5 ms·

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this s

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing. Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over meters from something the size of a USB plug. Now, imagine that doesn't have to include an aerial, or much of an amplifier, because even if you get a dodgy connection you're transmitting fractions of a millimetre into a chunk of metal, and you're looking at something that can be shrunk down to well within the scale Phonebloks needs, for pennies a block. With something analogous to a router running a zeroconf system on the baseboard, it's not even particularly difficult to see how you might handle service discovery from the blocks you plug in. Again, this is just a hypothetical, but it's just one way Phonebloks could technically be coerced into existence. I don't claim to know about any economic reasons, but there's a saying: those saying something can't be done should stay out of the way of those doing it. So, less knee-jerk negativity please, it's far more entertaining to try to figure out how this could be done than to wallow in a brief moment of superiority by writing it off.

agumonkey 13y ago
Maybe there will be too much data-protocol and energy overhead if communications goes through this. Smartphones could be very modular if they weren't so thin, even a USB2 pseudo backplane for everything but the screen and cpu would be enough. Maybe in a few year optic based chip interconnects (ala thunderbolt) will be cheap enough to have pluggable very high bandwidth components in a handheld device.
PeterisP 13y ago
The point of the article isn't really "this can't be done"; but "if this is done, it's inferior to a non-modular phone". Even perfectly functioning modular plugins take up extra space - a "classic" phone can instead either be smaller/thinner, or put in a bit extra battery in those cubicmillimetres; which both make the "same" phone better. Modularity imposes a cost, it's a tradeoff - and even for laptops we're seeing that people tend to prefer a bit of size/weight/battery life rather than modularity.
- regularfry 13y ago
  >The point of the article isn't really "this can't be done"; but "if this is done, it's inferior to a non-modular phone". And it's only inferior if you choose to look at it through that lens. As far as I can see, the idea is that modularity brings its own benefits, which, for some people, might outweigh the perceived disadvantages. If someone's already decided they'd never be in the market for a modular phone because they don't want that inherent tradeoff, what point is there in being negative about how that modularity is achieved? > even for laptops we're seeing that people tend to prefer a bit of size/weight/battery life rather than modularity. Applied to phones, size? Maybe. There's a place in the world for a Samsung Note, so I wouldn't write it off on those grounds. Weight? Arguably. Battery life? Beyond a threshold of about 18 hours, a vast number of people demonstrably don't care. If I were to pick an obvious problem point, it's simply that the hardware is bound to be more expensive for a given set of functionality. > Modularity imposes a cost, it's a tradeoff Yes. That's exactly it. It's a tradeoff which some people may find it worth making.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    It's gonna be more expensive, bigger, slower, and have a smaller battery life. What's in it to like? For less than the price of the modular version, you can get a non-modular one with all the functionality included.
    - icoder 13y ago
      > ..with all functionality included Well, except for the modularity. And 'more expensive' is debatable over time, since the user should get away with replacing only parts for a while and competition, standardization and partial reuse of components could result in lower prices over time. Functionality is also debatable, over time. Since bloks users can (ideally) replace a small part to upgrade to NFC, while regular phone users need a complete new phone.
      - lgg 13y ago
        That is a great example of why this idea is completely infeasible. You can't replace a small component to get NFC. NFC requires a large antenna (think roughly the size of a credit card). That has RF implications with other emitters ont he device (BT, Wifi, LTE). Also, all the RF modules in a PhoneBloks phone would require individual shielding to pass regulatory compliance (since the phone will never be tested as a whole the individual parts have to be certified), which will significantly increase their size and cost.
jdiez17 13y ago
>Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. And leaking all of your secret data in the process.
- regularfry 13y ago
  Nope. Not more than they do now. Look, the point isn't the specific protocol, the point is that it's possible.
  - icelancer 13y ago
    Not with that method. Compare bus speeds of 802.11 and wireline.
ctdonath 13y ago
The core problem is basic math: X+Y > X. (For positive values, of course.) Modern phones are marvels of stripping away everything not completely necessary, with the result that they're the size they are. Adding modularity means adding enclosures around the modules, which adds size and weight - and for something as small as a phone, practical physical limits of enclosures add up to a non-trivial increase in size. Separability between two components means adding shielding, casing, air gaps, etc for each module, to just (say) have a removable battery means at least 2mm greater size - not trivial when the whole device is less than 10mm thick. Should you accept that additional volume & mass (and cost) required to implement any degree of modularity, you're faced with the tradeoff: would you rather have significantly greater performance instead? You could apply that aforementioned 2mm to 50% more battery, or quadrupling storage, or etc.; which is more desirable, a replaceable battery or a longer lasting one? Most customers would prefer more performance. To your thoughtful point of solving the problem instead of complaining at it, consider that the phones are reaching the limits of physical and computational need/usability: with continued miniaturization of all components, we can free up enough space within the device to apply it to lower-priority use such as modularity and optical interconnections.
- regularfry 13y ago
  I totally take your point about the tradeoff, but that's the point, isn't it? For the people who don't fit into the "customers who prefer more performance" bucket (for instance), or any of the other buckets that can be served by a modular approach, where do they turn? How do we get there from here? It's at least worth looking at the map.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    They buy a different phone. There is more than one to choose from.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Are there enough of them to make such a product viable? Remember, you're up against products produced in such volume they become their own commodities. iPhones may cost some $650 full price, but is there seriously any way a modular phone could really compete without deep optimization to such a massive supply chain? anyone willing to pay $1500+ for an underpowered phone just because it's modular? These are not rhetorical questions. All that said, methinks here IS a market for a very well made dumb phone. Anyone carrying an iPad everywhere doesn't need an equal but smaller iPhone, just something like an iPhone nano (makes calls, great ecosystem integration, refined UI, and nothing else).
asynchronous13 13y ago
An engineer will rarely tell you that something is impossible. Ask an engineer to build a bridge across the pacific ocean. The response you get will not be "this can't be done", but "the costs involved make it impractical". It's similar to this phone idea. Of course a modular phone can be built, but the trade offs involved make it impracticle.
- banachtarski 13y ago
  Agreed here. Making a shared protocol for the cpu, RAM, and disk? Heck, how fast is this phone expected to run exactly.
lfuller 13y ago
In terms of performance, while it CAN be done, it would be several orders of magnitude slower than even the slowest phones on the market today. I'll just take the processor module as an example: in a modern consumer processor, bidirectional bus speed to the CPU can be upwards of 25.6 GB/s (gigaBYTES) - compare that to the 50 MB/s typical speeds of your average 802.11 network. It wouldn't even make sense for the phone to have RAM when using such a slow interlink as it would be no faster than flash memory. Yes, it CAN be done, but it would be so slow as to be unusable for most purposes.
- regularfry 13y ago
  If you were going to do something like this, it makes more sense to think in terms of a network, rather than a bus. What you'd be transmitting wouldn't be the memory contents, it would be the (much smaller) computation results. That does have implications for where you cut the modules up (you'd want your GPU to be sat right next to the screen, for instance), but doesn't fundamentally damage the core idea.
  - thedufer 13y ago
    > What you'd be transmitting wouldn't be the memory contents, it would be the (much smaller) computation results. The only way I can make that sentence sensible is to assume that you're putting the CPU and memory on the same module. Given that there are basically 4 pieces that make sense to swap (screen, CPU, RAM, battery), you're already pretty far down the path of engineering this into what we already have.
Beltiras 13y ago
I think the idea is really nice. Calls for some sort of standard for the manufacturers, that they converge on the Standard Shipping Container spec for mobile tech. This sort of happened with computer parts. Even Apple computers have interchangeable parts with their PC brethren, even the CPU in some cases. What you would need to do is motivate the hardware manufacturers to settle on the Container spec and the basic board and components can be built from off the shelf parts (like PC computers today). If you manage to pitch this to the hardware manufacturers, that's your entry point to build consensus.
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Have you seen a modern Apple like the Air and Macbook Pro Retina? The battery is a formless bag glued into the case wherever there is room. The "hard" drive is an SSD chip soldered to the board. The memory is not even replaceable any more.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
Niten 13y ago
What I find most infuriating is this attitude that, hey, this idea of mine is maybe theoretically possible, so let's make a shiny, over-stylized concept video to promote it as though it's practically been built already. Because I've done the hard part and come up with an idea. And now all we need to do is get the right companies and the right people together, and this whole thing will magically fall into place. The negative reaction that this video has engendered from myself and others is due mostly to the fact that its creator appears completely oblivious to the challenges inherent in what they want to make, including all the reasons that – at least on the face of it – this idea is a complete non-starter; and yet they dress this up and present it to the world with complete confidence, as a sure thing on the cusp of taking shape. This drastically over-values a design concept and brushes actual engineering effort under the rug as a simple matter of getting people and money into the same room. And it misses the forest (reducing waste and cost of ownership, increasing device durability and longevity) for the trees (an overly-complex modular design which would actually be detrimental to all of the above). Incidentally, I take your comment about using 802.11 as a system bus (!) in a similar vein. You make an enormous leap from observing that something might be made to work in theory, given sufficiently fuzzy constraints, to making concrete assertions like "you're looking at something that can be shrunk down to well within the scale Phonebloks needs, for pennies a block" (well no, not if those blocks need OFDM modulators and network stacks and zeroconf implementations). Nevermind all the more fundamental reasons that Wi-Fi is not a sane choice for a system bus (latency, EMI, power consumption, complexity of numerous unnecessary abstraction layers to name a few). Something which is possible in theory can also be a horrible idea in practice, and it's disappointing how many people have trouble with that distinction. [By analogy, one of the challenges we'll face in sending humans to Mars is the 26-month periodic launch window created by the planetary orbits, which imposes extra constraints on any mission plan. But wait, in theory we could build a rocket big enough to take us back home even outside one of these launch windows, right? I certainly don't know enough about astronomy or rocket science to say otherwise. But I'm also aware enough of my own ignorance in those fields to skip calling up NASA and insisting that they get us to Mars sooner by building bigger rockets.] The point is that if you're going to make a promotional video apparently designed to attract investment in your idea, the burden of proof is on you to show that your idea is reasonable. And if people with actual domain knowledge then come along and point out numerous basic problems with your strongly-asserted idea, it isn't "knee-jerk negativity" but a much-needed dose of reality. > there's a saying: those saying something can't be done should stay out of the way of those doing it. The Phonebloks designer(s) aren't doing it. Someone made a promotional video. Huge difference. And the people who actually would have the expertise to do it are saying, not quite "this shouldn't be done" as you lament, but something more like "the inherent tradeoffs that the designer has ignored make this not a good avenue to pursue given the design goals and engineering realities, and the designer is clearly way out of their depth for neither recognizing this themselves nor consulting anyone who could".

agumonkey 13y ago

Maybe there will be too much data-protocol and energy overhead if communications goes through this. Smartphones could be very modular if they weren't so thin, even a USB2 pseudo backplane for everything but the screen and cpu would be enough. Maybe in a few year optic based chip interconnects (ala thunderbolt) will be cheap enough to have pluggable very high bandwidth components in a handheld device.

PeterisP 13y ago

The point of the article isn't really "this can't be done"; but "if this is done, it's inferior to a non-modular phone". Even perfectly functioning modular plugins take up extra space - a "classic" phone can instead either be smaller/thinner, or put in a bit extra battery in those cubicmillimetres; which both make the "same" phone better. Modularity imposes a cost, it's a tradeoff - and even for laptops we're seeing that people tend to prefer a bit of size/weight/battery life rather than modularity.

regularfry 13y ago
>The point of the article isn't really "this can't be done"; but "if this is done, it's inferior to a non-modular phone". And it's only inferior if you choose to look at it through that lens. As far as I can see, the idea is that modularity brings its own benefits, which, for some people, might outweigh the perceived disadvantages. If someone's already decided they'd never be in the market for a modular phone because they don't want that inherent tradeoff, what point is there in being negative about how that modularity is achieved? > even for laptops we're seeing that people tend to prefer a bit of size/weight/battery life rather than modularity. Applied to phones, size? Maybe. There's a place in the world for a Samsung Note, so I wouldn't write it off on those grounds. Weight? Arguably. Battery life? Beyond a threshold of about 18 hours, a vast number of people demonstrably don't care. If I were to pick an obvious problem point, it's simply that the hardware is bound to be more expensive for a given set of functionality. > Modularity imposes a cost, it's a tradeoff Yes. That's exactly it. It's a tradeoff which some people may find it worth making.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  It's gonna be more expensive, bigger, slower, and have a smaller battery life. What's in it to like? For less than the price of the modular version, you can get a non-modular one with all the functionality included.
  - icoder 13y ago
    > ..with all functionality included Well, except for the modularity. And 'more expensive' is debatable over time, since the user should get away with replacing only parts for a while and competition, standardization and partial reuse of components could result in lower prices over time. Functionality is also debatable, over time. Since bloks users can (ideally) replace a small part to upgrade to NFC, while regular phone users need a complete new phone.
    - lgg 13y ago
      That is a great example of why this idea is completely infeasible. You can't replace a small component to get NFC. NFC requires a large antenna (think roughly the size of a credit card). That has RF implications with other emitters ont he device (BT, Wifi, LTE). Also, all the RF modules in a PhoneBloks phone would require individual shielding to pass regulatory compliance (since the phone will never be tested as a whole the individual parts have to be certified), which will significantly increase their size and cost.

jdiez17 13y ago

>Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. And leaking all of your secret data in the process.

regularfry 13y ago
Nope. Not more than they do now. Look, the point isn't the specific protocol, the point is that it's possible.
- icelancer 13y ago
  Not with that method. Compare bus speeds of 802.11 and wireline.

ctdonath 13y ago

The core problem is basic math: X+Y > X. (For positive values, of course.) Modern phones are marvels of stripping away everything not completely necessary, with the result that they're the size they are. Adding modularity means adding enclosures around the modules, which adds size and weight - and for something as small as a phone, practical physical limits of enclosures add up to a non-trivial increase in size. Separability between two components means adding shielding, casing, air gaps, etc for each module, to just (say) have a removable battery means at least 2mm greater size - not trivial when the whole device is less than 10mm thick. Should you accept that additional volume & mass (and cost) required to implement any degree of modularity, you're faced with the tradeoff: would you rather have significantly greater performance instead? You could apply that aforementioned 2mm to 50% more battery, or quadrupling storage, or etc.; which is more desirable, a replaceable battery or a longer lasting one? Most customers would prefer more performance. To your thoughtful point of solving the problem instead of complaining at it, consider that the phones are reaching the limits of physical and computational need/usability: with continued miniaturization of all components, we can free up enough space within the device to apply it to lower-priority use such as modularity and optical interconnections.

regularfry 13y ago
I totally take your point about the tradeoff, but that's the point, isn't it? For the people who don't fit into the "customers who prefer more performance" bucket (for instance), or any of the other buckets that can be served by a modular approach, where do they turn? How do we get there from here? It's at least worth looking at the map.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  They buy a different phone. There is more than one to choose from.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Are there enough of them to make such a product viable? Remember, you're up against products produced in such volume they become their own commodities. iPhones may cost some $650 full price, but is there seriously any way a modular phone could really compete without deep optimization to such a massive supply chain? anyone willing to pay $1500+ for an underpowered phone just because it's modular? These are not rhetorical questions. All that said, methinks here IS a market for a very well made dumb phone. Anyone carrying an iPad everywhere doesn't need an equal but smaller iPhone, just something like an iPhone nano (makes calls, great ecosystem integration, refined UI, and nothing else).

asynchronous13 13y ago

An engineer will rarely tell you that something is impossible. Ask an engineer to build a bridge across the pacific ocean. The response you get will not be "this can't be done", but "the costs involved make it impractical". It's similar to this phone idea. Of course a modular phone can be built, but the trade offs involved make it impracticle.

banachtarski 13y ago
Agreed here. Making a shared protocol for the cpu, RAM, and disk? Heck, how fast is this phone expected to run exactly.

lfuller 13y ago

In terms of performance, while it CAN be done, it would be several orders of magnitude slower than even the slowest phones on the market today. I'll just take the processor module as an example: in a modern consumer processor, bidirectional bus speed to the CPU can be upwards of 25.6 GB/s (gigaBYTES) - compare that to the 50 MB/s typical speeds of your average 802.11 network. It wouldn't even make sense for the phone to have RAM when using such a slow interlink as it would be no faster than flash memory. Yes, it CAN be done, but it would be so slow as to be unusable for most purposes.

regularfry 13y ago
If you were going to do something like this, it makes more sense to think in terms of a network, rather than a bus. What you'd be transmitting wouldn't be the memory contents, it would be the (much smaller) computation results. That does have implications for where you cut the modules up (you'd want your GPU to be sat right next to the screen, for instance), but doesn't fundamentally damage the core idea.
- thedufer 13y ago
  > What you'd be transmitting wouldn't be the memory contents, it would be the (much smaller) computation results. The only way I can make that sentence sensible is to assume that you're putting the CPU and memory on the same module. Given that there are basically 4 pieces that make sense to swap (screen, CPU, RAM, battery), you're already pretty far down the path of engineering this into what we already have.

Beltiras 13y ago

I think the idea is really nice. Calls for some sort of standard for the manufacturers, that they converge on the Standard Shipping Container spec for mobile tech. This sort of happened with computer parts. Even Apple computers have interchangeable parts with their PC brethren, even the CPU in some cases. What you would need to do is motivate the hardware manufacturers to settle on the Container spec and the basic board and components can be built from off the shelf parts (like PC computers today). If you manage to pitch this to the hardware manufacturers, that's your entry point to build consensus.

lnanek2 13y ago
Have you seen a modern Apple like the Air and Macbook Pro Retina? The battery is a formless bag glued into the case wherever there is room. The "hard" drive is an SSD chip soldered to the board. The memory is not even replaceable any more.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

Niten 13y ago

What I find most infuriating is this attitude that, hey, this idea of mine is maybe theoretically possible, so let's make a shiny, over-stylized concept video to promote it as though it's practically been built already. Because I've done the hard part and come up with an idea. And now all we need to do is get the right companies and the right people together, and this whole thing will magically fall into place. The negative reaction that this video has engendered from myself and others is due mostly to the fact that its creator appears completely oblivious to the challenges inherent in what they want to make, including all the reasons that – at least on the face of it – this idea is a complete non-starter; and yet they dress this up and present it to the world with complete confidence, as a sure thing on the cusp of taking shape. This drastically over-values a design concept and brushes actual engineering effort under the rug as a simple matter of getting people and money into the same room. And it misses the forest (reducing waste and cost of ownership, increasing device durability and longevity) for the trees (an overly-complex modular design which would actually be detrimental to all of the above). Incidentally, I take your comment about using 802.11 as a system bus (!) in a similar vein. You make an enormous leap from observing that something might be made to work in theory, given sufficiently fuzzy constraints, to making concrete assertions like "you're looking at something that can be shrunk down to well within the scale Phonebloks needs, for pennies a block" (well no, not if those blocks need OFDM modulators and network stacks and zeroconf implementations). Nevermind all the more fundamental reasons that Wi-Fi is not a sane choice for a system bus (latency, EMI, power consumption, complexity of numerous unnecessary abstraction layers to name a few). Something which is possible in theory can also be a horrible idea in practice, and it's disappointing how many people have trouble with that distinction. [By analogy, one of the challenges we'll face in sending humans to Mars is the 26-month periodic launch window created by the planetary orbits, which imposes extra constraints on any mission plan. But wait, in theory we could build a rocket big enough to take us back home even outside one of these launch windows, right? I certainly don't know enough about astronomy or rocket science to say otherwise. But I'm also aware enough of my own ignorance in those fields to skip calling up NASA and insisting that they get us to Mars sooner by building bigger rockets.] The point is that if you're going to make a promotional video apparently designed to attract investment in your idea, the burden of proof is on you to show that your idea is reasonable. And if people with actual domain knowledge then come along and point out numerous basic problems with your strongly-asserted idea, it isn't "knee-jerk negativity" but a much-needed dose of reality. > there's a saying: those saying something can't be done should stay out of the way of those doing it. The Phonebloks designer(s) aren't doing it. Someone made a promotional video. Huge difference. And the people who actually would have the expertise to do it are saying, not quite "this shouldn't be done" as you lament, but something more like "the inherent tradeoffs that the designer has ignored make this not a good avenue to pursue given the design goals and engineering realities, and the designer is clearly way out of their depth for neither recognizing this themselves nor consulting anyone who could".