[higherpurpose]

He doesn't see any advantage to a modular phone? Then I don't think he's looking hard enough. I stand by my belief that Gruber has backed himself into a corner where he now needs to defend anything Apple does, and attack just about anything the competition does that is at least seen by others as a threat to Apple, if not by him.

[skywhopper]

You've misread his statement. He sees the benefit, but points out that the tradeoffs will be the main areas of competition among smartphones: size, weight, battery life. All three will be worse in a modular phone. You'll also get less for your money overall. Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want. Sure, there's a market for a modular phone, but it's not going to seriously compete against the Galaxy or the iPhone in the mass market.

[joezydeco]

As a phone owner with kids, I just don't see this happening in my household. Modules getting dropped/lost (especially the critical one that makes the others go), connectors wearing out from constant playing around or, even worse, smeared with food and crammed with junk.

I have a hard time keeping unified units intact and working, much less letting my family near a Lego kit that needs to be 100% assembled to work properly...

[zheshishei]

>Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want.

I think consumers actually like a little choice in their products now. I mean, take a look at the apple laptop website.

Also, I could imagine vendors offering different phone presets (e.g. battery life, photo-taking, media consumption) and then letting the customer further customize it if they want.

[smackfu]

The same arguments can be used against a removable battery, but the flagship Samsung has one.

[sjwright]

And yet, probably 99% of their owners will never purchase a replacement battery.

For a given sized phone, a replaceable battery is necessarily smaller capacity than a fixed equivalent, due to space wasted on additional housings, clips and connectors.

[CHY872]

Well, the problem's just (obviously) that if you ever open up an iPhone (or I suspect any competing phone), every cubic millimetre of it is filled with things that do stuff. To add all the panels that bridge components, the connecting hardware etc can only add weight and space. It'll be interesting to see if Google can make it work, but you can't say that it's not unjustified skepticism. In terms of 'any advantage', I interpreted it as 'any overall advantage', and I think I probably agree with him.

[jacquesm]

No, Gruber has it exactly right, see my comments below on how an older modular phone fared.

[bane]

As a result Gruber has made himself almost entirely irrelevant. I almost can't wait to watch him twist himself into knots when Apple releases a larger phone.

[supercoder]

He's not suggesting there a no advantages , just that the ones that it does provide won't be enough to compete against non modular phones.