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Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

While I’m sure AR glasses are coming and will be popular, the notion that they’ll be so popular that smart phones won’t even have screens is particularly bold.

Smartphones didn’t replace PDAs, most people didn’t have a PDA to replace. Smart phones replaced whole categories of devices and bundled them into one: cameras, camera phones, PDAs, MP3 players, watches, timers, alarm clocks etc.

People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. The smartphone was a singular event in the history of computing and it wont be replicated within our lifetimes. At most it will be unbundled again, unevenly (eg, smart watches, and glasses)

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> People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming.

Or... what if the next big thing is the phone becomes the computer, i.e. there will be no laptops? Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use.

Today it seems impossible or hard to build but I think the bottleneck here is not even the hardware as much as it's software. But that's a long conversation. Just an idea (kind of an obvious one) I wanted to share.

Convergence is something that’s been talked about for a long time, but I don’t see it being something the large consumer companies want to actually drive forward.

Looking at the direction of Apple/Microsoft/Google, they’d much rather sell you more devices and keep your data synced in cloud services than let you own in all in one unit locally, so that’ll probably be the main direction we go in.

The main exception will be in the indie/enthusiast/hacker space with devices like the pine phone/purism units.

The problem you'll run into with this is a mobile CPU is $150 (at most), and the display panel and GPU will each cost more than a dedicated CPU. What you really want is a cross-platform roaming profile, but don't hold your breath for that.

> Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use.

You can do that with Dex on the higher end Samsung phones.

My brief review of it is close, but lacking some finess with the browsers compared to other desktop operating systems.

This kind of thing has been around for a while, e.g. https://nexdock.com/ these days, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G 10 years ago.

There was definitely a long-term trend of computer shrinking. Room->closet->desk->lap->pocket, but I agree that future interaction models look completely different, and there isn't an obvious next step.

I agree, from the perspective of what industry creates, but keep in mind that the effect on the consumer space varied throughout that history significantly. There was no consumer room sized computer.

Realistically I think the future is already here with a proliferation of specialized mobile devices. This is why Apple took away the headphone jack: so they could sell AirPods. OP was right in the sense that glasses will be coming into this model, I just differ as to how central they’ll be to the future computing environment.

I’m hoping that there will be a bit of a backlash to the Saasification of consumer tech, with its implications on privacy/control. Though I have to say I’m not very optimistic.

"Saasification" is just one aspect of this risk. The broader category of risk, and one that is harder to ameliorate, is that consumer technology is complex to the degree of approaching - from the user's perspective - magic. Who else besides Apple and a couple of other companies can create this magic technology? The answer, I believe, is "none". Apple fully understands this. They will talk up "privacy" etc. to distract us from the fact that they may become a monopoly provider of magic. I use Apple products and I like those products and in fact I am invested in the company (is there a better moat than magic?). But from a long-term perspective, I see a lot of risk here.

> won’t even have screens is particularly bold

I know that. But I've seen this tech evolve now for 40 years, and I am confident that that's where it's headed.

My response isn’t based on the tech itself, it’s based off of society/culture/consumer behavior.

I’m skeptical that glasses will become ubiquitous from a consumer purchasing standpoint.

I think they'll be sold on the compelling features and services.

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