USB-C and Modular Smartphones Are the End-Game for Convergence

This notion that we'd all suddenly want to do that for phones seems to me perhaps a little bit unfounded.

Especially when you consider that there was 0 engineering involved in building your own custom computer from different parts (unless you took a deep dive into custom cooling rigs or mini towers). i.e. you generally bought a mid sized tower and put in your parts. Space was barely a concern and there weren't any space related tradeoffs.

On mobile devices however, space is everything. Bigger screen? Won't fit in the pocket, or it'll be too heavy, and it'll draw more power. Bigger battery? Less space for the CPU or storage, or a camera module.

Not only are companies (with this being their core competency) generally better equipped to make these decisions, but they're also much better equipped to minimize the tradeoffs. They can engineer a camera module and a bigger battery, not just by engineering a better camera/battery module separately, but by engineering them to fit into a smaller space together. All the soldering-type stuff I like to complain about has, beyond business reasons, genuine engineering reasons, too.

Add to that the fact that smartphones aren't quite a fashion statement (in the way that creating a modular smartphone would be like choosing what clothes to wear), but are in a way a reputational statement (in that people do like thin, slick looking phones), I don't see how modular phones can really take off, with few people caring that you can customize them for fashion, and most people preferring the non-modular phone that's as thin and slick as you can get, because it's all soldered on and sitting in a unibody.

And none of this is unique. We tend to prefer the completely designed experience. We don't want to buy separate pieces and construct our own chair or table or our cars.

Modularity feels like creating pages from different books and turning it into a story. You don't get the same cohesion. Or going to the golden corral and ordering pasta, a steak, sushi and pie. It doesn't make a good meal no matter how good the individual pieces. A properly designed course around a set of ingredients or a theme is always better, especially when curated by professionals.

Does that mean we don't want choice or can't handle it? No. I just think that we find modularity, in a very loose sense of the word, in the product offering. All the different phone manufacturers ARE the modularisation and personalisation of the smartphone. Hell Samsung alone has put out 200 phones.

Many vendors do, and quite a few of them experiment. e.g. the phablet was a big experiment that saw a market demand. We've seen battery powerhouses. We've seen tiny-bezel phones with a large chin. We've seen phones with an insane amount of megapixels on the camera, phones built for selfies, phones with a curved display, phones that integrate with digital covers etc.

So the choice is really there.

In the end I think the flagship products are so well designed that the need for tradeoffs will diminish. In some ways we're already there. Phones have a good enough camera for everything except professional work. Phones come with storage we see on laptops. We've cheapish 'unlimited' data plans. We see insane resolution screens. We see all day battery life.

In short, when I buy a flagship phone, I don't really think 'damn wish I could switch out the iPhone camera for more storage, could do it if only my phone were modular'. Battery is still a big point of improvement for me, a tradeoff, but that's about it. It feels by the time Ara could pick up steam, the tradeoffs, like battery, are likely so small (ever more efficient chips, mostly) we probably won't have a big enough demand for different phone configs for different times, enough that we're willing to pay extra for the different extra units, and bear the reduced performance and form factor that a modular system offers over a single fully designed experience.

At the end of the day phones are becoming able to do everything, and the personalisation of the phone is all in the software (apps, themes, content), the choice of phone (again, lots of experimentation and catering to niche markets by vendors) and things like cases. I don't really see modularity becoming a big part of that.

That having been said, I love that I've been using my PC for 7 years, switching components every now and then. It's a pleasure. It'd be awesome to see how far modular phones could go. It might be one of those things that somehow just works so well and sticks, even if it's not the best system on paper, like say tcp/ip. Looking forward to ara going live for consumers this year.

And Atrix ended up going nowhere, because Motorola could not keep their designers in check. end result was that no two phones could share a dock, as the ports where spaced differently. their last, "universal", dock basically had two rubberized wires that the user had to manually fit each time.

As for Ara being locked down, you may be right. So far it seems that modules goes through a Google storefront, and they have yet to confirm or deny that trading used modules will be an option. Never mind that it seems Google will the lone provider of the endoskeletons. I find myself somewhat reminded of the early days of the PC, back when it was the IBM PC. I wonder if there will be a clean room endo firmware offered...

I suppose I need to justify that the cloud is better. It seems like a chicken and egg problem to me: people don't expect all of their data to persist between devices, so most apps (for mobile and desktop platforms) either don't integrate cloud sync, or do it in a haphazard way that requires effort to set up and is usually buggy and/or limited. Because most apps don't integrate cloud sync, people's expectations are set low enough that they don't demand it to work...

And this applies twice over for power users. In part because they're just likely to use more applications and more obscure applications in general, straying further from the beaten path and encountering wilder terrain. In part because they tend to use the command line, and command line interfaces are very portable, which means people still use decades old software practically unmodified, which is great in itself but ensures that it will never be possible to break expectations (e.g. file accesses might take time, and might not succeed) and expect most programs to eventually be updated to adjust to the new expectations. Not even over the span of a decade.

But for heaven's sake, NFS is 30 years old and allowed you to access all your files from any client. It's also completely unsuitable for today's mobile networks (or really anything other than a perfectly reliable wired link), but we've learned a thing or two about syncing protocols since then. Dropbox does a reasonable job at the protocol level, and works so-so with the command line, but is a centralized service (I think an ideal one would be decentralized) and doesn't aim high enough (you only sync one directory, and some applications use Dropbox-specific APIs to get smarter syncing functionality; it's not integrated deeply into a whole operating system). iCloud (+ Continuity) has the right idea in general, but is also centralized, and not (yet) sufficiently pervasive.

If this is so hard, why not just do the Atrix thing for now? -- Because while that can maybe be an okay solution with some more work, it's only a good solution if apps seamlessly switch interfaces when you dock or undock. Which is in practice is probably going to look very similar to cloud sync (data being transferred between separate applications), just on a single device.

There's the conservation-of-CPUs aspect, but I don't see a single CPU being suitable anytime soon for both maximum speed (when plugged in) and low power (when not). At best you arrive at a compromise that's not ideal for either. And do you really want a laptop dock that's a brick without a phone (i.e. if you leave the phone at a different location, or if you want one person to be able to use the phone while the other uses the laptop), if including a CPU and some minimal storage (enough to get what you need from the cloud...) would not be that much relative increase in price?

Do you really want to hold fast to a world where losing or damaging a device that you take with you everywhere can cause the loss of important data? I found the Google's goofy "people in lab coats destroy Chromebooks in amusing ways" ads (conveying the concept that no data is lost) pretty compelling; too bad Chromebooks are so limited even today.

There's the NSA angle, but the fact that most of today's consumer cloud services do not include client-side encryption and/or are closed source is hardly inevitable or unfixable.

There's the offline experience, but "cloud" can always be a protocol that can operate totally standalone on a LAN if necessary, adding the Internet as a communications channel when available. (Certainly today's cloud services could do better with LAN optimizations - if my phone and laptop are on the same Wi-Fi network, I should never have to wait for the Internet to get content from one on the other. Actually, this is true if they are close together, period. Use Wi-Fi Direct if you have to.)

I think we're coming very close to making this possible on both the hardware and the software front. Core M seems only a few generations of optimizations away from being feasible for smartphones in terms of power consumption (Atom is already there if performance is not a top priority), and Windows 10 scales pretty well between tablet and desktop at the moment, and integrating the Windows Phone functionality into the core OS seems like it could be a possibility eventually. The power management improvements to Hyper-V in Windows 10 should make it possible to run other OS's (possibly even Android eventually) in parallel with very little overhead and power consumption penalties.

There's no good reason to have a separate CPU in each of these devices. When you can fit a CPU that's as powerful as a laptop in a phone, why not just have it in the phone, and only have one computer? Then take the CPU out of the laptop, and plug in your phone when you need it.

Seems like the mobile carriers would be very much against this. They are currently charging per device.