When will I finally live a life where my work iPhone is plugged into a USB4 dock with mouse, display and keyboard and it makes my whole work desktop? M2 is already here, why can't we do this?
I got the PinePhone to evaluate if it could be used as a daily phone. It cannot, it is way too early for that. But as a portable laptop? Works excellent! Not for programming big programs, but it's surprisingly effective as a terminal-on-the-go and even vim is not that difficult to use with it.
Then when I come home, I can plug it into my display+mouse+keyboard and use a normal laptop to finish off whatever I wanted, push it to my git repository and then continue from my proper desktop machine.
Another not as portable setup is the Steam Deck. Ships with a proper linux distribution and works with the same docking stuff you have for the PinePhone, so basically connect a hub that has HDMI+USB and you're up and running with a proper Linux distribution, and with better heat dissipation than the PinePhone. Not as portable obviously, but more powerful than the phone.
Both setups are pretty open, as both of them can run basically the same operating system you use on a desktop computer (non-macos obviously, and no Windows on the PinePhone)
2015 Microsoft Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock
2017 Samsung DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX
You can do this today with an iPad Pro with keyboard cover.
Also, pretty much nobody wants this. Most people who use work computers have them provided by the workplace. The workplace does not want the employee phones running the call center apps with customer data, etc.
I for one do not want any work data physically present on any personally-owned device.
In the dock the phone is sandwiched between 2 cooling fans?
Don't let the decline of the telephone system fool you, when phones booths were widely used they were not disgusting toilets that you found in the late 90s-early-00s.
I would assume any public keyboard is basically the password equivalent of an ATM skimmer.
Regarding heat dissipation, you have a point. But I think it depends on the use case, which is the reason why we also have laptops going from paper-thin under-powered models all the way to models requiring a forklift to move around.
I think many "office jobs" could be done within the dissipation capabilities of a smartphone. Most of my days are spent answering emails and typing away in a terminal over SSH. My geriatric iPhone 7 could probably handle that without issue.
Most serious orgs prohibit BYOD unless you are on Pixel or iPhone where MDM can actually work securely. There is no meaningful way to secure corporate data on an employee-owned Galaxy, for example.
It is the rare corp that can do BYOD securely. The best practice is issuing corporate iPhones to all staff with universal MDM and keeping all corp data physically separate from personal devices.
This also saves your employees’ nudes in a subpoena/discovery situation during a civil action against the corp, which is all too common.