[michaelmrose]

In theory this makes tons of sense but despite microbenchmarks your expensive phone is still a kind of mediocre little computer and for optimal usage needs more ports a display, keyboard, pointing device, and battery.

Basically it needs everything but the motherboard/cpu/ram meaning you need a $500 peripheral to turn your awesome $1000 dollar phone into a merely OK computer.

If you really want to save money you probably have a $400 laptop and a $100 phone. If you have money to spend a $1000 phone AND a $1500 laptop will be a nicer experience.

With support for arm software better than ever before and better hardware available cheaper than ever before its better than it has ever been for this idea but it would still be a compromise that you have to convince your customer they ought to both pay substantially for and accept.

[bitwize]

Not true in the Apple ecosystem. The Apple Silicon chips in recent iPhones can trounce desktop chips from a few years ago, and the next-gen iPhone should rival a high-spec desktop from today.

[michaelmrose]

A high spec desktop from today has 32 3.7Ghz cores that 1 to 1 spank apple silicons 4 fast cores 32GB - 1TB of RAM and GBps of access up to TBs of storage or slower access to 10s of TB. It can use 1000W if need be and active cooling.

Claims that Apple is going to blow the rest of the market away usually revolve around

- Careful choice of chips usually involving only apple hardware running less than current generation hardware in thermally constrained situations

- Pretending that AMD doesn't exist

- Pretending that both Intel's slump in progress and Apple's progress are permanent unchangeable trajectories rather than the current status.

- Pretending that we can anticipate a fixed factor improvement over a given time based on changing power envelope. The just add power argument that suggests that future desktop chips will n times faster based on having n times the power and cooling an oversimplification an apple engineer is unlikely to make. You haven't made this one of course you think they will be able to blow away the 1000 watt desktop in 7 Watts. Which is more interesting yet.

- Pretending that a favorable microbenchmark chosen primary because it reflects desired reality rather than applicability proves not only anything about real world performance but everything.

The 2022 iphone still wouldn't make a great computer and the Apple atrix if it were to come to pass would still require you to buy hardware that is liable to be nearly as expensive to make and as bulky as a macbook for a worse experience. Why would a premium buyer want that?

Can you imagine Apple trying to make a laptop with a phone sticking out of it cool? Sliding it into something would be problematic for cooling. The sheer uncoolness is probably even more fatal than the performance.

[mcny]

Sorry if it sounds like I’m moving the goalpost but no. Apple, Android doesn’t matter. They are all trash.

The fact that I can’t remove the battery, and have the phone working when connected to external power makes every single phone (even those with user serviceable battery) garbage.

I don’t know of a single recent phone that works off of external power. Personally, I think this is enough to prohibit sale of a device.

What I expect when a device is connected to power is for it to

1. work off of external power directly

2. charge the battery to an optimal level (possibly 60 to 80 percent?) and STOP charging

I’d have thought this was the default way all electronics works. I know for a fact that my 2006 MacBook just worked if I remove the battery. Same with my random Asus N61JVx2 notebook computer as well.

Why can’t new devices do this?

[seba_dos1]

FWIW, the Librem 5 can fully work with no battery (including the cellular modem and WiFi, which often don't work with no battery on other phones) as long as it's connected to a powerful enough USB-PD power source. You can also reconfigure the battery charger directly via its I2C interface: https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/bq25895.pdf

[michaelmrose]

I believe the reason is typically because they want to make the design of chargers cheaper and the circuitry inside simpler and ergo cheaper as well. What you want has a slightly higher unit cost and in 99.99% of cases doesn't impact the users usage.

Laptops are designed to run off battery or power because this is how many people typically use laptops. They plug them in places where they use them for long periods of time whereas phones are virtually always charged for a short period of time often overnight and then carried around and used unplugged virtually all of the time.

I have found the best solution to be to acquire hardware with more than sufficient battery power so as to only worry about charging it every 2-3 days when I'm sleeping. Phones exist with up to 5AH of battery power.

[mcny]

> I believe the reason is typically because they want to make the design of chargers cheaper and the circuitry inside simpler and ergo cheaper as well. What you want has a slightly higher unit cost and in 99.99% of cases doesn't impact the users usage.

Makes sense but really given how much every company harps about going green... I don’t know whether a lot of people use their phones while charging but I think they do. At least I do.

You brought up a good point though. I should just get a phone with a huge battery. So no pixel and no iPhone.

[abdulmuhaimin]

> 1. work off of external power directly

> 2. charge the battery to an optimal level (possibly 60 to 80 percent?) and STOP charging

Asus Rog phone 3 & 5 actually have this bypass charging, and to restrict charging level(but can only set between 80%-100%).

[29083011397778]

The USB-C port doesn't provide enough power for the Wi-Fi radio to work, but ethernet (via USB-C hub) would work fine. Excluding that (major) use-case, the Pinephone works just fine using external power instead of the battery. Hell, for that matter, I'm tempted to find out if an external Wi-Fi dongle would work...

[seba_dos1]

The cellular modem also doesn't work without battery on the PinePhone (it does on the Librem 5 though). It's not a matter of providing enough power - on the PinePhone (and many other phones as well) those things are powered straight from the battery, because to make it work otherwise you have to provide enough capacitance to handle big power spikes (which the Librem 5 does, as it's not meant to optimize for low price or thickness).

[ac29]

Is it an OS thing or a hardware thing? I like the idea of using something like postmarketOS to repurpose an old smartphone, but I agree for long term use the battery might not be a good idea (especially if the hardware tries to keep it at 100%).

[mcny]

I have now fried two different phone batteries trying this: basically I wanted to set up old phones as time lapse photo capture using open camera but the battery swells up and becomes a fire hazard in a few weeks/months.

[michaelmrose]

Old phones seem like a really nice cheap high quality camera shame it doesn't work. Have you tried setting up something like a single board computer + usb cam?

[mcny]

No, so far I've only tried what hardware I already have like an old Nexus 4 phone with a cracked back.