[input_sh]

How does the author make the logical leap from "it'll use Type C" to "it'll have Samsung DeX equivalent"?

I think it's too much of a gimmick for Apple to even try, plus Apple is really not known for giving a damn about making their products work well with third-party peripherals.

[_ea1k]

As much as I want to like things like dex, I always find myself thinking that the real world application isn't really any better than carrying around a laptop.

[wredue]

Yeah. In a normal work day on a brand new i7 w/ 32 gigs of ram, I would say I get frustrated by the computer not doing what I tell it to in a decent timeframe more than a few times a day.

Now we’re saying “hey, let’s take a slower device with even slower pieces of shit applications on a foundation that worse at multi-window multitasking and make it what people use”

I’d probably blow my own brains out if this actually happened.

The technology is there for this to be usable. The dogshit development practice of “well, the hardware will catch up to my dogshit eventually” is meaning that “the technology isn’t there”.

Edit:

Case in point. This very laptop just spent 15 MINUTES cold boot till it allowed me to join my Teams meeting.

Granted the phone will stay on, so wouldn’t run in to cold boot issues. But also, I don’t want my work phone on all the time. That’s just letting work invade my personal time.

[_ea1k]

Honestly, I played around with a desktop environment with Termux on a Pixel 5. I was shocked at how decent it was. I could see a new iPhone performing pretty well. With enough RAM, it'd be decent for a lot of people.

But it'd always have the unavoidable downside of meaning that your phone was effectively tethered (even if just wirelessly) to your desktop. And at that point, why not just have a decent CPU in the desktop?

I guess it'd work well in a world where you constantly traveled between workstations and also couldn't bring your laptop. I've never lived in that world.

[drewnick]

I also have been using XFCE on Debian on my S23 and using it for VS Code and some dev work. It runs node and python just fine and is quick. It's nice because it is minimal. Having a 4K screen and only my phone and some peripherals is a dream. We are close.

[qingcharles]

Some apps are not available, or reduced functionality on desktop/laptop/web, though.

For instance, I'm forced to use CapCut on mobile device because the grown-up version is missing half the features.

[ojosilva]

The article mentions that iPhone Pro and Pro Max will have a Thunderbolt port. A Thunderbolt 4 port means double the speed of USB-C, 40Gbps instead of 20Gbps. There's plenty of powerful and legacy hardware that runs on Thunderbolt, like dual 4k monitors, so basically it's about hooking up an assortment of peripherals to an iPhone via docking stations, hubs or bare Thunderbolt. The only limitation is what you can do with iOS as a desktop OS today, but if/whenever macOS and iOS merge (with the help of Apple silicon I infer), we could see a new shift in portable workstation paradigms from laptop to phone. Even though some of it is possible today it's not there yet. Just like with cameras, books, tv sets, the iPhone won't replace "computers" per-se but has the potential to carve a nice niche in portable workstations.

[input_sh]

I don't disagree with you that they have the necessary bits and pieces if they wanted to go down that road, but based on their past behavior I just don't see that happening.

They've removed Type A while Type C peripherals were basically non-existent, I still can't have reverse scroll direction on my mouse and my touchpad (without using a third-party app), I can't create workspaces with a four finger swipe on an external monitor (but I can on the internal monitor)... My point being that they do the barest of the minimums on a Macbook, so I find the idea of them going all-in on supporting peripherals on an iPhone rather silly.

[kayodelycaon]

Some iPads already have thunderbolt ports. I think any advancement in hardware integration would happen there before it happens in iPhones.

[yellow_lead]

If the EU requires additional app stores to be supported, that door could open whether Apple likes it or not.