Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to the future we have envisioned for a long time, where you carry your main computer around with you and simply drop it into a standardized i/o dock when you sit at a desk and it runs the big high res displays and accepts keyboard/mouse input, and you use it like a phone the rest of the time. (Basically, a phone that is also a laptop replacement - I know there are dockable phones now that can run a monitor and kb/mouse, but they're not really "laptop replacement" level.)

I could even imagine such a system having two different CPUs (or, more likely, different cpu performance cores in a single package) that power up/down based on wired power availability, basically just automatically getting many times faster when connected to power and not having to conserve juice on battery. Storage and memory are already fairly low power these days, and tiny. Mobile (i.e. handheld) GPUs are now powerful/efficient enough to run high-res handheld displays with all day battery life, which while probably not 4k gaming level, are more than enough to run a multimonitor desktop setup when not gaming, especially if you make the quite safe assumption that they'll have wall power to crank up the GPU whenever asked to run external displays.

I'm really excited about mobile computing over the next ten years. The Nintendo Switch and M1 iPad Pro are little glimpses into this future. I look forward to replacing the dozen computers in my lab with a single handheld device that can simultaneously virtualize many of them and conveniently multiplex several big displays between them, and come with me in my pocket when I leave.

My experience with a Surface Book (which I use in at least 3 different ways - as a tablet, as a laptop, and connected to a monitor/keyboard/etc. on my desk via Surface Dock) makes me think that's coming eventually, but it'll take longer than you think:

- External GPUs are still pretty bad

- Tablets with cellular connectivity are if anything less well supported than before. I think this is mainly because carriers aren't really supporting the idea of one person/account having multiple "phones". Smartwatches have the same problem - I remember going to a Samsung store and they were showing off a smartwatch that had its own SIM card and cellular modem, but the staff couldn't tell me what kind of phone contract you had to have to make it work

- Small devices still mean a noticeable compromise in power. I've tried using Samsung Dex as well and it's... ok, but appreciably worse than even a netbook, even if on paper the processor/memory/etc. ought to be catching up. Laptop as primary computer only really took off once you genuinely couldn't notice any performance disadvantage compared to a desktop, at least in my friend group; I think it'll be the same with tablet and (eventually) phone/watch/ring form factors

> Smartwatches have the same problem - I remember going to a Samsung store and they were showing off a smartwatch that had its own SIM card and cellular modem, but the staff couldn't tell me what kind of phone contract you had to have to make it work

I might be missing something about cultural differences but... why would you expect an electronics store to tell you what kind of plans your telco has?

Here in Switzerland pretty much every telco offers an additional SIM for tablets and watches, but you need to talk to the mobile operator not the electronics store ^^

I guess the OP was from the US. Most US providers still seem to live in the mental world of selling SIM-locked phones, they are no smooth experience for customers bringing their own device.

Prices for just a SIM without buying a phone seem to be pretty high.

Here selling SIM-locked phones is not even legal. In most European countries it is legal, but still less common than in the US. So operators have to serve customers not buying a device from them on competitive terms.

> Most US providers still seem to live in the mental world of selling SIM-locked phones, they are no smooth experience for customers bringing their own device.

This was true 5-10 years ago. Nowadays, nearly every mobile network regularly has offers to entice users to bring their device from a different network in exchange for a cheaper monthly plan or similar.

Most smart watches don’t have a physical SIM card slot since that would be way too big. The software used to load an eSIM onto the watch often has a whitelist for carriers.

Another issue is that both the watch and the phone need to share a phone number if you want to leave your phone at home and answer calls and receive SMS on the watch. This isn’t standardized and only works with each watch’s supported carriers.

The solution to the SMS problem is to use VOIP. I personally very much like JMP.chat.

That would be ideal, but VOIP numbers are blocked in many situations. Most 2fa providers and bank transaction verification comes to mind.

>Most 2fa IME: banks and such are fine with it. Coinbase definitely works.

I'd expect the person selling me a product to be able to tell me what I need to use the product. Like if I was buying a car that runs off LPG or something, I'd expect the salesperson to be able to tell me where I can buy that fuel and roughly how much it costs, even if the car company doesn't actually sell it themselves.

Many of those telco plans in Switzerland that just add a data eSIM don’t actually work with something like an Apple Watch, which is why I assume the GP asked at the store. At least the Apple Watch requires a mobile network to offer a special shared-number add-on and support Apple’s GUI for provisioning this plan with an eSIM on the watch. Unfortunately, this usually means sticking with more expensive first-party networks rather than MVNOs and paying whatever fees they require.

It’s quite possible the Samsung watches don’t rely on this system, but I’m not sure and may have also assumed it was worth asking like the GP.

> Tablets with cellular connectivity are if anything less well supported than before.

Not my experience. I'm sure it depends a bit on your carrier, but on T-Mobile it was easy to order a data sim for a tablet from their website. Setting up a smart watch was even easier with eSIM, it just sets up everything for you when you pair with your phone.

You seem to be talking about the US. T-Mobile seems to be the only operator not having custom firmware for modems. Maybe a small remainder of the European influence in the company. In Europe national and international interoperability between any SIM and device (1) has been a thing since 1992 when GSM came. In the US operator business models were based on technical incompatibility and complete lock-in for decades.

(1) SIM locks exist in some countries. But they are commercial practices, not technical incompatibility.

I don’t see how the history of GSM is very pertinent to the present scenario. At least in the last several years I’ve used phones from Europe or Asia or other networks in North America and they all just work with first-party or MVNO SIM cards in The US, from T-Mobile, AT&T, Tracfone, Mint, and others, assuming the device supports the appropriate bands (which varies a bit by region, especially for LTE).

What's the problem with eGPUs? The most problematic thing I see is that they only work with intel CPUs for now and that all enclosures are tb3.

Also Samsung is really good at adding features and then locking them down in weird ways, breaking basic features or just providing horrible user experience.

> What's the problem with eGPUs? The most problematic thing I see is that they only work with intel CPUs for now and that all enclosures are tb3.

Maybe they've gotten better, but the last time I looked at reviews they were generally flaky (driver issues or incompatibilities with particular games) and had performance issues, to the point that a lower-model built-in card would often outperform a higher-model in an external enclosure. I'm sure they're coming eventually, but I haven't heard of anyone having an actually polished experience with one in day-to-day use yet.

I’ve had this for a year and a half with a PinePhone. I just don’t use the docking ability that much because:

1) Forwarding X11 to a desktop is easier (and all the apps run on X anyway)

2) Since it’s just Linux all the apps can run on a desktop just like the phone, all my stuff is synced with git or rsync, and if there’s something I need outside the usual folders it’s just an scp away. There’s absolutely no reason to use one particular machine over the other other than form factor and computing resources.

It just makes a lot of sense to have a decent desktop permanently plugged in that you can use without any hassle. Devices like that will kill laptops though, I know it did for me. Of course I don’t think this will happen with Android. Google is way too greedy and they’ll find a way to make it unusable.

My laptop has more than 20x the memory of the PinePhone's maximum, and can run 3x external 4K displays, so the PinePhone would not even remotely approximate laptop-replacement level for me.

The hardware in mobile phones needs to improve substantially for the scenario I described to be practical; there's no hardware that supports it today, but the software in TFA is a step in the direction.

This use case would be possible if Google didn't explicitly disable USB-C video output: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/03/pixel-4-has-usb-vid...

(As far as I'm aware, they still do this on Pixel 6.)

I already use my laptop as a desktop when I'm at home by connecting it to a USB-C hub, which in turn connects it to my monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. I think the smartphone as a "single device which can be used for everything" is a cool concept and definitely possible considering how powerful modern smartphones are. The limitation is software.

This idea is cool, but I already have a seamless experience of moving to different devices through my day and having access to everything I need.

It is stuff like O365, Github, OneDrive, AWS etc that enable that. No plugging in, no reconfiguring devices. Moving between windows 11, android and debian everything I want is right there.

I can't see the advantage, yet, of trying to consoldate down to one device.

You wouldn't even need centralized services to do this properly. Just bring back the old "My Briefcase" UI for device syncing, now additionally backed by a git repository for history, "fork" and "merge" support.

Windows phone used to have this and it was called Continuum. Although it couldn't actually run proper desktop apps, only a few office apps made for it. The promo page for it is still up despite windows phone being dead for a few years now.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum

Except that you will not be able to own a "main computer". It will be rented. And it also will be nothing more than a slightly less stupid terminal connecting into a cloud which offers you to rent the software you want to use, because you can't actually install your own thanks to everything being locked down behind VMs preventing the execution of unsigned code.

Want to execute your own code? Fine! Buy a license!

That's what you're looking forward to.

There are companies which provide the freedom, e.g. Purism Librem 5.

Too bad that it is almost impossible to actually purchase one.

Hopefully the CPUs will be available soon.

We already had that, e.g. maru OS, ubuntu touch, Linux on Dex, whatever windows called their version, ... . It pretty much flopped.

So it is "the future" in the same way 3D TVs were: Much hype and then kinda neat, but not great.

In a perfect world, it would work great. A world where hotels and workplaces have available phone docking stations that allow the travelling business people to plug their phones in, and their phones boot up an OS where we could have access to the full power of our personal computers on the provided monitors/keyboard/mouse.

The world doesn't exist. And it's not that much more expensive for the workplace to add the computer, and it's much more convenient to just carry our own ultraportable laptops so that we could work at coffee shops and on the planes.

But perhaps there is an use case out for parents with multiple kids who don't want to use low-powered or hand-me-down computers...

> have available phone docking stations

For that you want something that is ubiquitous anyways and works with everything. For samsung that was HDMI and usb (kinda works, but too many cables) a few years ago and nowadays is just a single usb c cable. Works with laptops, tablets and phones.

Counter question: Why aren't docking stations for laptops common in hotels/coffee shops/wherever? Or am just not staying in the "right" hotels? To me it just seems that the demand is pretty tiny.

> Counter question: Why aren't docking stations for laptops common in hotels/coffee shops/wherever? Or am just not staying in the "right" hotels? To me it just seems that the demand is pretty tiny.

Well, there is an attack called the "evil maid" attack. This attack can happen whenever your hardware is unattended for some period of time. A hotel where maids enter the room every day unattended is quite literally the scenario for this attack. Imagine the surface area for attack, where a dock gets modified, then an unsuspecting user plugs into the dock.

Not only is the demand tiny, but the liability is incredibly high for hotels.

And I even used a Motorola Atrix with the Lapdock - that was underpowered and disappointing too. Great idea for the time but a few years too early.

The hardware was nice though.

I feel you should get a Steam Deck then. It has almost everything you described you wanted in a pocket computer.

1.) Run windows/linux distro on the go.

2.) Can play graphically demanding titles in 720P.

3.) Has a dock which supports ethernet, Mouse/Keebs, HDMI out.

4.) Can have upto 4TB internal SSD with tweaks.

Then I still have to carry 2 devices though. I am not very interested at gaming at this moment.

Isn’t this the Samsung Dex experience?

Probably yes, but we haven't had a decent product like that. Now if it can decently run a linux distro (with external display, etc) I might ditch my iPhone....

What's not decent about Samsung DeX?

It's also what Ubuntu Touch aimed to do. Not sure if that's a use case that UBports still tackles, though.

have to also figure out cooling at that level as well. hell even my laptop can get pretty hot. its definitely is a good step in that direction though.

PinePhone does that.

Even cheap commercial phones are far more powerful though. I have a pinephone because I want a linux native phone, but it's not really useable still as a phone; it works ok as a very low powered Linux system though.

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