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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I really wish this was a viable option, but the lack of active cooling (and mediocre passive cooling) for phones really makes the phone-as-desktop a non-starter for anything but light web browsing or text editing.

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But if you think about it, the use case for almost 80% of the people out there that use laptops or desktops is for web browsing and office work (text editing etc) which phones should be able to handle well.

Think of any task that has ever caused your laptop fans to spin up, and cross that task off of what is possible on a phone-as-desktop list. No high definition video calls. No 1080p gaming. No fully functional IDEs (intellisense and interactive linting/compiling is computationally expensive). No high definition movies. Video/batch photo conversions are probably out, though may be possible at 1/10th speed.

The most successful tablet-laptop attempt thus far has active cooling simply so they don't have to throttle back performance.

It's possible that more energy efficient processors will come about and prove me wrong, but they've been working on the heat dissipation problem for decades now (yes, even in desktops/servers).

I can do hi-def video calls and video playback on my phone already; the video encode+decode is handled by dedicated hardware. Ditto for certain types of video conversions. Gaming is at 1080p, equivalent to PC games from perhaps 10 years ago.

This is with a mid-range phone from a couple years ago. I think you're being overly pessimistic.

A modern phone CPU is way closer to a modern desktop CPU than what most people think, due to the mobile-first (and power-efficiency-first) nature of most of the current CPUs in the market - in the detriment of pure performance. Power-efficiency matters more than pure single-threaded performance in both the mobile and server markets.

You are over-exaggerating quite a lot to say the least. Microsoft Continuum currently works on Windows 10 Mobile with passive cooling just fine. Samsung DeX has active cooling in the dock though, to be able to handle even heavier loads with SoCs as close to thermal limits as possible, without headroom.

On the other side of things, there are certainly laptop computers without active cooling-- the new MacBook, for instance

The future doesn't look so bleak, Microsoft already made a phone with water cooling -

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/215724-microsoft-announce...

And desktops are emerging without fans too -

http://www.fanlesstech.com

Anything that involves radiant cooling relies on radiator size and surface area. Neither of which are present in abundant quantities in a phone form factor. Especially when you add a rubber case (an insulator) to avoid damage from falls.

The Samsung DeX dock has a fan to cool off the phone while it's docked in desktop mode.

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