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We keep putting more powerful chips into phones, and giving them bigger screens, but we never turn them into useful computers. Why is this?

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I think it's clear that Apple has recognized that their target markets don't care to have useful computers. Just look way back to when Steve Jobs was still alive and he was talking about how "PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy."

They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.

Trucks analogy is interesting. I (temporarily) live in the US South and trucks are 3:1 to all other vehicles here.

So true. Whether people need them or not, people will spend the money to buy them.

The truck metaphor is actually incredibly apt, because if you want to do "truck stuff" with your PC, a lot of people think you can't do that on a phone, but 90% of what people need a beefy computer for could be done on a phone if we had that kind of culture around it.

Macbook pros for a lot of us are effectively like daily driving a lifted Ford Raptor with a snorkel. Most of what I do on my personal device I easily could do on a Chromebook or tablet, and pretty much all of the rest is entirely possible on a Chromebook with the Linux subsystem setup (which is what I did pre-Macbook). It's like if I'd setup an expensive truck for off-roading, but in the end it turned out to be aspirational and I only take it somewhere that can't handle a Subaru Outback once or twice a year.

Hah this is very true, though I'd argue the real Raptor with a snorkel is the gaming PC. I'm typing this on one right now and I mostly play Factorio which could run on any old potato, so yeah I'm that guy. The MBP is probably more akin to the BMW when you could be driving a Honda.

All that said, I'll take this hobby over the truck hobby. $3k for a pretty good machine is great vs. $80k for the snorkel truck.

If that's the case, then why do we go to work on a computer instead of a phone? Oh, wait. A screen. A mouse, a keyboard. Really, if they wanted to, you could simply dock your phone and have that experience if the company was willing to put in the time.

Steve Jobs didn't foresee that Americans would basically only buy trucks (and SUVs) in 20 years. You can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore.

Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.

Uh what? Where in the US are you?

I will admit that "you can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore" was a bit of hyperbole, but certainly they have declined precipitously, from 80% of the US new vehicle market 40 years ago to about 25% today [0]. You can still buy sedans in the US, but not from american car companies [1].

[0] https://mercercapital.com/insights/blogs/auto-dealer-valuati...

[1] https://carbuzz.com/eulogy-for-the-chevrolet-malibu-and-seda...

Globally, mobile+tablet crossed 50% of web traffic in October 2016 (51.3% vs. desktop's 48.7%) [0]. For the world minus HN, we’re entering the second decade of phones being useful computers for the most common definition of useful.

[0](https://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-...)

“Useful computer” is subjective. It seems to be difficult for HN users to imagine a device that doesn’t have a terminal for example, but the overwhelming majority of users simply do not care. Many of them manage just fine with a smartphone as their primary (if not their only) computer, so clearly they are useful enough.

Samsung dex really excited me when I tried it, but it still had a little ways to go. I am shocked it's not a bigger priority.

Esp for Samsung as they don't have a consumer PC division that they would be concerned about killing...

Android is getting close, with Google adding desktop support akin to Samsung's Dex when the phone is connected to a dock.

I had a Motorola Atrix and Lapdock years ago, and wished that concept had taken off. The phone was lacking in performance which made it difficult to use in "laptop" mode.

The modern phone I have is a "cheap" Xiaomi POCO F7 Ultra which has incredible performance, only hampered by the USB2 connectivity. If a dock existed for other phones, I would use this all day.

The Macbook neo has a Phone chip. And Android now integrates the Linux terminal (well, for compatible chips). Valve is also trying to put gaming on ARM chips. So I'd say we're starting to blur the lines between phones and PCs. Personally, owning a samsung phone, I'm looking for a neat option to leverage my powerful chip and work on it on trips, but so far I find the options to do so too expensive considering how much money I already put into my phone (VR glasses, Lapdocks, external monitor/keyboard...)

I did that a few times with a 10 inches Samsung tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, using the DeX UI. It had Linux on DeX with some Ubuntu version. 16.04?

I can't think about a good way to do it with a phone screen, unless you know that you can find a TV set to connect to. But hotel rooms usually place their TV sets very inconveniently and if you stay at a friend's home, their TV sets will be not so well placed too to be used as a monitor. So maybe a costly large foldable as your next phone?

There have been a few posts from people who have used these XREAL or other AR glasses with an Android and foldable keyboard.

Also, IIRC there was reporting that Apple considered doing the compute for Vision Pro on a device at the hip. Instead of what they ended up with which was just a battery.

I could see this coming back around again where a future iPhone is all of the brains or a lot of the brains for AR glasses.

Totally. It doesn't make sense to have such powerful chips and not being able to leverage it.

Apple has had a patent[1] for like a decade at this point which involved placing an iPhone into a slot on a laptop so it could be used in a laptop form, with the phone itself serving as the touchpad.

[1]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-patents-device-that-doc...

Edit to add: the phone itself is intended to be the main processing unit, the “laptop” is just a screen and keyboard.

This company https://nexphone.com/ has been doing something like that since 2016 but of course in a different way, by attaching the phone to a laptop shell or more simply to a USB hub.

At this point I don't even really need a phone. Nobody makes calls anymore and I can use my watch for 911 calls.

What I need is a more portable iPad. But that would cannibalize iPhone sales.

That seems to be entirely the purpose of this device. Instead of just a larger display, it's meant to provide a "second monitor" for multitasking or more context.

With terminal emulators, tailscale, local and remote agents, there's never been so much computing capability accessible from your pocket before.

If you still need a remote computer to do your work, in what way are you doing work on the phone?

I would love it if I could use it as a second monitor when working in a coffee shop or library. Unfortunately universal control was pretty solid at launch and then just completely left to die

The 7.6" screen here is far too small to function as a second monitor type device. This is going to be for pure content consumption

I have a Chromebook with an ~11 inch screen. It’s basically the minimum size where a keyboard is still useable. I like it a lot, but it’s actually too big when I want to use it as a tablet.

I think this is the tension. Or maybe we just need to master one handed keyboards.

At least some of the time, when people refer to using their phone as a computer, I think they're talking about plugging into an external monitor through USB-C, and using the phone as a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.

I've tried every so often, and while I think all the hardware is there, the software wasn't. Perhaps Android has improved on this recently? I know there have been niche attempts in the past, like Samsung DeX or Ubuntu Touch, which may have been more solid. I've never tried out any of those.

Artificial limitations open many new avenues for new and exciting revenue streams.

Almost all of these big phone companies are also the ones selling tablets and some of them laptops, so if they did do that they would start eating into their other business units.

You can get something quite useable these days by plugging a pixel into a USB dock with a monitor and a keyboard + mouse

Android Desktop mode looks so promising, it just needs to support higher resolutions/refresh rates but this is probably a side effect of at least the Pixel having weaker performance versus other flagships.

Although I can’t wait for the more powerful Motorolas with GOS to release. Maybe that’d be enough to make a phone my sole computing device.

Have you seen how the average person uses their phone?

You want what, a terminal that you type on w/an onscreen keyboard?

Lots of computers have external keyboards, mice, and displays. Why not a powerful computer like the iPhone? Who cares if it's small? Lots of SBCs are small and are quite useful. This one even has a built in UPS.

you can connect those things though right? or you want a mouse and keyboard attached by default like a tiny laptop?

You can literally use all those things with an iPhone. Including all at the same time.

So I don't know what you're complaining about?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634645

It's easier to make an existing thing better. But far harder to come up with a new idea.

How are you gonna do mandatory age verification on a full fledged computer?

What do you want to do on your iPhone that you can't do now?

Run game emulators with JIT. Currently you have to accept emulators either running very slow without JIT, or go through massive hurdles to enable it.

That feels like an exceptionally niche use case

Retro game emulation isn't mainstream but "exceptionally niche" is overstating it.

I disagree

3rd party app store.

abuse over a monopoly is the reason. probably you already knew that though?

if they made it a useful computer, they couldnt charge 30% of revenue to their app store customers

Apple's lack of vision and fear of innovation. Jobs is gone. We're back to 90s Apple. Dumb ideas become dumb products, and no one has the balls to say, No.

The moment apple ship MacOS on their iPads, sales for their macbooks will all but collapse.

and increase power usage?

Will they though? They would capture more windows users. They already have the Neo actually. iPad still has another job mainly around simpler tasks. I’ve not yet got to love the Macosy windows management.

Have you ever tried to do serious work on a tablet?

Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.

Have you ever connected an iPad to an external display, mouse, and keyboard? I agree with you that laptop sales would continue, but I bet they would decline. Apple could do the MS Surface much better than MS did.

I’m not so sure personally. A MacBook Air is not that much less portable than an iPad, but is far more useful for work when not docked than an iPad because it still has a keyboard and a precision pointing device. And it can still be docked when you need a bigger screen.

The areas where the iPad beats the MacBook are still (imo) the same as the day it launched: web browsing, watching video, and reading. Workloads that are heavy on the Apple Pencil too, but that’s a fairly narrow slice compared to anything else you might do on a computer.

I mean my iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard case has fully replaced my Mac for everything. I haven’t touched my Mac in months. I literally do all of my work via GitHub Codespaces (soon to be self-hosted Coder). Yes it’s not all on device but it works (for me).

I don’t see anything in my use case that I’d gain from a MacBook over this setup.

Let’s just ignore the price comparison though lol

Yeah I used a Magic Keyboard myself for a while but I found it significantly impacted what I liked about the iPad. It doubled the weight, and removed the ability to hold it in my hand or in portrait (still the most common orientation I use mine). Sure you can take it out any time, but I found it just added a lot of extra friction to a device that previously had very little (iPadOS aside). Glad it’s working well for you though.

That's what I thought when they announced the folding phone, but iPad sales

What are you talking about?

A MacBook is optimized for a larger screen and comes with a better keyboard and trackpad.

I use both my MacBook and iPad all the time, because their hardware form factors are better for different things.

I don't want to read books on my MacBook and I don't want to do development or writing on my iPad.

I briefly tried using my iPad as a Mac through the screen sharing. It's not as useful as you are imagining.

do you not consider your phone a "useful computer"?

I'm guessing they mean one of the following:

-Installing software without App Store approval filtering

-True multi-tasking and background execution (though this hurts battery)

-Write iOS apps from an iPad

I certainly don't. You simply cannot get actual work done on a phone anywhere near as easily as on a real computer. There's a reason that companies issue laptops (or have desktops even) instead of giving employees a phone.

This is the biggest disappointment, imagine running a full blown "Ubuntu Touch" that gives you the freedom of Linux with full root access. This is the biggest failure of legislation in the 21st century so far that has enabled a strict Android/iOS duopoly.

I sincerely hope one day we can free these hardware devices from the shakles of their software and run anything that's possible.

Until such a time iOS devices are strictly off limits until at least a grapheneOS can run iOS at a minimum.

You can already run postmarketOS or PureOS on a phone and get the full desktop mode with no restrictions, except the computing power.

* Select models only. Limitations and restrictions apply. Warranty void in all countries.

Every phone has its own limitations and restrictions, don't they?

> Warranty void in all countries.

This not true for Librem 5 running PureOS.

The iOS app iSH [0] allows you to do this, it’s a full blown Alpine environment running through x86 emulation in the app. I’ve been using it for a while, as far as I can tell almost all of the Alpine packages run without any issues.

[0] https://ish.app/

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