked well. Better than on the phone itself due to lack of good small-screen-capable software.

eru 1y ago

> I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen. I don't see that at all. That's because I think over time the processing power of a eg laptop will become a small fraction of its costs (both in terms of buying and in terms of power). The laptop form factor is pretty good for having a portable keyboard, pointing device and biggish screen together. Outsourcing the compute to a phone still leaves you with the need for keyboard, pointing device and screen. You only save on the processor, which is going to be a smaller and smaller part. > theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others. Even in your scenario, most of your devices will be idle most of the time anyway. And they don't use any energy when turned off. So you are only saving the cost to acquire the processor itself. Desktop computer processors that can hit the computing power of a mobile processor are really, really cheap already today.

zigzag312 1y ago
You are ignoring data location and software installs. Having all your data always with you stored locally (on your phone) is simpler than syncing and more private than cloud. One OS with all your software. No need to install same app multiple times on different devices. Don't need to deal with questions like, for how many devices is my license valid for. However, apps would need to come with a reactive UI. No more separate mobile and desktop versions. Example, you take a photos on your phone, dock it at your desk or laptop shell, and edit them comfortably on a big screen, with an app you bought and installed once. No internet connection is required. A docking station could be more than just display and input devices. It could contain storage for backing up your data from the phone. Or powerful CPU and GPU for extended compute power (you would still use OS and apps/games on your phone with computations being delegated to more powerful HW). This could replicate many things cloud offers today (excluding collaboration). No need to deal with an online account for your personal stuff. IMO, it would probably be less mystical than cloud to most users.
- wkat4242 1y ago

hulitu 1y ago

> but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop. The compute power yes, but the OSs and UX are shit.

gf000 1y ago
Well, they are a generation ahead in many perspective than desktop UIs, so. E.g. android/ios has better security than Windows/GNU Linux/MacOS, much more reliable suspend/wake functionality, much better battery management, etc. Like it's a 50/50 chance my laptop with Win 11 will wake up fully charged or fully discharged in the morning, and whether it will be kind enough to actually be ready for work, or I can go brew a coffee before it's ready..

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

GenshoTikamura 1y ago

There's no need to stop there, why not just generalize that already to the WEF-approved "there's not a great reason for an individual to own anything"

Gareth321 1y ago

I strongly agree, and have felt this way for a long time. We are being sold many processors, each placed into their own device. The reality is our phone processor could be used to run our TVs, streaming devices, monitors, VR glasses, consoles, laptops, etc. That's less profitable, however.

wkat4242 1y ago
With cables, yes. And LG did that for a while in fact, they had a VR headset that would plug into the phone: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-360-vr-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/lg-360-vr-review/ It wasn't a success but this was more software-related and also some hardware-skimping. It was a good idea, it just seems like the devs forgot to actually try using it before declaring it a finished product. But wireless the lag is so bad that it's not really usable. Like Wireless DeX. Definitely not good enough for processor-less VR glasses (even the wireless VR streaming from meta does require significant processing power on the glasses end).

fsflover 1y ago

> this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085