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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

I've seen these before and I always loved the idea of "convergence" even though its never been successful. I remember in at least 2013 when the Ubuntu Edge had a convergence feature that would blow your phone up into a (very slow) desktop PC over DisplayPort that you would then control via the phone touch screen [1].

I suspect the reason that mobile convergence hasn't been successful is that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in. My phone is for social stuff, my tablet is for entertainment stuff and my laptop is for work stuff. The thought of cramming all of those head-spaces into one device feels stressful, like putting all my eggs into one basket. I'm always very happy when I hear about updates to DeX or new convergence docks though

1:https://youtu.be/bk9-v8Sl4yU

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A scooter, motorcycle, car, and delivery van all serve different purposes, though there is a little crossover between each stage.

The same is true about these devices: yes, in a pinch you can grab that document and search for something but really when editing it you want not just a keyboard and larger display, but a bit more horsepower and different apps.

So I use to think a fancy dock like this would be good, but their continued failure has taught me a lot.

A basic phone blows away the early computers. 40mhz one core cpus (spark, mips, 80486...) used to do a lot of work and be fast. What has changed is bloat.

No, what changed is our expectation of what such a device should be capable of doing. You're not gonna load a 1080p YouTube video on 400 MHz.

Some would say 1080p is bloat when you can watch videos perfectly fine in lower resolution ;)

I remember when I got a 1080p monitor and watched some slightly old content (~480p) on it. The experience was very lackluster. Now I'm getting a similar feeling with a recently-bought 4k-capable laptop, and watching 720p content that looked perfectly fine on the 1080p monitor. I don't even want to think about the 480p archives. Almost makes me not want to upgrade devices.

(Can totally sée some AI-based solutions performing some heavy "interpolation" to "upsample" content in realtime ...)

That's already a thing: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5448

I would, perhaps ...

PS. I quite distinctly remember the point in time when I finally said my then desktop machine couldn't move video, and it really was time to consider an upgrade ...

(My 500 Mhz K6 II - DAE remember those AMD chips? - had finally become too slow. Video was 'unstoppable' ...

The parent wrote 40mhz. You could probably do 1080p on 400mhz if you’re clever

We could and did. DVDs played on 400mhz machines

DVDs are 480p

Damn. You're right.

They felt like 1080p at the time.

That said, I could have and should have said Bluray, which came out in 2006 and did do 720 and 1080

We also seem to have picked up a few features along the way. Rendering screen resolutions beyond 640x480, network speeds above 9600 baud, video, displaying images that each would fill one of the hard drives of that age, video and music editing, running programs that were unthinkable in terms of features set. Clearly, inefficiencies have crept in, but it’s not as if the software today wasn’t way more capable than what we had at that time.

We had much better specs than this available at an aerospace company in the mid 90s, not to mention LAN storage and direct T1 to the internet.

I bet those cost more than today’s cellphones…

Couple thousand per, in the 90s.

lan storage at 10mbs? T1 is only 1.544 Mbps. Those are incredibly slow by today's standards

We often had 100baseT and it was quite snappy for text heavy coms and reasonably sized images from the net. 9600 was already faster than you can read, this was an order of magnitude faster. Quake deathmatch was incredible, I remember getting almost twenty folks on a server once. :D

At some point I procured a 1600x1200 monitor… but not until a later job after 2k with an SGI was my computer able to handle that resolution comfortably.

> was already faster than you can read,

You make an interesting point: This *is* some sort of breakthrough point: When "average human textual input bandwidth" was matched ...

(This might be comparable to AI: Now we are trying to match "average human processing capacity" ...

Yep, I think my first modem was 2400 baud and even that was slightly faster than I could read.

Sluggish modem websites have no one to blame but themselves.

> images that each would fill one of the hard drives of that age

This really puts things in perspective ...

So much this. I could edit documents on my first 8088 PC with 512K memory. And people wrote novels on computers like this.

People also used to write novels on pen and paper, later typewriters, then word processors. What we have now is far, far better in every conceivable way.

I think nostalgia gives rise colored glasses when if you were to put these things side by side you’d never actually go back.

We need different types of vehicles for all those things because they cover use cases with different storage capacity and performance requirements. This seems less true for cellphones now.

Sometimes I still find the need to write a lot on a phone and it's thumb typing in a touch mobile device that frustrates me the most. I believe a good add-on keyboard, preferably just as portable as the phone, would have more use cases than a hollow laptop that can be just as big (and similarly less convenient) as a normal laptop.

> believe a good add-on keyboard, preferably just as portable as the phone,

Sure.-

(But "good" and "portable" [keyboard] are antagonistic here ...

... maybe, perhaps, someday, one of these "newfangled" projected keyboards, chord keyboards, one-handed keyboards, foldable keyboards ...

... will hit the mainstream.-

I understand there's basically no market for them but I loved slide out keyboards. I miss the keyboard on my Motorola Droid daily.

> I suspect the reason that mobile convergence hasn't been successful is that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in. My phone is for social stuff, my tablet is for entertainment stuff and my laptop is for work stuff.

Nah, I used to think the same thing about desktop vs laptop but turns out once laptops got good enough to be a true desktop replacement it was much better to just have one device. Phones aren't there yet, even if the raw processor speed numbers suggest they should be.

> people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood

Agree this is a big factor, but with peripherals to extend your smartphone into a laptop you do still have to own multiple “devices” (discrete units of physical hardware). If you’re already gonna have to lug around a dongle/adapter and one or more pieces of hardware (mouse, keyboard, screen) to get the laptop experience, you might as well just lug around an entire laptop.

Also, “cloud” software (not just things like Google docs, but the widespread use of web applications allowing you to log in to some app from anywhere) has solved a lot of the biggest problems in this space. You can easily access all the important things on your phone from a laptop, unless you go out of your way to not upload something somewhere. So being able to convert a smartphone into a laptop is mostly about saving money on hardware (which may not be that much. Do you pay $200 for peripherals to get an underpowered laptop powered by a phone, or a mid-like laptop?) or addressing a very niche UX need.

The last generation of Windows Phone had convergence that provided a version of this. Allowed you to run UWP apps on a Windows desktop. But like many things in the Windows phone universe, it was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind.

I miss the thing all the time.

There was also a dock for your Windows Phone that granted a desktop UI and allowed for light MS Office usage. Used it a couple of times in a pinch.

> was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind.

This is a great way to put it. "Recipes" were ahead of their time, but half-baked ...

I see a an increasing number of people around me using phone only for stuff they absolutely need to carry around – payment/banking, loyalty cards, 2FA, maps. Maybe also some pure messaging app, some puzzle game, but that's it. No any social media, news, work etc.

Two (diverging, yet simultaneous) tendencies: "The phone as a glorified wallet" and "The phone as your life". Both at play ...

Now that you mention it, that's a good way to think about it.

Of all the things on my phone, the only thing I feel like I absolutely can't live without (in my phone) is my OneBusAway app that tells me when my next bus is coming.

Also: /shameless-plug-for-free-and-awesome-app :)

For me, it’s that I don’t have a monitor on hand to plug my phone into. And if I’m going to plan to bring a monitor, shit, I’ll just bring my laptop anyway.

Yes, Samsung has had their "Dex" which looks just like NexDock.

Modern Motorola phones have a similar feature.

VNC has been around for a long time.

It just seems like something people don't want to use. I'm not sure why, though?

Price point might be an issue ...

You can get an external monitor and seperate keyboard for about $100. The issue for me at least, is that I don't want to to put android apps on a monitor, I want a real Linux desktop experience when I plug my phone into a monitor.

the real convergence will happen eventually, when Google merges Android with ChromeOS and we will get the worst of both worlds

Luckily, it will include FSL-Fuchsia Subsystem for Linux. Enabling it will block Netflix and YouTube though.

Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly. This will get quite interesting with the newer device form factor of handheld consoles running x86-64 hardware, since they too have a roughly phone-sized screen that usually supports touch input, as well as analog sticks that might be readily usable for pointer movement or scrolling, and lots of physical buttons that might be usable for gestures or chorded input.

> Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly.

My Pinephone Pro runs Plasma Mobile and yeah you can just plug it in to a USB-C dock with HDMI out and a mouse+keyboard plugged in and it scales up into a slightly odd desktop:)

There was a meme a while back - my most millennial trait is that big purchases must happen on a big screen”.

My brother is a zoomer and the only computing device in his house is his mobile phone and work laptop. He does absolutely everything on his phone. I think we’re moving away from separated devices, honestly

I feel like it highly depends on what people are doing with a device: if there're only a consumer (of digital content or physical product), only owning and using a smartphone is fine. However for creating things (writing a PhD thesis, making a game, editing horizontal video) a PC is still required.

If we want to quantify every exception sure. We've moved away from mainframe devices but that doesn't mean none exist. We've moved away from Windows XP but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

It wouldn't be hard to trigger DEX/desktop enviroment to load a different profile. I feel like most hardware companies don't want to eat away at different segments.

(Along those lines, some phones have a "second" or "secret" profile/mode that is accessible through a different PIN code at the lockscreen, for example ...)

Not really. Let's look at Bell's Law from 1972 to understand this:

"Roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and a new industry."

So we can say, generally, mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, microcomputers, laptops, smart phones, and now wearables (watches, rings, wallets, bracelets, glasses, etc)

Next we'll have something I'll call the Mckenzie corollary (that's me I guess):

"Roughly a decade or two after introduction, the lower price computer class will subsume the upper price computing class."

So the minicomputers took on mainframe tasks. The workstations took on the minicomputer tasks. The microcomputers took on the workstation tasks. Laptops took on the micros. All this happened with a significant lag time.

And now, the smartphones are vying for the laptops.

These are superstructural transformations and take years because a bunch of new things need to be invented, developed, mastered and widely deployed for it to happen.

We are roughly in the wearables and phones-become-laptops epoch.

Let's look at The Poverty of Historicism from 1944 to understand why you can't predict societal change with laws.

"[The evolution of] human society, is a unique historical process ... Its description, however, is not a law, but only a singular historical statement."

Karl Popper was being a logician about it. People aren't claiming supernatural powers with market trend analysis like some Helena Blavatsky of electronics or that these "laws" hold like thermodynamics.

If it's been good for 60 years so that might continue or maybe something unexpected will happen.

Popper's piecemeal alternative predicts nothing. The market trend analysis is at least accurate > 0% of the time. It's a non-scientific process with unquantifiable accuracy but it is empirically non-zero. For instance, Geofferey Moore's adoption curves proposed in 1991 are widely found but, every now and then, the galloping animal is a zebra. This doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for horses.

Presuming a decade or two from now people will connect their wearables powered by kinetic charging to foldable e-paper with a transparent solar panel layer is just a bet.

Maybe something radical will happen instead: The public payphone will come back as a public computer that people will biometrically log into after shunning personal electronics as toxic spy machines ruining society. Eh, probably not, but maybe.

> every now and then, the galloping animal is a zebra. This doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for horses.

With permission, I am going to put that on a t-shirt :)

I'm not that brilliant! I borrowed it from medical slang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_(medicine)

So steal away

Appreciated.

(As is the intellectual honesty :)

> and widely deployed for it to happen.

(And, don't forget, "mass adopted" ...)

> The low end always eats the high end.

The low end eventually becomes a satisfiable alternative for price sensitive consumers and may become the majority market if _consumer preferences follow_.

That's important. Even more expensive brands in the purely functional space like Tektronix, DeWalt and Zojirushi can still command a preference and not for the same reason as Patek Philippe or Christian Louboutin.

Also when preferences aren't considered, the base observation can become rather risky.

For example, it implies a majority of American cars will eventually be electric microcars like the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV or Chery QQ Ice Cream because:

1. Most cars on the road were bought used and these cars cost less than a used car.

2. The battery efficiency of the smaller vehicle means you can charge it without special hardware in reasonable time.

3. The vehicle speed and range are increasingly adequate to satisfy most consumers needs.

Do I think an EV microcar revolution is coming to the US? No. There's zero evidence of that. American consumer preferences would need to change first.

Fickle human behavior is an X factor in any market.

Preferences can change however. Pretend Apple comes out with iCar, a sleek electric microcar or Costco introduces Kirkland CarTwo, a practical second car that charges in a few hours on a normal outlet. Perfect for teenagers and easy to park in small spaces. Cost? $89/month for 48 months.

I basically just pitched the Geely Panda Mini EV or a number of similar cars which have been in production for years. The tech is here. The American preferences are not. Not yet.

I like your analysis.

I'd like to ignore American Consumer Preferences and talk about engineering examples.

Linux/OSS/MySQL: These were seen as toy alternatives to the real thing. Linux eventually displaced all the proprietary Unix operating systems. And it still isn't at feature parity with some of those OSes decades later.

Same goes for X86 and Arm.

High margin stagnant businesses often get consumed by a toy entrant that crosses that inflection point where it does what it needs to do for 20% of price. When the cost of something is less than your margin, you are screwed.

On the ACP in regards to vehicles. Americans have been conned into liking low-end vehicles wrapped in a high-end sheen. SUVs are high margin vehicles partially because they are cheap pickup trucks. US auto manufacturers got their asses handed to them imports from Japan, where people did prefer smaller, lighter more efficient vehicles. There was then an effort across all auto companies to change the tastes of US car buyers so that foreign vehicles couldn't compete.

# Semantic Scholar links for the paper, "Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention"

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Experimental-evidence-...

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Supplementary-Material...

----

Evolution of opinions on social networks in the presence of competing committed groups

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22448238/

Linux is a different story.

I've got an hour long talk with about 70 or so slides that talk about it

https://siliconfolklore.com/linux-corrections

Super book was another example of these type of devices which never got to market. Had the chance to play with the foldable devices and thought they are actually pretty great.

I think these type of formats are decent for travelers.

I've got a Samsung Android phone that I tried with a DisplayLink dock for browsing. It was able to use the Ethernet OOTB, but browsing was PAINFUL. The responsiveness is/was not there.

I always liked the idea that rather than your phone being the powerhouse for a laptop or desktop environment that it instead be a receptacle for data.

If only there were a standardized protocol enabling browsers (could be any smart terminal protocol, but browsers exist now, and would mostly work) to securely connect to nearby devices, maybe even require a physical connection if you want extra safety.

Then instead of a specific dock you could use just about any capable laptop or desktop as an environment.

I don't think it can be done at the moment without an on-internet intermediary. A local discovery and connection system that the terminal(browser) could be aware of. Maybe this could be shoehorned into existing systems like Bluetooth.

You could get an absurd usb connection working if the phone appeared as both a file store as well as a keyboard that types in the commands to launch itself. I see no potential pitfalls with that approach.

avahi/bonjour for discovery, vnc served up over http for UI. Intel proposed a box with Ethernet over USB for this a long time ago but it never caught on.

Meh, it works fine for me. You can also use work profile (island app) to segment your phone a bit further.

I really love DeX and I just spent a whole week working with it as my primary computing device. I don't have a mobile dock though. The reason being that they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point.

> they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point.

True. Probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption. Their price point pretty much overlaps with an entry-level laptop.-

> that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in

Sounds reasonable.-

PS. As a counterpoint to that, many will I am sure remember how one PC *was* everything and one did everything on it. One per household, even ...

Haha.

* counts 4 in the living room, about 10 servers in the lab, probably 20 computers in total in my single person home not including raspberry pis, mobiles or tablets :)

Insane.-

(Yet, I am sure, not atypical nowadays - if a bit above the mean ...)

Convergence happened already, I'm logged into the same apps from any device and have access to mostly the same files and functionality through the cloud.

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