I was always intrigued by the concept, but never really wanted to buy such a device for one simple reason: performance. Mobile phones, especially back then, don't exactly have great performance characteristics for desktop use. The Atrix has a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, those were low specs for a cheap laptop even back then.
The same problem still exists on the PinePhone and Ubuntu's attempt, and Microsoft's failed attempt to use Qualcom chips as mobile workstations have so far all failed. When it comes to powerful yet power-efficient chips, Apple simply has no real competitor. Sure, AMD and Intel can outperform the M1, in some cases even at similar power draws, but Apple has mastered the base and idle power draw and caching that give their devices such a great battery life during simple, normal use.
With the processor unification, Apple may be able to provide a decent experience if they can think of a system that won't kill the battery (external battery the phone switches to?) and can cool the processor sufficiently while it's in a dock. Apple seems more than capable of solving those problems, if they'd want to.
I'm 100% sure I won't buy an iPhoneBook because I strongly dislike Apple's operating systems and the way the company itself operates, but if Apple fans will buy the product, competitors should soon follow with a device I'd find acceptable to use. Maybe, by then, the Linux smartphone ecosystem has grown to the point where it's actually usable for day-to-day operations (unlike the Librem/Pinephone/pmOS in their current state).
> With the processor unification, Apple may be able to provide a decent experience if they can think of a system that won't kill the battery (external battery the phone switches to?) and can cool the processor sufficiently while it's in a dock.
Why not just power the device off the lightning (hopefully Usb-c soon) cable used for docking? That's how all docks work now. When you're charging a single cell (most phones) you draw power from the charger, with the battery helping out during bursts if needed. No need to invent anything.
There are still a lot of things that you can do in a 4-core 1.1GHz Cortex-A53 / 3GiB RAM context of a pinephone, where performance is more than good enough.
Perfectly useable for i3 wm, terminal/ssh usage, light browsing in firefox, playing 1080p@60fps video, viewing photos, and plenty of other things, in docked mode.
Yes, so many people seems to be dreaming of that "phone that turns into a laptop" but I don't see it becoming a thing.
It might have made sense 20 years ago when everything wasn't online and sharing files was a pain, but nowadays it makes more sense to have independent devices than a single phone/laptop/desktop.
You need a screen+keyboard anyway, so why would you make that a dumb terminal instead of an independent device?
As kube-system said, Motorola had this, and Microsoft phone also tried to fill this niche. Personally, I would love to have everything in a phone, with a good docking system for my desk, interop with a living room large monitor, and of course supporting all the dev setups that I use. After seeing what functionality Apple packs into their Apple Watch, it seems like the tech exists for a ubiquitous phone device - if only there was a large enough market so a company like Apple, or a Linux based phone company to build it.
I'd love to be filled in. I saw some videos of Manjaro which was dreadful (latest version). Ubuntu seemed to run fine until you do something performance intensive (for 2005 standards).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop
The dock was a commercial failure.