One would thing that such an universal interface would quickly become a standard offering in airports, hotels, libraries, conferences, etc.
I just want to say that Windows 10 does feel like Windows Millenium (an 'incomplete' OS).
Windows 10 is very well polished. It's also the first windows where most of the user's gripes are stuff added on top of it (telemetry, simplified/restricted update system, ...).
Windows ME, by comparison, was so bad that merely leaving it running would end up causing PC Health crashes.
Well, aside from Windows Defender steadfastly turning itself off because it thinks I have a different AV package installed (I don't) and "helpfully" redirecting me to uninstall the offending software first. Only there is no other AV package to uninstall.
I have so far been absolutely unable to find any sort of resolution to this issue, short of a full reinstall.
But the kernel and system side are miles above ME. We're talking about a time when you could turn a system on, sit there and watch it for a couple hours without touching anything, and it would crash itself.
USB-3 controllers won't initialize reliably if there's a single low speed device conntected, like e.g. the keyboard/mouse I've connected to the USB-3 hub my my monitor, which I'd like to connected to a USB-3 port of my computer so that I can plug thumb drives into the side ports of the monitor.
If the do initialize they take ages to go through POST.
After waking from S3 it takes several minutes(!) for all devices to come up properly. Often the OS drops the controller into USB-2 mode, because keeping it USB-3 creates interrupt storms or similar.
Just having enabled the on-board USB-3 support without anything connected may cause random POST hangs.
All of this happening on pretty recent hardware (late 2015, but still available for purchase in that configuration as of today) with latest BIOS and drivers.
And that's without the issues USB-C introduces (alternate modes, power delivery, which requires driver support, etc.).
I wasn't sure if this was an issue with KVM, USB-3 or just a general issue with nesting hubs (even though I'm running low speed/power devices and a 3.1 port should be able to handle it) but you make it sound like it might indeed be an issue with USB-3
As for Apple products, it's available on the desktop (using Intel CPU's/chipsets) but not compatible with their iOS devices. So it's far from "universal" given that iOS devices are an overwhelming majority of their sales.
My intuition is that USB-C standards will eventually replace most Thunderbolt interfaces (e.g. for eGPUs etc.)
If I understood it correctly, Thunderbolt at the same time can "carry" USB. So basically if you have Thunderbolt 3, you also (potentially) have USB.
A non-Thunderbolt USB 3.1+ USB-C can via Alternate Mode (depending on devices and cable) carry e.g. a DisplayPort A/V Signal over dedicated lanes (but has not nearly the same Bandwidth as Thunderbolt, so restrictions apply).
So: "Every Thunderbolt 3 is USB-C, but not every USB-C is Thunderbolt 3".
Yes, it can get confusing, but essentially you both are arguing about A is better than A, because Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C. The "fullest" features set though you only get with Thunderbolt, for now at least.
My favorite computing peripheral form factor has always been the PCMCIA card.
It seems to me that you could fit a minimum viable phone inside a PCMCIA card and then insert that PCMCIA card into a normal sized laptop when you choose.
The laptop would have no CPU/RAM - it's just a big USB keyboard and monitor - and the phone would probably have limited battery life, given the size (although you could bump out the non-port end of the PCMCIA card with some extra battery, the same way that wifi cards had an antenna bump ...)
Something like this was proposed ... there was some minor project where they had built an entire PC (not a phone) into a PCMCIA card (although with different pin-outs) and proposed using it as a portable "guts" for any laptop "host" but I can't find the URL for that project anymore ...
I certainly would welcome a phone the size of a pc-card and a cable-less docking of the brain into the host laptop would be much better than either 2-3 USB cables or some weird, proprietary phone dock ...
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/pcb...
Imagine if that device was a fully functional, standalone phone ...
No syncing required. You only have a single computer. That's a big win, I think ...
I don't personally see the utility in having my phone be my computer. I don't need Visual Studio or Photoshop on my phone. If I don't have my laptop/desktop, I'm not going to work on the things I typically do with a full-power computer. The phone is just not the right form factor, so it doesn't help for that stuff to be on my phone.
I disagree.
If you care about (stuff) you really want to back it up somewhere.
This is different than "syncing" which can mean anything, is usually a completely unintelligible process for the end user, is fragile, and is actually a hard problem.[1]
Much more intelligible and manageable is to have one single repository of data and carry that "kernel" of stored data everywhere. Yes, certainly you should back it up, but the backup is just that: a point in time backup that you do not operate against.
[1] Two way sync, dealing with new, but different objects on both devices ... this is not a "solved" use-case ...
Then we should probably define it before asserting that it's "completely unintelligible", "fragile", or a "hard problem", right? Yes, full multi-way sync is not a simple problem. Most scenarios don't need this (and even ones that do tend to devolve into simple cases since single-actor conflicts are not that common).
The simplest case for "sync" is just "my stuff is in the cloud". Call it remote storage, since sync is ambiguous. Make the client dumb, put the data online, and most of the complexity evaporates. Of course, local storage with remote backup is also a reasonable solution that has different tradeoffs.
For me personally, I prefer the "remote storage" solution for most things. I greatly appreciate that my email is just "magically" everywhere I need it to be without me carrying a repository of email in my pocket. I love that all my important documents and photos are accessible everywhere even if I forget my phone.
People keep building phone dock systems and they just don't really seem to take off. Maybe the best one available today is the HP Elite X3 .. running the discontinued Windows Phone.
Like the iPod itself, it's not a question of new functionality, but better usability/popularity of existing functionality. The revolutionary aspect was that you could just drop an iPod into the dock and it would start playing your music through the dock's speakers, while also charging. This didn't require the dock to be "smart", it was analog audio.
Apple's marketing is working a bit too well.
Moving the audio to all-digital moves more NRE cost to the devices. It also means there's a potential for the "choice" of rubbish DACs to save cost.
Actually, they only work when they follow the standard physical layer. Try plugging a Line device into a Mic input, or a Line device into a speaker. Or an unbalanced into a balanced jack. It'll "work" but not "correctly."
And, just like saving money with "rubbish DACs", there's room for designing complete crap, noisey audio paths (and noisey amplifiers) in products.
If people could actually agree on a standard (USB3 seems a good choice), sending audio over a digital port seems fine.
The ONLY real problem, is digital audio isn't digital audio. It's a protocol with MANY audio formats. 44Khz. 48Khz. 96, 192khz. 2 channels, 4 channels, 7.1 channels. 16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit float. Compressed with different compressions.
THAT'S where the real shitshow happens. Because now you're basically in the oldschool Modem situation where you have to try various standards and HOPE that the sender and the receiver both have compatible formats and in failing that, falling back to some standard required format like "stereo 44Khz PCM".
Contrast this situation with digital audio, where the number of modes is exponentially larger by your own admission. Analog audio is more reliable.
This doesn't mean digital couldn't be more reliable; it's just that it hasn't typically been designed with the necessary metadata as part of the protocol.
Not smart, just have a 30pin connector. Having DAC on board would be trivial (esp. after paying the royalties for the connector). So calling it revolutionary is just being an Apple shill.
I was able to plug my phone in at the last hotel I stayed in because its ageing 30-pin dock also had an aux plug, which my modern phone still supported. It also seemed a lot better for my device security to not give some random active device direct access to my phone.
You get a set amount of data per month, for instance 20GB. Why should they care at all what you decide to use that data for?
crony capitalism
I will say, in the carrier's only defense: when the market demanded everyone sell vastly oversubscribed "unlimited" plans at rates that were far too low to support them... then prohibiting tethering had an argument. (As anything that promoted higher data consumption led to directly increased costs)
Now? With "unlimited w/ cap" or "data-by-the-GB" plans? Absolutely a ploy to screw customers.
Tethering fees on limited plans are incredibly stupid, and just a cash grab by carriers. Luckily most major carriers have eliminated them now.
The way to get around that is supporting such kind of project (like fairphone, ubuntu mobile, linux on samsung) and gaining a true majority in the user base. However that is unlikely since for most people it's good enough to just run instagram, whatsapp and spotify. And for that the OS really doesn't matter.
*edit: I thought about something one can do also. Not an expert about these, but these very flat laptops like macbook air, I think they are underneath the keyboard also a smartphone/tablet. Buying these may increase the desire to create smaller and smaller computers. If what is labelled "computer" gets as small as a smart-phone that's also fine for our usecase, but it may be easier to digest for marketing people of these big corps.
I don't think those two are mutually exclusive.
but then everyone got hung up on emulating Apple's dock plug, and things went backwards.
Unfortunately, while quite a few docks are on the market, compatibility is a bit iffy, and rival USB-C alt modes like HDMI and MHL muddy the waters.
I think Apple are the only company that can pull this off right now, everyone else is too fragmented to get the hardware/software integration right, and popular enough for mass adoption.
If they release it they could tigger a whole new era of computing. e.g. Imagine going to work without having to bring a laptop along.
Even mac folks have their Macbooks at least twice as long as their phones.
So i dont see this happening for any kind of professional use anytime soon. But who knows.
Disclaimer: My last phone (downgraded recently, because battery life > 4k screens) is more powerful than my Laptop.
Not anymore they're not. I haven't bought an upgradeable laptop since 2011.
Written from my Thinkpad :)
The people who will buy a phone dock are probably also the same people that value ultra-lightweight devices, so I don't think you're in the same bracket as them
If you look at my 2011 Thinkpad however, it was shipped with 4GB of RAM and a 512 GB analog disc. Spending only like $200 extra it turned into a 512GB SSD + 16GB RAM + new battery beast which outperformed my 2014 MBP for nearly all of my development tasks.
So i guess it depends on how you look at products. I tend to buy things i know i wont have to replace anytime soon.
I use a tablet now for my idle couch browsing.
So for us devs it would mostly be for non-work stuff. And then you have the problem that you'd have to carry around external hardware with you or find places that offer it for use.
Phones with 8gb of ram like the Oneplus 5 make this more and more appealing to try out.
It looks like a MacBook Air, but is really just a screen, keyboard, touchpad, and portable battery bank for your Android phone.
Hopefully my Kickstarter pledge pays off!!