[sixty4bit]

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.

[reportgunner]

Why even plug a phone at all ?

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.

[delusional]

Finally, I will be able to watch all these ads from anywhere.

[shrimp_emoji]

>phone desktop

>cloud desktop

Please kill me. :)

[smoldesu]

Cloud desktops are going to be mainstream long before phone desktops will be a thing, at least at the rate Apple is moving.

[drewzero1]

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.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2021/07/14/microsoft-unveils-wind...

[danlugo92]

Yeah, if you perform a migration to a newly bought iPhone, you'll see they have this nailed down.

Just needs to be an instant thing now.

[smoldesu]

Do iPhone migrations give you access to a secret desktop mode, or did you perhaps misread my comment?

[com2kid]

> 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.

[andai]

Didn't Ubuntu make a phone ten years ago that did that? But they gave up on it. I also thought Samsung phones could do that, too.

[delusional]

Samsung phones can indeed do that. It's called DeX (https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/) and nobody cares.

[m4rtink]

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.

[opan]

The PinePhone and Librem 5 can both be docked and used like computers.

[RedComet]

Yes, I'm hopeful for the day they work well as phones, too.

[mbirth]

MaruOS was a project that tried this for a bunch of phones.

https://maruos.com

[fsflover]

> 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.

Not three monitors, but: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

[emilecantin]

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.

[musingsole]

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.

[crooked-v]

> To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors

Rumors say Apple is working on a monitor with an A13 chip embedded in it for something like this kind of usage.

[deergomoo]

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.

[danlugo92]

> and the way macOS handles scaling means you have to scale by a non-integer factor.

There's no 2x?

[deergomoo]

There is 2x, but for 4K at >= 27”, 2x would make all UI elements comically large.

[tomjen3]

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.

[emteycz]

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.

[photojosh]

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.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/23/exclusive-apple-testing-new-e...

[tristor]

The Steam Deck promises this, and it's a big reason why I reserved one. I think this could be integrated nicely into my daily web-centric workflow.

[beebeepka]

Steam Deck is nice and I want one even though I have no need for one, but it's not exactly a phone. It's got fans I think. Give it another 10 years

[beauzero]

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.

[chronogram]

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.

[fsflover]

> The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer

If you have a single device for everything, you do not need syncing and backups are needed only for one device.

[zepto]

A single device for everything is a single point of failure for everything.

One of the great things about having various synced devices is that if one fails or is misplaced, stolen etc., the others are instantly available.

No single device solution can replicate this real world benefit.

[neolog]

Well, you can get two of them

[zepto]

As I said, no single device solution can provide this benefit.

And even having a spare doesn’t help if you don’t sync.

[wjnc]

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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Only gaming rigs consume 400W routinely. My current devices are drawing as follows:

  PC             40W
  Monitor        27W
  NAS box        2.5W
  2x Hard drives 16W

[stonemetal12]

I am really hoping the steam deck gets close to that.