[jiggy2011]

The lowest friction solution always has a big advantage. Under your solution I have to take a dumb laptop , a smartphone and a bluetooth headset with me everywhere and hook them all up together whenever I want to sit down and do something, bluetooth headsets are particularly cumbersome compared to putting a phone to your ear, not to mention that they make a lot of people feel dumb to wear.

A "cloud" solution that is fast and smooth enough will replicate the functionality of having one "mega device" without the drawbacks.

I actually think that the cloud will become the place for everything for a conceptual point of view. If you are concerned about privacy etc it will be possible to run your own personal cloud out of a tiny PC in the corner of your home.

Some concessions will have to be made for offline use of course (which I guess will become increasingly rare). Really though it makes more sense to think of your devices as an extension of your "cloud" rather than the other way around.

[Casc]

And why wouldn't you have to bring that hardware with you now, or with the cloud? What happens when you have no connectivity?

The cloud solution doesn't reduce the hardware requirement. This isn't even necessarily about reducing the hardware requirement.

If you need to run your own PC you now need the bandwidth, an additional PC sitting in your home, know how, etc...

The phone solution isn't increasing what you'd need to bring, it will situationally decrease the requirement, though, but that's not even the point. You don't necessarily need a bluetooth headset. Use headphones, speaker, or something. A simple microphone and headphone requirement isn't going to break the concept, it's really beside the point. Set up is a non issue, plug and play. Slide the damn thing into a dock built into the device.

The point is all your data in current state comes with you, apps and all. You can go to public terminals and it's all instantly there, you have the mobile experience, it's all familiar, it's always with you. I think cloud storage is complimentary here, not an alternative solution.

This can, however, situationally reduce your hardware requirement when traveling if your destination is outfitted with dummy terminals, and you get the benefit of local storage, which I'm not convinced cloud will be able to 100% replace for quite some time, if ever.

Don't forget you won't require internet access or any other limiting conditions, which may be the strongest advantage.

Our smartphones aren't going anywhere, they're more accessible than the cloud and they're increasingly attached to our side. I just don't see the cloud as an alternative, it's all about the use case here.

I'd rather have one device.

[jiggy2011]

I think that in theory people prefer to have one device , but in practice people are quite happy to have a house with lots of computers in it, after all space isn't a premium and it's nice to always have something near to hand.

Even amongst non tech people I know , most of them will have something like 1 Desktop PC , 2 Laptops , 1 Tablet , 2 Games consoles and 2 smartphones laying around the house. They could probably condense these substantially but they don't seem to see any need to.

I wouldn't agree that a requiring a headset would be "besides the point", I think being able to instantly grab your phone and stick it to your ear when you get an important call through is an important use case (after all it is a phone) and one that more than justifies the small extra expense of having a cheap CPU etc inside a laptop case.

Regards Local vs Cloud storage, there is no reason that this couldn't be transparent. For example , if you go somewhere and login to a public terminal it could detect that your phone is close by and offer you the option to transfer the state (if it is more up to date than the cloud copy) from the phone to the terminal via wifi.

Of course docking the phone into a laptop and using the laptop display/input to control the phone could be a possibility , I just don't see it as such a compelling usecase that you would see large sales of dumb laptops.

For example laptop docking stations have been around for a while and allow you to turn your laptop into essentially a desktop PC, negating the need for a desktop PC. However I don't know anybody who actually uses one very often in the real world. It's simply too cheap to just buy an extra PC and use Dropbox + IMAP Email to handle most of the important "state" for you. An ex boss of mine bought one, but replaced it with a separate desktop about a month later for example.

I suppose time will tell, but I would imagine that we will get to the point where just about everything in your home will have a reasonably fast CPU inside it (possibly 1Ghz+ devices even given away as part of a novelty toy in the bottom of a cereal box at some point) and the valuable parts are the Human Interface devices & software/data rather than the computers themselves.

[vidarh]

> I think that in theory people prefer to have one device , but in practice people are quite happy to have a house with lots of computers in it, after all space isn't a premium and it's nice to always have something near to hand.

This isn't about the number of devices people have. Or in a way it is, because having instant access to your data and state of computation "everywhere" makes having more cheap devices floating around even more attractive. Currently every extra device is a device that might hold data that is not accessible everywhere else, and that might result in data loss, and that need to be "managed" if only in the sense of knowing what you can do which things with or which one has those embarrassing photos and hence shouldn't be lent to grandma.

If they are mostly dumb shells (I'll grant you that having a $25 of computation capability or so built in as "backup" might be useful) and they are just appliances or furniture.

> Regards Local vs Cloud storage, there is no reason that this couldn't be transparent. For example , if you go somewhere and login to a public terminal it could detect that your phone is close by and offer you the option to transfer the state (if it is more up to date than the cloud copy) from the phone to the terminal via wifi.

Latency and bandwidth are killers here, and latency in particular is subject to nasty physical limitations. Yes, it can be more transparent. But network bandwidth and latency are both increasing very slowly. My mobile internet is still only about 1.5Mbps. My home broadband is 8Mbps. If I'm lucky I can upgrade to 66Mbps down next month. My wireless is 300Mbps. My wired network is 1Gbps. I have SSD's at work that easily does 5Gbps, and my home laptop's SSD can do at least 2Gbps. I'd turn it upside down: For personal usage, cloud storage, apart as for backup and sharing with others, is a workaround for the deficiencies that currently force us to use a variety of devices. It becomes less relevant as functionality converges and shortens that gap for everything but "overflow" as storage becomes cheap enough and easy enough that having it elsewhere becomes pointless other than as a backup.

> I wouldn't agree that a requiring a headset would be "besides the point", I think being able to instantly grab your phone and stick it to your ear when you get an important call through is an important use case (after all it is a phone) and one that more than justifies the small extra expense of having a cheap CPU etc inside a laptop case.

And how would it being a computer stop you from doing that?

> For example laptop docking stations have been around for a while and allow you to turn your laptop into essentially a desktop PC, negating the need for a desktop PC. However I don't know anybody who actually uses one very often in the real world. It's simply too cheap to just buy an extra PC and use Dropbox + IMAP Email to handle most of the important "state" for you. An ex boss of mine bought one, but replaced it with a separate desktop about a month later for example.

They are frequently used in businesses. But today they are less relevant because the trend is instead to buy "desktop replacement" notebooks. Desktop sales are stagnating to dropping. There will be more smart phones sold this years than PC's in total, and desktops will be a dropping proportion of that minority market. People opt for laptops instead of desktops, not in addition to them, because they are now powerful "enough" and the mobility, even if it's only sufficient to move it between rooms, is valuable.