Mac Pros, Ara, and Modularity

It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everything written demonstrates the different level of granularity of modularity between the Ara and the Pro. But to the consumer, the forward facing arguments are exactly the same: "Buy what you need, each separately, and link them all, as needed rather than a huge AIO - one size fits all".

The Mac Pro is requires you to bring your own HDs, bring your own expansion cards, bring your own network gear. Which centers the Pro itself at the core of a modular computing center.

Clayton christensen , the researcher behind "the innovator's dilemma", says there are natural cycles in industries between integration and modularity. Basically , when the performance of a product isn't good enough, there's a need for tight integration. So the winners usually have tightly integrated products.

At some point people don't need more performance , the products are "good enough". Then a modular architecture becomes very usefull because it increased the rate of innovation, increases competition and reduces prices. At those phase the winners are usually companies who control modular products.

Now if we look at the mobile market we see signs of a possible shift: for many consumers , mid level phones are good enough. And jolla unveiled in 5/2013 a modular phone[1] that achieved good reviews.

Incidently , it's seems a few months after that declaration, one year ago, motorola has begun working on a modular phone.

So assuming we can extract plenty of value from a modular phone(an it seems to me that way) , i believe we will see a large shift towards modularity.

[1]The jolla phone is composed of two front, front and back. the front is fixed, while you can change backs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla#Products

Obviously Ara and iPhone fill different niches and take different sets of compromises. Neither of these is better than the other by all parameters, but each offers unique advantages.

Possibly the niche of Ara will be narrower, because the connectors are going to add noticeable cost. OTOH the ability to add an entirely different functional block right into the phone can be very valuable in some circumstances.

Of course, CPU and RAM need tight integration; I suppose these will come as one module. But the periphery, like radios, storage, cameras, etc need much less tight coupling and can use physically narrow high-frequency serial connections. If a connector is only 4 contacts wide (like USB) or even 6 contacts (like USB3), it can be reasonably cheap an compact.

Most probably a real Ara phone will have far fewer detachable blocks than currently pictured: a CPU/GPU/RAM block, a radio block, a camera block, probably an extra extension block for new devices (finger scanner? second camera for a stereo pair? projector?), and, of course, traditional detachable flash storage and battery.

The bigger problem with Ara-style modularity is that as computing power shrinks (in both size and power draw) it becomes pointless to think of modules of "a" computer.

There's simply no point to try to separate processing power out of any component that has other physical constraints. e.g. displays, lenses, antennae, etc.

So you won't want to slap a 'better' camera onto your smartphone to leave your DSLR at home. But not because the interconnect between lens and mobile "base" will become too wasteful or inefficient. Simply because that future lens will be a stand-alone camera and it will operate within a network of things, in which your mobile phone won't be a necessary component.

Similarly with any other useful components. You won't have to make any trade-off of space other than "what can you physically carry".

Need more storage? Put a storage pod in your pocket. Want a rangefinder? grab a 'network of things' capable device. Need more battery? grab a power brick that can charge anything with a capacity limited only by your willingness to carry it, rather than being locked into a form-factor unrelated to (and possibly in conflict with) your power needs.

It's my understanding that most major appliances (washer, fridge, etc) are less repairable than they were 50 years ago. I think it's because of several contributing factors:

* Cheaper manufacturing with simultaneous increase in quality control and reliability.

* More complicated objects lead to more costly repairs, mechanics have to be more skilled, so wages go up.

Because it's simultaneously cheaper to something and more expensive to fix something, it makes much more sense to replace than to repair. These effects feed off of each other, too. To make something more reliable and cheaper, manufacturers seal off more and more parts, making it more and more expensive to repair, and so on.

> We're already seeing workarounds - graphics cards are using two, or even three PCI-E slots to get that precious bandwidth they need. With 4k displays on the horizon, and textures in games being updated accordingly, we're going to need more bandwidth to graphics cards. At some point, we're either going to have to switch to two dimensional connectors like processors are using for GPUs (which will still only delay our issues), or we're going to have to move away from the 1mm build fabrication for our interconnects. If the later happens, we simply can't rely on consumers to properly line up lanes in components.

They aren't actually using the slot, just potentially covering a slot right? One of the fastest desktop cards out, r290x only uses one PCI-E slot.

I sincerely doubt interconnects are going to be the problem the OP thinks they will. First of all, individual connectors have not changed much in size, but the serial data-rate we can push through copper connections continues to rise. Fiber optical connections are already used to implement PCIe in many applications (Thunderbolt is, in part, a fiber optical PCIe link).

One huge advantage of fiber optics over copper is that you can send many data streams down a single fiber using different wavelengths and/or optical modes. This is why backbone fiber bandwidth keeps growing even over fiber links that haven't been upgraded. It's a function of what you hook up to the ends of the fiber, not the fiber itself. There is tremendous room for bandwidth growth in optical fiber.

Apple definitely doesn't need to use non-standard interconnects for the new mac pros just like they didn't need to use custom connectors for SSD's in their laptops. They just wanted to.

The Mac Pro is a very modular computer. The only thing set is the Cooling, Power and Case. Everything else is Modular:

* Graphic Cards * Storage * Ram * CPU - In the form of the entire motherboard but that has always been Apple's approach

Everything else lives outside the box and is super modular.

Modularity is going away, not only in Mac Pros, but even in desktop space.

AMD APUs are integrating the CPU and GPU together. Intel is releasing mainstream chips that cannot be physically separated from the motherboard (See the i7-4770R: it needs to be soldered on).

GDDR5 RAM, the mainstay super-fast graphics RAM, is assumed to be soldered onto a board. DDR4 will only support one RAM per lane.

Modularity is almost the opposite of market forces right now... as unfortunate as it sounds.

I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing a phone with modularity. Apple provides its customers focus. Rather than worrying about how they can modify their machine to improve performance and functionality, Apple's customers can be fairly confident that their machine will be reasonably fast, feature rich, relatively safe, and aesthetically pleasing while sacrificing a higher monetary cost and faith that the previously mentioned qualities will be fulfilled. You are very right that modularity on a mobile phone is going to involve sacrifices due to space constraints, and this is what we will see with the Ara. Interestingly though, while almost all mobile phones I've been exposed to in the past, this one will have swappable options. Basically I think this is saying that mobile phone technology is at the point where we can make some of the sacrifices but still end up with a useful device with options. It will be really cool to see how this plays out and if 3rd party add-ons will cause Motorola to pull back with this offering.

I'd like to point out that you highlight the benefits of modularity as improvements for speed, power consumption, size, and cost, but the use case you give is that you are writing an article on this custom machine that you've built. What else does your custome-made computer let you do that you couldn't do otherwise? And why do you think that the majority of consumers don't go down the custom route?

On a side note, I feel that I have to refer this article from the Harvard Law Review. It is a bit of a philosophical discussion on the "generative" aspect of computers compared to other devices/appliances. It's headlined "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan L. Zittrain.

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_...

The article hits the nail on the head. Engineering for modularity will squeeze out the benefits at some point. It's not some evil conspiracy, but ever-shrinking electronics and tolerances. It's going to be the domain of robots and high res 3d printers because we just won't be able to see or touch things at this scale.

"I'd rather make improvements to speed, power consumption, size, and cost"

I think those are optimizations that you care about - but not the average consumer. We're getting to the point where phones of the same price pretty much universally operate within a standard of performance, give or take a margin of error, and can run a day or longer without recharge. At a certain point users stop caring about further optimizations and start caring more about features. And that's where modularity gives a huge pay-off.

It is always funny to see the arguments of modularity age. Consider, the idea that a car is this somewhat perfect modular thing. While there is certainly something to it having some obvious discrete parts. Typically along the lines of what wears at a different rate from other items, the idea that it is modular for the 99% consumer is laughable. And I say this as someone that changes my own brake pads. Speaking of, the "components" of most computers are more universal than the average car part. Unless you are simply talking about things which plug in what used to be cigarette lighter.

> A screen has to put out enough photons that a pupil two millimeters wide can capture enough light from it half a meter away. That fundamental principle isn't going to change anytime soon, and since that's the largest piece of energy consumption in phones these days, power requirements aren't going to drop significantly in the foreseeable future

The technology isn't there yet, but I would love to see the day when we can make laptop screens (and the like) out of e-ink-like displays.

I don't like staring at backlit screens all day. A computer screen has about the same luminous intensity as a 40W bulb[0], which is not a pleasant thing to stare at all day.

If only we could figure out a way to make e-ink remotely usable with high refresh rates, etc[1]., we could rely on external lighting (which is usually available) and get dramatically better battery life out of our laptops and/or phones.

It could even fall back on "frontlighting" (what the Kindle Paperwhite does) for nighttime usage.

[0] Preempting any physicists' objections: yes, I know that watts do not measure luminous intensity (that would be the candela), but a 40W bulb is a familiar reference point, and this comparison is roughly in the right ballpark.

[1] Which is a big hurdle, and why I admit that the technology isn't there yet.

I'm not sure I buy the narrative about 1mm connectors. You don't currently line up the contacts on your graphics card - the card only fits into the slot one way. What is preventing us from taking the current design and doubling the number of contacts? Manufacturing tolerances get smaller, but they're certainly going to get smaller if we start printing the same number of connections.

Modularity is going to remain very very much alive, at least for mobile phones.

Here's why.

A mobile phone needs to be a certain size to hold it. There's always going to be a minimum size, beyond which it won't be sensible, it won't be usable.

See this? https://www.google.com.au/search?q=panasonic+gd55&tbm=isch

When have you last seen one of those being used? People want their 4 or 5 inch screen, it's as simple as that. The most frequently sold Android devices used to be fairly dinky 320 by 240 affairs, but at the price difference becoming fairly tiny, they've now given way to devices with bigger screens, higher resolutions and more processing power.

The Google Nexus 4, for instance, features a base frame that 's a fairly thick chunk of Aluminium. It's bezel features large back areas at the top and the bottom of more than a centimetre each. It features triumphs of miniaturisation within, sure, but the product itself isn't. It's designed to be used by human hands.

The only thing that really requires the space is the battery and the antenna. The antenna can be built into the base frame. It could even be a sheet that sits underneath the components that could also be replaced. Or it could be a bezel, similar to that starting on the original iPhone 4, that might also double as a bumper frame for the thing. Have a bumper frame with connectors and you're there. Or maybe at some point those extra 3 or 6 dB don't matter much any longer for the majority of the market, especially if a lot of the heavy lifting will be done through WiFi.

When it comes to the speed a phone can accomplish as it matters to the vast majority of the market, then size of the components to make that happen is not that much of a constraining factor.

At some point, the diminishing returns of a modular phone vs. a non-modular phone will bring it to a point where the performance difference, as it matters to the average consumer, will be about, let's say, 20% or maybe even 30%.

But when you can target the one aspect of performance that matters most to you and swap that out, if you can prioritise there, then you have the ability to make up for that.

If you then also have the components, on average, each last twice as long for your needs than would otherwise have been the case, it's just become twice as valuable an investment.

I like the size of my Nexus 4, and any performance penalties imposed by modularisation are outweighed by being able to swap out components and it being a better investment. There are diminishing returns to making mobile phones smaller. Desktop computers have reached a certain size and then they didn't really get any smaller because they had no reason to and modularisation outweighed that. Why not the same with mobile phones?

Seeing that computer running from inside the mobo box is like seeing pictures of frightened, malnourished animals in those Humane Society ads. Get a case, you cheap bastard! One coffee spill away from disaster...

Hadn't heard of Project Ara before, sounds an awful lot like http://www.phonebloks.org/

What graphics cards are using 2 or 3 PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots?

Can't wait to see the first prototype for an organic based cell phone. No modules, but software controlled morphing parts.

I'd much rather see modular, standardised laptops. Mine doesn't even have a removable battery.

128Gb, not 128GB. 16GB storage on the iPhone 5s iFixit tore down.

I don't see how the two are mutually-exclusive.

Kudos for the jjcm.org website.

It is more sad that people are seriously believing this person who is a designer not an engineer. "I do art and code and sometimes other things. This is my homepage, which as a rule of thumb contains nothing useful. This homepage is where I conduct experiments, which at any given time are usually broken."@ http://jjcm.org/

I am sorry but the only things that are non-modular are computers like the xbox360 and products of that nature that the companies do not want the user to change/upgrade the computer at nearly all cost. It is ridiculous to state that it is "inevitable" to become non-modular. Scientists have been backing the barriers of nearly every science there is in the past 50 years and as such you can NOT conclude that this is "inevitable" it is more likely that by the time we run into a space problem at the level you are implying (which by the way is ridiculous as other people stated... what graphics card uses 2+ PCI slots LOL) that we will finally figure out how to make the first bio-matter computers. Ie: a computer that has a cpu of nearly jello matter that will process data at most likely at first a slower but much cooler rate than our cpu's that we use at the moment.