There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. I believe Mozilla tried to invest in this pretty heavily.
But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
As others have mentioned, Samsung DeX does this very well. Plus, there are several apps out there for setting up a near Linux desktop experience on the device. Previously DeX itself used to support running Linux applications, it's a shame they dropped that.
As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra.
It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.
The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.
The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.
The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.
But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"?
Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.
Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.
Can confirm. I recently demoted my old Samsung S7 to be Wifi-only and work stuff-only. MFA, mobile email when I'm not at my desk, etc.
When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
The entire vision behind Windows 10 cross platform apps was inspirational. Code once run then across phone, tablet, desktop, and Xbox. And Hololens... I guess.
The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
Phones are powerful enough these days, but computers are more powerful. I carry work laptop between home and office, but I couldn't do work on phone. Computers are also cheap, I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as spare desktop.
The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs.
Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
> Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.
> There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. <...> But it went nowhere.
It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
I thought about this quite a bit when my phone and table started supporting Samsung Dex. It's a great system and I could literally do every single thing I need to on my phone.
In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc.
I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
> I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc.
> But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more.
Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
Apple has a better solution with Continuity, if you are near your Mac there is an icon for the activity you are doing on the iPhone that you can click to continue it on the Mac. So you can just finish an email using the keyboard if you want.
That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while.
You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
(VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.)
With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy.
Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling.
That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience.
(This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.)
I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
I want to like this setup, but the NexDock's input devices (especially the touchpad) are so bad. Like, near unusably bad. Which, for a device that's mostly I/O, is a shame.
I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.
Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.
HP did build a mobile phone with Windows Mobile (X3) and something they called Lapdock. It was like a slim Notebook, but just the screen and the keyboard. You could connect it wit the phone with a cable or even wireless. All the CPU and memory was in the phone. The Lapdock was just really just a second screen and a real keyboard. I have no Idea, why no other company made something like that for android phones. I mean all the tech is already there an it works (DEX).
iPadOS is mostly delivering on what you describe. Plug into monitor, mouse, keyboard, window manager, multitasking. Only gap is the “open/unlocked” bit, but Apple is making slow progress there.
It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
iPadOS has some real weird limitations when it comes to big screens. For example, the small iPads don't support stage manager despite being more than powerful enough to drive a measily 1080p display. Their weird window managed also makes for a suboptimal desktop experience, with the weird mouse blob making the entire thing look more like a non-touch tablet than a real desktop.
They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.
I just don't see the appeal of this. I still need a screen and a keyboard to use it in desktop mode. Then I can just bring a laptop. My data is in the cloud and my settings sync - so the only way this could be "better" is that I don't have to buy a phone and a laptop I guess?
I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac.
That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
I think there is a GNU/Linux distro which can do that. Not sure whether it was KDE Neon or some feature of Framework laptops or another one, but they had a video where they plugged the phone onto a screen and were aber to use both.
Does the Deck count? It's just a laptop with a weird keyboard, you don't exactly put it in your pocket. Attaching an external display to s device running Arch isn't all that unique.
I really hate the modern idea of locking down devices to protect users from themselves. It's my device and I should be allowed to install what I want on it.
Android's better than iOS in that regard, but that doesn't mean it isn't still terrible. Sure, you can sideload apps, but you still can't run as root unless your device's manufacturer allows it. And sure, it might have a built-in file manager, but in newer versions of Android, you can't read/write to /sdcard/Android/data without a separate device.
And this trend is even infecting non-phone devices as well. You can't install extensions on Firefox if they haven't been signed by Mozilla. The only way to disable this restriction is to use a fork or beta version (Developer Edition or Nightly).
Most people are using computing devices to do the specific things the device is designed for, quite often in a low-trust high-security work environment (even when this isn't explicitly how people think of it, it's usually the case - i.e. bad things happen when unauthorized access takes place). For the vast majority of people creating barriers or guard-rails around what their device can do is actually a win. People and organisations often put a lot of effort and expense into creating even further guardrails and restrictions a lot of the time.
There are hobbyists and professionals who take apart, repair and/or modify cars but it's also generally a very good thing that you can't just make (or easily authorise someone else or their product to make) significant modifications to how your car works. The walled gardens are really just computing growing up.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't actually happen on Android phones, and it doesn't even happen anymore in Windows, which runs with admin privileges by default. The toolbars and viruses were mostly a thing pre Windows XP SP2, and they were mostly gone with Windows Vista.
Ah yes, the “lowest common denominator” argument. Personally, I hate the idea that everyone should be punished because some people can’t handle something.
Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices.
Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system.
Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device.
My android devices have all come with basic file system browsers, but even better, I can choose from a plethora of full featured apps for full file system access. This is one of the issues that has kept me away from iphone, though.
Modern Android (11 onwards) no longer allows full filesystem access for file manager apps. Apps can opt into exposing some of their files for management by implementing a horrible Java API designed for cloud storage services. Some vendors' forks probably disable this change but that's not something that can be relied on.
Meanwhile iOS also has sandboxing but at least you can still meaningfully use normal goddamn filesystem APIs and there's now a system file manager.
Yep, this is the main reason I use Android. It also means I can modify things on the OS level to e.g. fabricate false GPS data and supply it to apps that insist on GPS access to be functional.
On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
So exactly why do you need access to the file system? You have access to a location where you can share files between apps. Any application that supports access to file picker gives you access to any of your installed document providers like iCloud, Google Drive, Box, an attached USB drive, a network drive and the local device.
And direct access via the Files app.
The one thing missing is that admittedly there is no way to add your own music to the music library on the phone itself.
The difficulty I had just copying things from one phone to another recently was ridiculous. You’re right, this should be a basic function. I have files I’ve copied from computer to computer that were originally from the late 80s.
I have this problem also with Windows, it's one of the two purposes for which I made https://dro.pm. If it's too large for email or there's no email client installed, I wouldn't know for the life of me how to copy things on Windows without spending >5 minutes setting up shared folders, firewalling, and then undoing the changes when done. Uploading to a website and typing over a very short link is done in ten seconds
Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.
For the same reasons Android just actively broke it. Sandboxing is a matter of user security, if you let apps violate sandboxing then you can't have a meaningful permissions system.
You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.
It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.
modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
iOS has come a long way, though. There's a local file system I can access and move files around with. I can run Syncthing on it (with Möbius). I can even run Linux on it (iSH), including a package manager. I can use qpdf to decrypt a PDF I downloaded with Safari, and I can even run Python and compile C code, on the device, with acceptable performance.
It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
You can't do any of these things without doxxing yourself to Apple, as you can't install apps without an Apple ID, and you can't get an Apple ID without a phone number.
A counter-datapoint of one, from me: I don't miss the file system browser at all. I have been a little bewildered by the iOS "Files" app, and the addition to the sharing widget of "Save to Files" - I never use it. I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose and that no one would ever use it, but I don't miss it and don't have a need or want for it.
Sometimes I want to collect a couple of files and documents from emails, and make sure they are both available and together in a place. That's about the only time I use it, but I find it pretty handy in those occasions. It's more of a temporary place though, rather than something permanent.
But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.
It can also do things my watch, refrigerator, car, iPod, washer & dryer, and smart lightbulbs can't do. Know why? Because they're not meant to write and compile programs on. Why would anyone want to write software on the ergonomically constrained (for writing software) iPhone? Just because? Gotta do better than that.
Well, I run iPython on my Pixel phone a lot. When I'm at home, I can ssh into the phone and edit files etc with a real keyboard and desktop display. I have many Python functions defined which allow me to do quick, but fairly complex, calculations on-the-go. I also mount the phone's filesystem using sshfs on my desktop machine. That automatically happens whenever the phone connects to my home WiFi. Much of this may be possible on an iPhone too, for all I know, but with a Pixel phone, a Linux desktop and a bunch of Raspberry Pis doing home automation stuff, I only have to know Linux. So I hardly ever write software using the phone's screen and virtual keyboard (although I do occasionally do it), but I write quite a bit of code on the phone using the desktop machine to provide better I/O.
It can even run shortcuts which is pretty cool for home automation. I don't own an iPhone but your comment made me check if it was possible to run actual commands on the different python ide apps on Apple.
This is a fun use of technology I lose by having my iPhone 8 Plus. Previously I had an Android phone I used to automate to the nines with Tasker and such. Having similar capabilities on all of my devices and holistically binding them together (as you do with sshfs and similar technologies) is enjoyable and has more utility than any regular walled garden. Vendors locking down their devices to prevent advanced users from unlocking its full potential is sad.
I'm switching over to Android soon - once my current phone dies and I can find a capable device with a headphone jack, replaceable battery, and USB-C - and your setup has inspired me to get back into this game!
How many people in the world do something like that? Even in the bubble that is HN, how many people do that? The average person benefits a lot more from a walled garden.
His reason is that if he can program it, he is no longer at the whims of the manufacturer. They decided that two timers were "bad UX?" He can theoretically add it back in.
I used a bullet journal for a while for the same reason. No longer was I waiting for an update to a todo app, or voting on features. If I wanted to add a "feature" to my todo list, I was in full control of doing so.
Honestly, the iOS tweaking community is a great representation of why you should be able to have control over your devices. Over the years many of these tweaks have been integrated into iOS as standard features. Granted, many of these were "duh" features like wallpapers, custom keyboards, Control Center, wireless iTunes syncing, etc: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...
This is exactly what I mentioned before in another thread about Apple and how visionOS will be a similar walled garden unlike macOS and thus it will be very difficult to use it as a laptop replacement, by Apple's design.
> Anyone else worried that Vision Pro will simply be a large iPad and not macOS like, ie closed app store and not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode you need to mirror your own Mac simply boggles the mind, it's like Apple wants to cut off the potential of the device at the knees simply to continue selling services.
AVP is another vector for vendor lock-in, same as iOS. It cannot even do video out from a Macbook, because then you might actually play a video or a game without passing through Cupertino's toll gates.
Huh? They demo it doing exactly this in the WWDC keynote video. The user looks at their MacBook, the MacBook screen goes blank and is replaced by a virtual, floating, larger screen, which can be moved in space and resized.
It's a shame, I wonder when we'll get the comparable version of AVP as Android or Windows is to their respective Apple devices. I definitely don't want to mirror a Mac to play games, lol.
That's something I've been saying for a long time.
It frustrates me a bit when you see these announcements for a productivity app on iOS, and I'll just sit there thinking "wow, this is almost as cool as the stuff I had on Windows 98...". Stuff like Excel have (historically) been substantially worse than their desktop counterparts on mobile.
Now, in some ways I do understand why this is; I suspect the people making the apps figure that if you're doing "real" work, you'll probably still defer to a "real" computer running Windows or macOS or Linux, but that sort of implies that smartphones aren't "real" computers.
My iPhone 12 Pro is so much more powerful than a typical Windows 98 computer that I'm not even sure how you'd quantify it [1], but if I had to actually do work, it's not immediately obvious to me that the iPhone would actually be the superior option. Microsoft Office 98 is still pretty usable, early Photoshop is primitive but still reasonably intuitive, it's not hard to get proper text editors.
[1] Obviously you can look at clock speeds and "flops per second" and stuff like that, but there's other ways that modern computers are more powerful that are less obvious, like custom decoder/neural chips, better compilers and more efficient operating systems, etc. I think the safest thing to say is it's a lot more powerful.
I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel is designed around a mouse and keyboard. The tiny little cells, the dragging things to be wider and narrower, typing everything - everything is designed around using a very accurate pointer and a keyboard. I have no idea how you'd use Excel productively on a phone. Even if the cells are the same size as they are on a desktop, the screen is tiny, so you'd not be able to see anything. And if the cells are smaller, then they're even harder to use. They actually need to be bigger to be a decent touch interface, and then you'd be constantly scrolling around.
The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.
Did you actually try using Excel on your phone? (The Microsoft 365 app is free, you don't need a subscription to use many features of the mobile Excel app.)
The cells are displayed at a size that is comfortable to read on a phone (which means you need to scroll). When you click on a cell, you get two handles (top left and bottom right) to grow/shrink the selection. On double-tap, a small popup toolbar appears, where you can select Fill, which makes the handles control the usual Excel filling feature. The cell headings have handles to make the cells wider. It just works, and while there are no macros, and some other advanced things might be missing, it's pretty good for most typical editing.
Right. And we can see that by looking at the iPad, a device halfway between a full size computer and a smartphone. Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. The world's progressed since Windows 98 for good and bad. There are a multitude of cloud services that let you program from your iphone or ipad. Yes, that's not gcc running locally and yeah something's been lost along with progress. I miss it too. But we live in the present, not the past.
Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.
Excel on a phone is dog slow for some reason (seriously, I've run Excel on a Pentium II, you don't need this much CPU power) but the UI is fine.
Cells are large enough to comfortably interact with but not big enough to cause problems. The lack of space for UI hides a large part of the standard Excel ribbon, but there's absolutely nothing that prevents Excel from working on your phone.
Phone keyboards don't always need to be QWERTY. Setting flags on input controls to hide autocomplete or to focus on numeric/mathematic input is trivial. Microsoft Excel displays its custom keyboars optimized for formula entries for phones, with formula autocomplete available as well.
Word is dog slow as well, but Google Docs seems like a fine text editor for most cases. GDocs isn't that extensive a text editor to begin with, but you've got everything you need to type out a document. In fact, I think many people under thirty will be faster typists on the phone with autocomplete than in their keyboards sitting behind a computer. A whole generation is currently doing their homework on a phone!
I wouldn't want to program on a phone keyboard and tasks that need a lot of UI (like PowerPoints) probably aren't very comfortable either, but for Excel and Word you don't need a computer at all.
I don't know what office suite you've tried or what device you've tried it on, but it's really not as bad as you make it seem. It'll be terrible for someone who's used to working on a PC, just like using Excel is terrible for someone who's been working on phones their entire life.
Calling out excel, photoshop, and text editors (I’m assuming coding)… those are all computationally expensive tasks.
My mom runs her entire business off of her iPhone and iPad. I’d say that she’s doing “real work”. She just doesn’t need a discrete GPU.
My sister is in a similar boat with her business.
There are definitely certain classes of work that lend themselves to larger screens and an actively-cooled chassis. But many people don’t need the extras and are quite happy with the “mobile experience“. It’s just a different market. They love the updates coming down the pipe.
Have you tried using excel or google sheets on an iPhone or android. It is perfectly serviceable. In fact on many days I get most of my work done through my iPhone, if I don’t have to _write_ code, just documents, review PRs and attend zoom meetings. Especially after the GitHub app has become good.
It feels likes some of the office like apps on the browser at least let you read documents and sheets and what not but when you go to edit them they push to to install the app. That's when I switch to the desktop version of the website which lets edit operations proceed. Kind of a weird workflow but it is what it is, mobile biased to reading, and apps biased towards editing. Problem is I don't want the app.
There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc.
Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment.
I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
From a hardware point of view, your average iPhone is definitely fast enough for many types of development.
What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature:
Indeed, developing directly on the smartphone would be ridiculous. But, to be honest, I have similar feelings to developing directly on a laptop. There's no position I can place it at to have an ergonomic position; I always end up feeling like I'm hunched over a tiny screen. Which is why, when I get into work, I dock it and use an external monitor + kb/m.
So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
You're missing the point. The point is _NOT_ whether _ANYBODY_ would use them, the point is that you should own your device and be able to install any software on it that you want.
...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
> The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
People have been developing code for the last 50 years with command line ides. So long as the device has a command line and privileges its as fine of a platform as any, and orders of magnitude more performant than the hardware a lot of developers historically made a career out of. IO should be easy considering these things already have bluetooth and could interface with a keyboard. You don't need a mouse for command line work after all.
I’d choose to use Xcode on Mac, but you _can_ write apps in Swift Playgrounds on iPad, and even upload them to App Store Connect for publication in the App Store.
If there were iOS dev tools on the iPhone, I think they’d probably be built around Xcode’s Interface Builder and resemble something like a touch friendly version of Visual Basic or REALBasic, simply because the smartphone typing experience is so ill-suited for writing code.
On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
You know what though? Shortcuts exists on iOS. What is shortcuts? It’s a visual programming language for making apps on your iPhone. It allows you to interact and program your phone in a sensible manner for a small screen. Yeah it doesn’t give you keys to the kingdom, but the types of things you might want to do to automate using your phone are there.
I've seen those but never fully comprehended what it was about or experimented. I need to watch some Youtube videos on the subject and take a bite into that world.
"e-waste consumption slabs" really does a disservice to all of the art that has been created with these devices (visual, auditory, textual), all of the communities that have been built by information sharing and network effects, education that has come from looking up anything at any time, and the exploration that apps like Maps, Weather, Translate, etc encourage and enable.
"I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.
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But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra.
It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.
The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.
The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.
The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.
But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.
Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum
The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs.
Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
I hate to break it to you, but outside of tech, a lot of people have no desktop, no laptop, and just a smartphone these days.
It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc.
I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
> But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more.
Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while.
You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
However, we'll just have to accept that most people don't want this. It's a niche use case.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO>
(VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.)
With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy.
Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling.
That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience.
(This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.)
I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co...
Hardware side:
https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/
I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
It's fine? Never stuck with it
... and the UserLAnd app then gives a normal Linux terminal with all tools or Linux Desktop apps.
If you live in the EU.
I look forward to Emacs on the ipad.
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It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac.
That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
Android's better than iOS in that regard, but that doesn't mean it isn't still terrible. Sure, you can sideload apps, but you still can't run as root unless your device's manufacturer allows it. And sure, it might have a built-in file manager, but in newer versions of Android, you can't read/write to /sdcard/Android/data without a separate device.
And this trend is even infecting non-phone devices as well. You can't install extensions on Firefox if they haven't been signed by Mozilla. The only way to disable this restriction is to use a fork or beta version (Developer Edition or Nightly).
There are hobbyists and professionals who take apart, repair and/or modify cars but it's also generally a very good thing that you can't just make (or easily authorise someone else or their product to make) significant modifications to how your car works. The walled gardens are really just computing growing up.
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2023...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213757
Yikes!
I think that purpose you're ascribing isn't entirely right. It's many things, but not just that.
This is what happens when you give a user the ability to install whatever he wants. This is what still happens for a lot of android phones.
"Some people are bad drivers so all humans must be banned from driving"
What is the psychological cause of such subservience to a corporate entity?
Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system.
Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device.
Really wish it wasn't this way.
Meanwhile iOS also has sandboxing but at least you can still meaningfully use normal goddamn filesystem APIs and there's now a system file manager.
On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
And direct access via the Files app.
The one thing missing is that admittedly there is no way to add your own music to the music library on the phone itself.
Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/more-than-1000-android-apps...
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...
You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.
It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.
It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/https://ubports.com/
Just a random example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pyto-python-3/id1436650069
It can even run shortcuts which is pretty cool for home automation. I don't own an iPhone but your comment made me check if it was possible to run actual commands on the different python ide apps on Apple.
I'm switching over to Android soon - once my current phone dies and I can find a capable device with a headphone jack, replaceable battery, and USB-C - and your setup has inspired me to get back into this game!
I used a bullet journal for a while for the same reason. No longer was I waiting for an update to a todo app, or voting on features. If I wanted to add a "feature" to my todo list, I was in full control of doing so.
> Anyone else worried that Vision Pro will simply be a large iPad and not macOS like, ie closed app store and not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode you need to mirror your own Mac simply boggles the mind, it's like Apple wants to cut off the potential of the device at the knees simply to continue selling services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36329540
Huh? They demo it doing exactly this in the WWDC keynote video. The user looks at their MacBook, the MacBook screen goes blank and is replaced by a virtual, floating, larger screen, which can be moved in space and resized.
It frustrates me a bit when you see these announcements for a productivity app on iOS, and I'll just sit there thinking "wow, this is almost as cool as the stuff I had on Windows 98...". Stuff like Excel have (historically) been substantially worse than their desktop counterparts on mobile.
Now, in some ways I do understand why this is; I suspect the people making the apps figure that if you're doing "real" work, you'll probably still defer to a "real" computer running Windows or macOS or Linux, but that sort of implies that smartphones aren't "real" computers.
My iPhone 12 Pro is so much more powerful than a typical Windows 98 computer that I'm not even sure how you'd quantify it [1], but if I had to actually do work, it's not immediately obvious to me that the iPhone would actually be the superior option. Microsoft Office 98 is still pretty usable, early Photoshop is primitive but still reasonably intuitive, it's not hard to get proper text editors.
[1] Obviously you can look at clock speeds and "flops per second" and stuff like that, but there's other ways that modern computers are more powerful that are less obvious, like custom decoder/neural chips, better compilers and more efficient operating systems, etc. I think the safest thing to say is it's a lot more powerful.
The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.
The cells are displayed at a size that is comfortable to read on a phone (which means you need to scroll). When you click on a cell, you get two handles (top left and bottom right) to grow/shrink the selection. On double-tap, a small popup toolbar appears, where you can select Fill, which makes the handles control the usual Excel filling feature. The cell headings have handles to make the cells wider. It just works, and while there are no macros, and some other advanced things might be missing, it's pretty good for most typical editing.
Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.
Cells are large enough to comfortably interact with but not big enough to cause problems. The lack of space for UI hides a large part of the standard Excel ribbon, but there's absolutely nothing that prevents Excel from working on your phone.
Phone keyboards don't always need to be QWERTY. Setting flags on input controls to hide autocomplete or to focus on numeric/mathematic input is trivial. Microsoft Excel displays its custom keyboars optimized for formula entries for phones, with formula autocomplete available as well.
Word is dog slow as well, but Google Docs seems like a fine text editor for most cases. GDocs isn't that extensive a text editor to begin with, but you've got everything you need to type out a document. In fact, I think many people under thirty will be faster typists on the phone with autocomplete than in their keyboards sitting behind a computer. A whole generation is currently doing their homework on a phone!
I wouldn't want to program on a phone keyboard and tasks that need a lot of UI (like PowerPoints) probably aren't very comfortable either, but for Excel and Word you don't need a computer at all.
I don't know what office suite you've tried or what device you've tried it on, but it's really not as bad as you make it seem. It'll be terrible for someone who's used to working on a PC, just like using Excel is terrible for someone who's been working on phones their entire life.
Pretty good setup for people who’s only computer is their phone.
My mom runs her entire business off of her iPhone and iPad. I’d say that she’s doing “real work”. She just doesn’t need a discrete GPU.
My sister is in a similar boat with her business.
There are definitely certain classes of work that lend themselves to larger screens and an actively-cooled chassis. But many people don’t need the extras and are quite happy with the “mobile experience“. It’s just a different market. They love the updates coming down the pipe.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...
There is a more compelling argument about the iPad not being able to do software development since it is marketed as a laptop replacement.
Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment.
I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature:
https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
https://youtu.be/Ku6eQvYRDrk?t=342
So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
Tell that to those of us that wrote games on a TI-83.
On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
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Wow, this quote really hits the nail on the head.
"I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.