Hacker News Reader

Comment by nateb2022 | Hacker News Reader

nateb2022

I would love to see some "pro" features hit the Pro or Pro Max. Something I've wanted for a while is the ability to have more than 2 active eSIMs; I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.

Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD, and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick. Or (waterproof) exposed PCIE lanes so 3rd parties can integrate an ecosystem of backpacks like how Pi Hats work.

View on HN

> Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,

The old iPhone 17 Pro has USB 3.2 Gen 2, which is good for 10Gb/s.

You can already record 4K60 ProRes to an external SSD. This feature already existed for a year, so I assume you didn't actually need it?

> and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick.

I think you're looking for a MacBook Pro the size of an iPhone.

The MacBook Neo runs an A18 Pro phone chip. It's appears to be all there and somewhat ready to give us something like DeX [1].

[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/samsung-dex

yes, and the fact that it runs a phone chip is the reason why it only has one 10Gbps USB-C port and the other only supports USB 2.0 speeds...

Something like DeX is already lying dormant on iOS and it's already enabled on iPadOS.

But, if you modify the MobileGestalt plist on the iPhone, you can enable the "Stage Manager" desktop mode and connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and you get a desktop from your iPhone.

Caveat: due to artificial reasons, it's not really usable for daily driving due to the way the hacks work, but Apple could certainly make some trivial changes and get it going.

https://github.com/frs0n/GestaltEdit

10Gbps is 12 times slower than the maximum bw of TB5.

You could argue most people wont need that speed, but most people don't need pro phone too.

Something else will drop the ball guaranteed.

Can you show me the workflow which uses this and has an iPhone as the bottleneck

Moving my videos from ip to my TB ssd ?

are these videos larger than the iphone SSD or TB SSD DRAM buffer and will need to drop to NAND erase/write speed?

No, but i dont understand your point ?

The point is, with your example the link speed of the iPhone isn't the limiting thing of your example. You'll likely be limited by the speed of your storage before you saturate that link.

Yes, and TB5 also uses around 10x as much power, around 4W rather than 0.4W for USB3, which would consume the majority of the sustained power budget of the entire phone.

>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,

My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.

> I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.

Can already do iMessage over satellite. Most “data” is download and I predict some satellite service that sends basic broadcasts (traffic, news, Text-to-speech podcasts) squeezed into a few mbps by pointing your phone at the sky (or a small cabled antenna for around the clock use). Would love to go carrier-less.

Long ago there was a Usenet over satellite feed: http://www.art.net/lile/pagesat/netnews.html

Images that sync to mac photos app instantly via wifi rather than half day via icloud.

You can almost achieve this by setting a reminder to turn on "sync immediately" manually every single day (because Apple decided there should be no permanent or indefinite option, and went through the extra effort of making it timed simply for the sake of inconvenience).

I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.

I just don't understand why they wouldn't enable something p2p. We have handoff, screen mirroring, etc, but simple photo sync is impossible scientifically.

Fair. I usually just manually share with AirDrop when I need to have something on one of my other devices quickly, but I don't see the reason why the regular photo sync can't take advantage of the LAN

AirDrop is so finicky and you need to not to forget select option that doesn’t compress photos.

Isn't that a feature of the share menu itself? It likes to try to be "compatible" with whatever you're sharing it with. So if you try to share a video to Discord, it'll try to compress the video to fit within Discord's file size limit, etc. But AirDrop for me has always shared the full original file in Apple's native format without requiring processing steps.

I would like to see dual Thunderbolt ports on the iPad Pro. I wonder if Thunderbolt chips would even fit in a phone.

Apple Reference Image is the new "pro" feature.

*not so "pro" in EU and China

Well it apparently is so "pro" that it got regulated out of existence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com