This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it.
To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't know the answer to this question. I feel like the answer is yes.
The other idea is just to mount the phone to a head mount display and go VR or AR. But I feel like that is going to require way more advancement in resolution on the phone screens to get right.
We can get there. We are super close. The iPad with an M1 chip probably already has the power to do it. Maybe one or two more years and this is not only feasible but purchasable. I'm a buyer.
Scan your retina and have the screens broadcast your zero latency always on desktop running in the cloud that seamlessly updates, never has to stop or reboot and backs up every single interaction you have done in the past decade.
The screens turn off and disconnect as you walk away and reconnect to your phone (now merely a pocket-screen) with all applications adapting to whatever size of the screen.
Oh and of course your earbuds have been connected the whole time broadcasting any audio that might be playing in the desktop without interruption.
Microsoft appear to be moving this way as well with the recent Windows 365 announcement [1]. I tried self-hosting my own cloud desktop a few years ago on a raspi, and was blown away by how much work I could get done remoting in from my phone or old laptop, not to mention the seamless transition when switching clients.
> This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it.
This has been attempted multiple times. (Motorola's go at it and Windows Phone are two recent attempts that come to mind) Each time it has failed.
Reasons:
1. The upgrade cycle on phones is much shorter than on laptops/desktops.
2. Phone manufacturers want you to use their own proprietary docks, which means investing in their ecosystem, which is a non-starter for most people, especially since history shows such products will be discontinued after one, maybe two, generations. The investment just isn't worth it. (chicken and egg problem here).
3. Corporations already have fine grained infrastructure in place to manage Mac/PCs, and employees are pretty used to it. Of course your work laptop has restrictions on what you can do, and corporate VPN software, etc etc. People generally expect their phones to belong to them, they tolerate PIN policies and remote wiping, but that is about it. Newer android versions do support a dual work/personal mode, but that still isn't on the level of what exists in the Mac/PC management space.
4. Thermal limits are a thing.
5. Related to #4, pushing a phone at its limits all day long will shorten its usable lifespan. LiON batteries don't enjoy living next a hot CPU that's running at full load for hours on end.
As for cords, thunderbolt will take care of your bandwidth needs. Even USB 3.2 (I think that's the right version?) can handle dual screens, USB 4 can certainly handle it.
Is it doable with todays tech? Of course. Is it even more doable with some sort of cloud compute dumb terminal setup? Naturally, could have done that a decade+ ago.
I use DeX quite a bit - it's super handy for viewing photos/videos captured on the device (Galaxy Note 9) on a big screen with desktop like controls.
Also I have the Wacom One LCD drawing tablet that I often connect to my Galaxy Tab S6 and draw on in in DeX mode with ClipStudio. It effectively turns this setup to a nice portable drawing studio, with the added flexibility of being able to work on your projects also on the go with just the Tab S6.
Funnily enough, you can kinda already do this with a USB-C dock. I have one for my MacBook Pro, and when I plugged my phone in it launched a desktop interface that ran on my phone. It could only use one screen, though.
It's my hope the future will be more decentralized than that. Perhaps a smartphone is a portal to a dashboard coordinating a fleet of machines -- some in the cloud, some in the community, and some under your personal control in your property.
A high definition display (perhaps a projector or OLED screen) embeds a streaming device of which there are already plenty on the market. A computer with integrated game controller and advanced graphics sits charging on a dock, ready to pair and cast it's intensively, locally rendered graphics to a screen of the user's choosing. A room off to the side contains 5 or more smartscreens, ready to accept display from a personalized repository of cloud containers.
A touch-tablet hangs from a swivel arm under the cabinets above the kitchen stove, a swipe away from picking up a webpage from a smartphone or another on-network device. A UV light is embedded under the cabinet to help sanitize the tablet after cooking.
I think the intelligence gets decentralized behind APIs -- some hosted locally, some hosted through the internet. The user interfaces become more focused on context. You have various levels and kinds of input and edge intelligence based on the specific goal, all backed up by some handful of cloud applications. But a fleet like this becomes too hard to manage for an individual. So the specific deployments, allocations and budgeting is managed by an AI system that you set "moods" for through a smartphone app with some -- but limited -- advanced, specific settings available through a hamburger menu.
I just wish they’d make a monitor that doesn’t cost $5000. It’s basically impossible to find a 27”+ monitor that works optimally with a Mac because they’re all 4K, and the way macOS handles scaling means you have to scale by a non-integer factor.
Just give me the 5K iMac panel in a basic shell, that’s all I need.
If we can send 4k over a cable it also has the bandwidth to handle 3 screens at HD.
I am not sure that there is a phone that can do that though. I can plug my Android into my USB-C dock and it can display a copy of the screen on the screen, but that is about it. Doesn't even seem to work with the USB keyboard I have plugged in.
Your phone does not support USB 3.0 then (common with e.g. Xiaomi - these ports are USB-C but USB 2.0). The USB-C on my Samsung can do everything the USB-C on my PC does, including a 4K screen in dual display mode.
I would be a buyer too. I suspect the only reason it hasn't happened is that it would mean less revenue... why would I buy a laptop/desktop AND a phone then?
This rumour about Apple sticking one of their SoCs in a monitor [0] popped up the other day. Relevant here.
And their current Lightning->HDMI adapter uses an embedded chip that decodes a h264 stream of the "screen", potentially the exact same stream that would be sent via AirPlay to an AppleTV. CarPlay does something similar.
I was hoping this would be the general direction of Windows Phone. I want my big monitors at home and at the office (split time 3/5 and 2/5) and just want to carry my phone...without having to login to Windows 365...or a VM in the cloud...to do small to medium .NET development. Looks like Apple/VSC may get me there quicker.
I don’t know why you’d want that. The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer that has enough room to be always fast and quiet for my tasks that I can leave running things, while my phone is something that I need for communication which can help with information/scheduling and that I would like to have with me at all times. Having all my work on my phone would make me leave that phone at home and get an extra phone, I just wouldn’t trust myself with all that even if I have backups.
It’s a 400W+ machine blazing under my desk, with relatively low performance per watt and per unit of cost and high depreciation per hour of usage. With 6 ms latency to my major IX and the stability and backup professionalism cloud providers can offer I’d be all in for online desktop. Perhaps I’d invest in a bit more beefy Synology as an internet-down local machine, but my phone or iPad could offer that functionality as well. Going from full machines to terminal-screens would also save my household of 5 many kgs of electronics. That times a few hundred million households sure adds up.
One idea would be to buy out the investor. I read in one of the comments that you do have some cash to spend. If you can work out a reasonable deal with the investor you would no longer have a neutral party doing nothing, you'd own 50%, and be able to set the terms.
Many of your articles are coming from real clear politics dot com. All they do is show an image and then forward on to an article. Would be better to cut the middle man out. Unless you also own RCP too, then carry on capitalist.
Wondering for almost two years after this news we haven't seen a single flying car demo from these companies. Of course Larry Page's money is a good financial support but Elon Musk has repeatedly rejected the VTOL idea, it can pummel populated areas.
Customers don’t differentiate branches of a company when thinking about brand identity.
Google Fi was running a special, buy the phone from Google Fi and you get $800 off of your bill. I bought the phone from Google. Not Google Fi. It took 3 months for them to figure out that I was never going to get that $800. Every rep that I spoke with except for the last one said, "it looks like you should get this money, we don't know why you aren't."
The benefits of Fi out weigh the shittiness of their customer support, or lack thereof. And none of the other carriers are any better. That's the only reason I am still a subscriber.
One of my friends loves to throw the pizza restaurant analogy out all of the time. There are many pizza restaurants and they all have some different level of success. Each pizza place offers something just a little different than the others. Ultimately, the winners will be the ones that offer a better overall service. You already have "out-compete" in your mind set so you should be fine.
I like your analogy, I usually use a slightly different pizza restaurant analogy. In my town there are all sorts of places to get pizza:
- 1: Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's
- 2: Little Cesars
- 3: Mom & Pop shops selling ~$5 pizzas
All three types offer pizza (not identical, but still) and seem to coexist just fine but their strategies are pretty different: 1 & 2 spend millions on national campaigns, 1 & 3 offer delivery, 2 & 3 have really cheap pizzas, etc.
I think the takeaway is that product alone isn't enough, you also need a solid strategy to take a place in the market.
Yeah, this neighbor, Jamis, just parked an automated snow blower in your driveway that just sits there and waits for the snow, and when it does snow, it just goes into action and clears the whole thing, and your side walk, and then also cleans up after itself.
Capistrano is one of the greatest parts of Rails development/deployment. Thanks Jamis for ALL of your hard work. I am sorry I didn't say Thank You sooner.
To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't know the answer to this question. I feel like the answer is yes.
The other idea is just to mount the phone to a head mount display and go VR or AR. But I feel like that is going to require way more advancement in resolution on the phone screens to get right.
We can get there. We are super close. The iPad with an M1 chip probably already has the power to do it. Maybe one or two more years and this is not only feasible but purchasable. I'm a buyer.