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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

>It's really cool to see the latest Windows Phones and watch them plug into a keyboard, mouse and monitor and bam you have the FULL version of Microsoft Office apps and a Windows 10 like desktop.

Cool maybe, but what would be the use case for this? If people think they'll need full Office on the go, chances are they'll take a laptop or Surface-like device with them. Right now they will need their Windows phone as well as a MS display dock, keyboard and mouse, and it will still all be useless unless they are able to find a monitor to plug into. Every workplace or airport lounge I've been to with a PC monitor has VGA/HDMI cables locked in place, and unremovable without a key or without cutting plastic ties.

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> Cool maybe, but what would be the use case for this?

Less stuff to carry around. Since it's brand new there isn't a lot of utility there just yet. Honestly, even though Windows Phone may be dead, I really think this is the future of computing. I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?

You could go to an airport, plug your phone in and use it like a desktop at one of their tables. Get on the plane and plug it into a screen.

Ultimately I could even see the phone part disappearing and it's a small object you keep on your person that can then connect to various types of devices maybe even wirelessly. This is a great use-case for, in 80 years or however long it takes, when we have computing devices embedded into our bodies. Then we simply touch a screen and we can visualize the data we're carrying.

I stay awake a night thinking about how cool this could be :) (seriously, I even started sketching how to create this type of universality myself but it's such an undertaking and difficult to succeed that I never actually wrote code for this idea but it's certainly one of my favorites)

> I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?

You have to hope that those different things are always there to be plugged in to. If not, you have to carry them with you, at which point I'd rather have one bigger device ~~and~~ (correction: ) THAN two pieces to assemble into a smaller device.

That's a future I think we could have had, but IMO it doesn't look like it's actually coming anytime soon thanks to market fragmentation.

And even if it did, in my experience, working on a machine with remote storage and computation resources in the cloud is anywhere from annoying to nightmarish depending on local latency and bandwidth. Good luck getting the HW/OS/Cloud vendors to come up with a mutually agreeable standard for this.

So I achieve my approximation of that future for myself by carrying around a beefy linux GPU laptop, a trac-ball, and keyboard wherever I go. I'd love to just use my desktop sitting at home as my cloud storage and computation server, but I gave up on that some time ago.

I disagree; what you're talking about would be an issue in today's world but if someone were to come out with a way to re-use a personal computing device (phone today, maybe something else in the future) so that you could have multiple visualizations with it to the point that you would never need to buy another dedicated device again, I think you'd eventually finding that picking up enough traction that it would be everywhere. I mean, why not? Similar to wifi which is pretty much everywhere now.

Ultimately I don't know if it'll be the phone that powers this or if it just simply takes so long that it'll be something else but I would be shocked and supremely disappointed if, by the time I pass, there isn't a way to quickly and easily view your digital information on any screen with or without keyboards in multiple layouts that best fit the screen and purpose.

> I really think this is the future of computing. I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?

And when you need to make or receive a call? Pull out the bluetooth earpiece (yet another fiddly thing to carry around)? I'd rather just have a tablet and a phone and I think most people would agree.

> And when you need to make or receive a call? Pull out the bluetooth earpiece (yet another fiddly thing to carry around)? I'd rather just have a tablet and a phone and I think most people would agree.

Bluetooth or just pick up the phone? Especially if it's wireless then you could do it however you wanted. Video chat on a large screen, move the phone to your ear to talk and listen discretely, etc.

"Less stuff to carry around."

You're still going to have to carry around a keyboard, mouse, cables, and probably a screen. It's going to be far, far easier to do that with a laptop/surface, or even a tablet, than with their setup.

"I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?"

A desktop is going to have more power, a laptop is going to have a form factor that's much more convenient to carry around, and more battery.

And people use their phones (which many think of as their "primary computer") all the time while they've got their laptop open. It seems like it would be really frustrating to not be able to use your phone because it's playing laptop CPU at the moment.

> You're still going to have to carry around a keyboard, mouse, cables, and probably a screen. It's going to be far, far easier to do that with a laptop/surface, or even a tablet, than with their setup.

Um, what? Why would you carry around all that stuff? I clearly described scenarios in which places would already have that setup for you. You just dock and go. Just like today you don't carry a router around with you or anything else.

> A desktop is going to have more power, a laptop is going to have a form factor that's much more convenient to carry around, and more battery.

"More power" doesn't mean anything without context. If you're just writing papers, code, even playing some types of games you likely have plenty of power for this already in your phone. If you want to play FarCry then obviously yes you're not going to do that from a phone.

A phone is more convenient to carry around than a laptop. If someone can supply you a laptop that your phone simply docks with you wouldn't need to carry it around which is precisely my point: the phone (or possibly another, smaller device) could be your personal computing platform and everything else around you simply visualizes the data contained within.

I don't think it is a given there really is a market for such devices

Reason? From the situation you describe, it is just a small step to "store everything in the cloud; authenticate with your phone" (most locations with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor that people who can afford a fast phone will visit will have fast internet connections, and will easily have the 10W power budget needed to beat your phone, performance-wise)

You would have to trust the hardware you use, but you have to, anyways, the moment you plug a modern keyboard or monitor into your phone.

Yes, you would be ensured that the software you use on your phone is compatible with the software you use on your 'desktop' because it is the same software, but you also run the risk that it is suboptimal for either (the fonts may be too big for power desktop use, or you might need a pen for manipulating some not-too-often-used controls), and in the 'use phone to authenticate' scenario, you run less risk of running your phone's battery dry.

The problem with the cloud approach is you're using and storing data and credentials (even temporary) onto an unknown device. I don't think that'll ever become the norm. Using a phone to handle all this means you only need dumb hardware to hook into (which, again, could be accessed wirelessly) so even if the hardware is compromised there are still security controls in your device to limit the damage.

Ultimately I think the final outcome, which may take many decades to get here, is a device embedded inside of people that give them access to everything they need and if they need another way to interact with the information they'll use some sort of dumb terminal (because if everything is embedded in you and can be accessed easily via some wireless protocol, why would you go through the hassle of a separate authentication step where all your data could be exposed).

Whether there is a market for this today or not I don't really know. I'd love to find out but this is the type of thing that would require quite a bit of start-up capital and an MVP might be difficult to do.

> I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?

Right now, tablet + laptop often replaces what I would do a couple decades ago with books (or notepads) + desktop. Sure, a single (powerful enough) CPU with all the various interface form factors being wirelessly-connected dumb systems could work instead, but then, it seems that basic CPU and storage are fairly cheap, and the interface bits -- particular the high resolution touch screens -- are the expensive bits, so there's no real good reason not to put enough brains in the individual devices to let them be standalone rather than relying on a common external brain.

With fairly ubiquitous syncing technology, you get much of the advantage of having a single "brain" device with greater flexibility and resilience against a single-device failure.

A company I work for, has pretty strict security policies. I have to subject my phone to these, because of calendar and email, but I wouldn't want to subject my personal laptop to these requirements. I can totally see myself hooking up the phone to some dock in order to do things remotely, if necessary.

Developing markets where the only computer you have is a phone.

I'm picturing myself in a developing country with a phone in hand, thinking about how to go about getting a "computer". Let's see, with this phone, I can go and buy a compatible keyboard and dock, then find a screen that is advanced enough to be compatible with the dock's interface. Or for almost certainly less, I can buy some no-name tablet or basic chromebook or laptop. I would probably go with the tablet/laptop.

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