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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Since iPhone 4 I have been saying Apple should take over the office by replacing all but power users' desktops with an iPhone that when at the desk, runs a Microsoft Office/Exchange compatible environment (web, email, word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, etc.) connected to a bluetooth kb and wifi display which all autosyncs along with documents and state whenever within proximity as well as seamlessly integrating with the present office telephony.

Anyway, this is the best thing I have seen in a while, but the demo video would have been more impressive with display sharing (with the vm fullscreen) and bluetooth kb&m, because it visually proves the viable pocket light workstation.

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part of my phd dissertation was process migration for the desktop. I argued that MSFT or apple should make low powered portable devices (say phones/tablets) that were your computer, but could also be docked to more powerful computers. When docked, processes migrate off and run on the powerful hardware, when you want to undock, they migrate back.

when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode.

I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.

Surface Book was a step in this direction. The base of the computer had a discrete MVidia GPU, so you could run heavy GPU loads from the tablet section of the computer while connected to the base. If the base was removed, only the onboard Intel GPU was available.

I did this back in 2013 I think. I had a desktop and a laptop that both supported IOMMU device passthrough. I used the Xen hypervisor at the time, and had a VM that I could migrate and then hotplug all the PCI devices to between the systems.

I never got it past the "playing around with it stage," but I was just _so_ sure that the market was going to move that way... Imagine your phone and laptop just migrates out to the cloud every time you lock it, then live-migrates back in when you wake it up... Or at least between your tiny laptop and your beefy desktop. Because nobody would have just one computer!

It sure sounds cool to me, but the reality is that it's too clunky. Virtualization and live migration are absurd solutions to consumer-level problems.

Samsung has sorta been trying this for a while with DeX.

Samsung DeX feels like a POC, sure it works and I've used it for about a week while my laptop was being repaired but it had lots of paper cuts, most applications were out of place, even some of their own.

Is DeX still being maintained? Like is it available on their new flagships too?

Yup, tried it on a current samsung recently. It's basic but it works.

And before DeX, there was the Motorola Atrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop).

> wifi display

Can this ever be performant enough? I feel like even the tiniest amount of lag would be unbearable.

Of course, people stream VR games over wifi: https://www.theverge.com/22218827/oculus-quest-2-wireless-pc...

But does that work in a crowded office building with everyone doing it?

A direct connection with 5GHz WiFi would be ideal and realistic. (And, coming up, WiFi 6E and the 6GHz band.)

Contention on 2.4GHz is the main concern I think

Even on 5GHz, your office router would quickly run out of bandwidth. A compressed 1080p stream is like 40mbps, so even if nobody in the office is using a HiDPI display, you'd connect maybe 5 or 6 displays before hitting some serious local congestion. You might be able to resolve it over ethernet, but if 'wireless' is the name of the game, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

They did say "direct" so the router wouldn't be a concern

https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct

"Direct" Wi-Fi still shares the same spectrum though, so even without central points it's not equivalent to cables.

Right, that's the part of it I'm worried about in a crowded building

But it is a fundamentally different type of problem. Going through a router imposes hard bandwidth limitations at a central point.

With direct wifi, each monitor only needs to serve a single user, so the devices can be lower powered -- the broadcast only needs to serve ~a single desk. And they are centrally controlled by the IT department, so unlike a wifi router the in RF mad-max anarchy zone that is a modern apartment building, there shouldn't be concerns about noisy neighbors.

I'm not sure there's a point to all this -- the phone being used as a computer is probably going to be plugged in, so why not push everything through USB-C/thunderbolt nowadays? -- but it is almost certainly possible.

The difference between sharing limited spectrum and AP resources in a room and only sharing limited spectrum resources in a room are not a fundamentally different problems. In addition you'd have loads of noisy neighbors, at least everyone close by in the room.

I agree the phone ought to be plugged in anyway. Even if it could survive a full day of being your workstation, you wouldn't want a half dead or worse battery at the end of your work day, and regularly draining a significant amount while stationary unnecessarily shortens the total battery lifespan. In addition, if docked into something with a bit of active cooling, the phone could perform better and once again preserve the battery.

I think they are fundamentally different. For the first case, everyone must broadcast with enough power to reach the AP. It introduces a bottleneck.

For the second case, everyone only needs to broadcast with enough power to reach their device. Overlapping coverage areas are essentially a side effect.

A high quality 1080P video stream is more like 5-10Mbps, and a typical desktop use case is going to be much, much more compressible.

> A compressed 1080p stream

I was thinking more along the lines of 1024x768. Non-power users. And if it was an Apple enviro, the display would be a computer, and the connection would be vnc or nx.

I've used 3 different wireless VR implementations before, all of them require absurd amounts of bandwidth (50-130mbps), and send a highly-compressed image. It looks worse depending on the display you're using; on the OLED display of the Quest, the image ended up looking particularly terrible.

Even with proper display stream compression, I doubt you could build a network robust enough to host more than 2 or 3 wireless monitors on one network.

VR required like 90fps at something >1080p, right?

Office work is fine with 30fps (can realistically drop lower). Also I suspect office workloads should be compressed more easily (think of a next editor -- lots of white-space, only a couple characters changing from frame to frame).

And peer-to-peer rather than through the router would probably be the way to go. Since 5GHz drops off pretty quickly, it might be possible to exploit this if people aren't packed in too tightly. Which gives a nice, hard technological backing to requests not to be crammed in too tightly.

Its probably quick enough now, but tbh, I'd rather it just run over USB-C. Maybe then it could keep the phone charged up at the same time too.

Just leave a single dongle with a bunch of ports at the office. You need to plug in the power anyway and it's simpler than pairing.

My laptop now connects to my monitor with a single USB-C cable, providing power, driving the 4K monitor and connecting to its built-in USB hub where the other peripherals are connected. It doesn't even have to be wireless because you'd want the phone connected to power anyway.

I feel like any recent iPhone would be brilliant for this, though the RAM is on the short side, though with slightly more in recent Pros it could be a Pro only feature.

Shame it seems like such an un-Apple move to not provide this value, that it will likely stay that way.

The problem here is there's not a clear value proposition. It seems like a really cool concept, but who is it for?

What situations exist where a potential user would have access to desktop peripherals, but also don't have access to a laptop?

I’ve just given up on my M1 Pro MBP in favour of my M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard case.

I’m very excited to see if the rumours about a proper DE for iPadOS when attached to a monitor comes true.

I don’t want to carry my laptop around. It’s too big and heavy. I want to carry one device that I can use as a portable device, but also use as a full fat device when I have appropriate peripherals, without having to worry about some kind of Cloud sync instead.

I don’t want to have to wait for state to sync between multiple devices. I want a single device that can do literally everything. The M1 iPad Pro with detachable keyboard (Logitech Folio) and Pencil is dangerously close.

Now if it could run a Linux environment that wasn’t horrifically slow due to Apple’s obscene limitations (see iSH, which is incredible, but unfortunately, slow), that would solve everything.

For now, I depend on Cloud VMs instead, which falls over once my connectivity becomes poor.

What you're describing actually existed in the form of the Continuum feature on Windows 10 Mobile [0] or Ubuntu Touch's convergence

You can’t run a computer on a iPhone. If you could, it wouldn’t be iPhone shaped. The fact that you think you can comes from the incredible amount of work put into making them fast when being used as iPhones.

How is a current iPhone significantly different from an iMac architecturally? Sure they are curreny running different variants of Apple’s operating system, but they share similar processors, similar wireless connectivity, etc.

Edit: a slightly different way to look at it: the iPhone has always been a computer. Since iPhone 8 or so, it’s also had desktop class performance.

That’s the A7 SoC that had a “desktop class architecture”, not the phone it was in.

current iphones actually use the same exact chips as the macbook air series - the base-tier M1 (although some laptops have the more powerful pro/ultra).

the crossover between "high end phone" and "ultra-portable laptop" has been observed for a number of years now, that's really the space where chromebooks thrived even with inferior ARM reference cores, if you throw an actually-good M1 into it then you get an extremely solid ultra-portable. And the bigger laptops are just more of everything - more cores, bigger GPU, more memory.

The phones do NOT use the M1, although the M1 is based on the chips in the phone. The newest iPad Pro does run an actual M1 though.

Either way I agree a recent iPhone would be plenty for standard work (documents, spreadsheets, email, web).

Why not? An iPhone 13 has a similar single core score to all of the M1 processors and a similar multi core score to a MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2020) with an Intel Core i7-1068NG7 @ 2.3 GHz (4 cores). However, iPhones only have 4GB or 6GB of RAM which may be limiting.

Because the SoC is not the only component of a computer and neither is one benchmark score. Other components are the power system, (lack of) cooling, flash storage…

So an M1 MacBook air basically?

“Basically” is doing a lot of work there. Those two things don’t have the same parts in them, just the same kinds of parts.

It’s not a categorical point but current iPhones don’t even have real external display support.

iPhones have had external display support for a _long_ time. Does it require an adapter? Sure. The USB-C only MacBooks and iPads do too, unless you have a USB-C display. It’s entirely possible to display different content on the internal display and external display. That’s an app specific feature in iOS, but not a hardware limitation.

Have you seen a current iMac motherboard? Nearly all of the I/O is on a breakout board with a thunderbolt controller. Does an iPhone expose PCI-E lanes for interconnect? No, of course not, but there were desktops long before PCI-E and as others have mentioned, the first USB-C MacBook had exactly the same number of external ports as the iPhone.

> iPhones have had external display support for a _long_ time. Does it require an adapter? Sure.

And it’s actually a compressed video output reusing the screen recording hardware. The adapter runs a miniature iOS that decompresses the video again. It’s not raw pixels.

What? I run desktop Linux on a Pinephone which is (unfortunately) iPhone shaped. The shape of the actual computer inside these devices is often really just a small board ~2/3 the size/shape of your credit card anyway.

The above post mentions web browsing, and I can easily find you common websites that’ll take 1GB per Chrome tab on a desktop sized screen. That doesn’t leave much of a 4GB device for computing.

There’s other issues but that’s the main one. The workload you’ll enjoy it with is a lot less than you’d expect unless you’re a mainly terminal user.

Yeah you can't open many tabs for large pages at once. I'll happily trade doing that for the computing freedom and git, xmpp etc actually working. iOS automatically kills your tabs anyway so it's not like you're actually using it.

Which xmpp client do you use on the pinephone? How is the support for OMEMO and A/V calls? If there is a Linux phone with great XMPP support there wouldn't be a lot left that keeps me on Android.

Dino does OMEMO, it's what I use. Apparently they just added A/V the other month, I haven't tested it though.

I used an old Kyocera Rise [0] for document editing a few times and it worked fine, and that was a budget phone ten years ago.

Having an actual keyboard and a dedicated task switcher button made that phone better for work than the modern flagship Android I use now.

I don't know much about iphones, but I've definitely seen people do real work on ipads, so I think the same argument applies.

[0] https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Kyocera-Rise_id7097

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