I’d love the ability to carry all my software and data around in a phone without lugging around a laptop or having to buy a desktop computer. And I’d love to never concern myself with transferring or syncing data again.
And why not let us connect an iPhone to an eGPU for desktop gaming?
> If you could wirelessly and seamlessly use the same device to do that work on a larger screen, powered by that phone, they would absolutely want to push that.
This vision works just as well if the larger screen is powered by its own computer instead of the phone.
[1] see for example the movie “her”.
You say this as if it is an easy problem to solve.
You can’t look up what he thinks, only what he says he thinks.
Apple would be stupid if they wouldn’t be researching this option just in case. If they ever manage to make it work well, you can be sure what Cook says he thinks about convergence will change overnight.
For those who need more convincing: look up what Steve Jobs said he thought about products Apple didn’t ship, and compare it with what he said he thought about them later, when Apple _did_ ship them)
A friend of mine is a master real estate broker. He's a good example of someone can move almost entirely to a chromebook or an ipad because nearly everything is now web based. So it's not just old folks or people just surfing but regular people doing their jobs. In particular this guy is someone who has half his browser eaten up by toolbars and buys a new computer every few years "because the old one is too slow." A chromebook or ipad is a great place to park those people since they're curated environments and not the free-for-all virus delivery and identity theft machines PCs are for the unwary.
And now that Apple's on board with USB-C, which can do video/power/peripherals, it's not inconceivable that a Monitor+USB hub would be all you need for a plug and play iOS productivity station.
It would be a trivial firmware change for the next release of iMacs to support, and an extension of their existing target-display mode.
A: (Scott Forstall) You don't have to. The user just uses things and doesn't ever have to worry about it.
A: (Steve Jobs) It's like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager... they blew it. Users shouldn't ever have to think about it.
The point was that using a stylus as intermediary when doing basic interaction with a touchscreen is indirect/awkward and unnatural (the mouse is too, frankly), not that nobody should ever use a stylus for drawing.
Styluses clearly have a big precision (and visibility) advantage vs. tracking a whole fingertip touching/sliding around the screen (i.e. if we compare inherent human capabilities, not specific hardware), but relying on a stylus is also much more prescriptive about acceptable hand movements, and all of the stylus-first mobile devices pretty much suck compared to finger-based multitouch, in practice.
Besides Microsoft, Google has come the closest, but they're not pushing it as convergence.
I think it is the future, but it's going to be a difficult one that requires an excellent launch - at least 3 years off before the next major inroads.
That's more a reflection of the fact that Samsung and Huawei suck at software--Bixby, anyone?
Everybody said the same thing about WiFi.
I used WiFi when it first came out--PCMCIA cards, external stick on antennas, etc. Worked as advertised but nobody gave a shit about them---until you sat in front of somebody and used it. It was almost a virus and spread like one.
Then everybody gave a shit. And look where we are now.
Everything on your phone--everywhere--is the endgame.
The endgame is everything on every device you own. Sometimes you'll use your watch. Sometimes your phone. Sometimes your tablet or laptop and sometimes your big screen TV. It's just differently sized screens that all connect to your data in the cloud.
That is the endgame here. Nobody wants to go swimming with their phone or watch a feature film on their phones or do 8 hours of office work on their phones.
Given the current performance numbers and the fact that we are switching to USB-C, which allows high speed connections to multiple types of devices, and we may be reaching a point where this is actually feasible.
Obviously, the laptop form factor is missing, but it would be...interesting if the iPad, iPhone, and MacBook were all pretty much the same compute device with different form factors and different battery sizes and possibly different storage sizes. Honestly, the form factor and user experience are going to be the biggest user-visible differences, and those are also the things Apple seems to care the most about (even if they don't consistently get it right!)
Also, why would you want a single physical device anyway? Because hardware is expensive? Sure, maybe. Because you want to keep all your data in one place? That's the purpose of iCloud. Because you don't trust the cloud and want to keep all of your data physically on the same device and still access it from multiple form factors? That's a small fringe of the market that probably wouldn't buy Apple products anyway.
All my files and apps setup they way I want them on a single device that's with me 24/7. Complete privacy and security because my data never leaves my device (except for backups to a time machine or iCloud).
I don't have to own multiple computers. I own one computer: my iPhone. There's only one device to setup, update, and maintain. If I want to have a larger screen, VR headset, eGPU, mouse, keyboard, speakers, headphones, etc., I just pair my phone to one. I can buy different peripherals for my home, my office, etc. but I don't to buy redundant computers.
Think of the Nintendo Switch.
So you don’t want your data to leave your device for privacy reason but you back it up to iCloud?
A tablet is pretty similar, but the dock needs to be behind the screen, which probably makes a thicker than average tablet. Or you just make a foldable phone which folds out to a tablet.
I think it's really interesting what Apple are trying to do (with Marzipan, pro apps for iPad, desktop level SoC's) but I think they still have a couple of years work ahead of them. It's not an easy task, especially with so much legacy.
Getting Adobe and Autodesk to rewrite their flagship software for iOS was quite a good win, though I still wonder how those compare to the desktop versions
Now if they could only get Apple to rewrite their flagship Pro software for iOS.
If Apple invests in enhancing CarPlay, it might be a sign that they are scaling to a wider convergence market. If they don't invest or abandon it, then maybe convergence won't happen. They're famous for saying they're not working on projects that they are actually working on, so we have to read between the lines.
After upgrading from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone XR, I've been thinking how close the latest gen devices are to traditional computers anyway. The configuration/settings and features are so far beyond the first gen devices that I think convergence will happen, nobody knows what it will look like yet.
There have been a few party game apps that allow a person to drive the game on their device while the other participants see what is on the TV. I don't think it ever really caught on; perhaps partly because AppleTV was a niche product way back when and partly because it didn't get much advertising.
That sounds like the most un-apple thing I can possibly imagine. Their ethos was always to build a device that does something incredibly well - a phone that can be a phone but also a desktop computer is everything but this.
And this was during the Jobs era.
That doesn't mean they will ever manifest in real products.
For it to work on the iPhone, they would have to add support for some kind of mouse/trackpad, because the iphone itself is sitting in the dock - and I don't see apple doing that in a million years.
Because that would mean Apple doesn’t get to sell you two devices.
But attach a proper(!) keyboard with touchpad to an iPad Pro, put macOS on it instead of iOS, and there's your next MBP ;)
Sure - one device could do everything, but that doesn't drive sales or profit.