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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy to me is how insanely overspec'd mobile devices are for what they deliver. If you went back in time and told 1999 me the following:

I'll give you a computer with the following:

* 256GB of solid-state storage

* 6 CPUs @ 3+GHz

* 8GB of RAM

* Weighs only 200 grams

* Battery-powered, lasts 5+ hours

* 1440 x 3168 resolution display

I would have been absolutely gobsmacked. Such a machine absolutely outclasses every desktop up into the early 2010s!

And then you would tell me that it's mostly used to shitpost on reddit and Twitter and would be completely useless as a development machine, and the manufactures would do everything to make it impossible to put what software I want on it...and also it would spy on me everywhere I went in order to sell me garbage...

We took a wrong turn somewhere, didn't we?

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For me it's a mystery how phone specs are so good, but their performance is so bad. Always freezing, crashing, long load times, etc.

I have an old PSP (PlayStation Portable) and whenever I turn it on I'm amazed at how fast and lag-free it is. This probably proves that the problem is most likely the software, not the hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Frameworks piled on frameworks to make things 5% faster to develop, combined with a general tendency for software developers to not optimize anything until someone complains.

One of the golden things about gaming consoles is that software is typically written with the exact hardware in mind and there are pretty big costs on both sides of the vendor/buyer relationship.

You have the opportunity to be able to know exactly how all of your customers will run it and you have a good chance of having the extra $ to actually give a damn about performance.

Its not some big mystery. Its a passively cooled chip, designed for burst performance, with OSes concerned with saving power.

That said, they're not so hard to dev on. You can unlocked bootloader Androids fairly easily.

You want to 'develop' on a mobile device? Interested to hear how you would envision this being a pleasant experience.

It's also a trade off between installing what software you want and security - the App store means you don't have to worry about (certain kinds) of maliciousness from software you install.

I just think it's a little bit of a spicy take saying mobile devices "don't deliver" when they are most successful form of computing in history by a large margin. I would argue this is for a reason and they provide enormous value.

> they provide enormous value.

My point is that they have incredible computational power that is often wasted on pretty graphics and other nonessentials. Pretty much all communication/text apps (except video) could easily run on a device spec'd far lower. The web is ridiculously bloated and full of ads and crapware. Just rendering pages of decent-looking text shouldn't take so much power. Even manipulating maps for navigation is mostly a 2d graphics scaling problem that can't possibly require that much horsepower.

But yes, my point about development does pretty much rely on having an external keyboard and mouse.

Here's a pic of the logic board of an iPhone 11: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/UNjifVHATsvaagZB.f...

The miniaturization of tech is absolutely astounding to me, even today. We're pretty unappreciative and wasteful, IMHO. 20 year old me would have been absolutely astounded that that much power was packed in that tiny space, and yet what it delivers is just marginally prettier and not more usable than back then.

What if you could connect an external display, keyboard, and mouse?

Of course, you need an OS that supports that and provides a proper desktop-like experience.

Motorola Atrix comes to mind, or one of those. This was a thing back in 2011 or whenever that phone came out. You could dock your phone and use it as a laptop.

Samsung has Dex too: https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/

I'm not surprised Apple doesn't have something like this as it would probably cannibalize their Macbook sales.

fwiw some people develop software for jailbroken devices on their device. They seem to manage somehow. I suspect with a Bluetooth keyboard and an external screen it would be too bad if you had no other choice.

I wonder if it's possible to take a cheap Android phone and turn it into a desktop? I.e. connect keyboard, mouse, external monitor, install Linux with X?

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