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The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

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Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#71

Post by flukus »

bluedino wrote: post #38
losteric wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that standardization in the PC markets is driven by overlap between enterprise server hardware, enterprise PC hardware, and (incidentally!) consumer PCs... Think about laptops, they've been around for a lot longer and are much closer to desktop PCs. Why hasn't modularization transformed that market? What about tables? Answer: Most consumers don't care. They won't upgrade their PC, their laptop, their ph…

Modular design of PC's made the manufacturers all race to the bottom in price and nobody but Apple has made money from personal computer sales in 15 years.

How much of that race to the bottom was driven by a handful of integrators like dell though? If they were on store shelves they might have other ways to increase profit margins. Spending $10 more on a better component is an easier decision than spending $100 on a packaged product that you don't know the internals of.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#72

Post by autocorr »

sjg007 wrote: post #29
jpm_sd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Sorry. Physics. Compared to a lightweight device that fits in your pocket, an IBM PC is huge. Colossal. All the space you could possibly need for modular interconnects, sheet metal sub-chassis-es, proper fasteners, etc. etc. A comparably-modular mobile phone cannot be anything but thick and heavy, unless you would prefer fragile and unusable.

PCs were expensive which created the markets for upgrades and components. Phones are basically disposable.

It seems likely they only appear that way because the initial cost is amortized into the contract for most people in the US. An iPhone 7 is around $700! And flagship android phones are up there too. I guess people have a lot of disposable income or just see the sign-up price?

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#73

Post by tomc1985 »

onli wrote: post #6

I don't get it. This is a IBM PC moment right here. Imagine you could standardize the smartphone. Really divide it into block, standardize the communication bus. Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers. I even think this is how Google would have beaten the iPhone. Android as the OS for an ever-evolving phone, where if a user needs more ram he would just a…

I think part of it is that none of the OEMs really want to be just a computing platform. Margins are razor-thin due to competitive pressure from both the markets and from suppliers. They see Apple and Google and Microsoft dominating the field with their tightly-integrated ecosystems, commanding what is essentially a royalty on all "app" economic activity (to say nothing of hardware sales and everything else). And they want some. Bad.

Besides, public opinion on computing as a platform seems all but dead. This is a computers-as-appliance age, where everyone is punch-drunk on services and single-use apps. Power users seem to be disappearing; nobody wants to learn how to do anything and so much of what sells are just variations on a it-wipes-my-own-ass theme. Platforms don't work in that world; too few want to bother with them.

Nobody wants to simply build computers anymore, it seems. Too boring.

(edit: On the margins thing-- the big three enjoy greater margins because they offer greater services, insulating them from said pressure)

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#74

Post by flukus »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #54
WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, It did in the early days (the first 10 years). These days, the mobo, CPU, ram, power supply, graphics card all seem to need to be a matched set.

You've been active through the transition. Care to speculate why?

Basically the interfaces between the components became less stable, instead of a single PCI connector for every component and IDE for drives, several were around at once. These were stable for a long time because the CPU was always the bottleneck, then suddenly CPU's got to the point were disk/RAM and graphics card buses were the bottleneck. So probably nothing intentionally sinister, other than the lack of more future proof standardization when the change happened.

Now that CPU speed increases have leveled off things seem to have stabilized again.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#75

Post by tomc1985 »

grizzles wrote: post #5

Google mgmt fake releases and then subsequently cancels unlaunched products all the time. They do it to assess market viability and also to stymie competitors. Ara is notable because of the breadth of the project, but it was really just about protecting the android cash cow's flank. The strategy has worked pretty well. Android was released as open source almost 10 years ago, and you still can't run it on any semi ope…

It seems every SoC minicomputer builder offers (or has available) some kind of an Android flavor, you're saying they aren't doing that independently?

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#76

Post by WalterBright »

flukus wrote: post #74
throwaway91111 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been active through the transition. Care to speculate why?

Basically the interfaces between the components became less stable, instead of a single PCI connector for every component and IDE for drives, several were around at once. These were stable for a long time because the CPU was always the bottleneck, then suddenly CPU's got to the point were disk/RAM and graphics card buses were the bottleneck. So probably nothing intentionally sinister, other than the lack of more futu…

This. The interfaces kept changing at an accelerating rate. In the 80s people bent over backwards to not change the interface. That all went out the window.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#77

Post by nradov »

serge2k wrote: post #41
beambot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full modularity never made sense. The system-level tradeoffs for battery, screen, and antennas are just too astronomical. But one or two expansion slots... now that would've been revolutionary. You could add whatever mattered to you: medical devices, specialized cameras, etc. etc. etc. Instead we're left with shitty USB or audio jack dongles or detached Bluetooth devices. Suck.

> Instead we're left with shitty USB How is USB not a fantastic answer to the problem you described?

USB by itself is a terrible answer. The connector is small and weak so you can't hang a peripheral device from it without risk of breakage. The only way this would work is if phone manufacturers agreed to add mounting rails or magnets at a standardized position near the USB port in order to provide a secure and robust mounting point. But realistically I doubt that the major manufacturers would ever cooperate on that type of standardization.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#78

Post by kemiller »

autocorr wrote: post #72
sjg007 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCs were expensive which created the markets for upgrades and components. Phones are basically disposable.

It seems likely they only appear that way because the initial cost is amortized into the contract for most people in the US. An iPhone 7 is around $700! And flagship android phones are up there too. I guess people have a lot of disposable income or just see the sign-up price?

Starting price for the IBM PC was over $4000 in current dollars, for a dramatically less-capable device. It's not that upgradability wouldn't be nice, it just isn't as important as portability, reliability, battery life, or initial price.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#79

Post by digi_owl »

Every time they made a public presentation of it, further away from the IBM PC for your pocket it moved.

First it was that that Google was to be the only producer of endoskeletons, and that it would house custom chips. OK, that's on par with the IBM BIOS.

Then they started talking about how modules would only be available via their Play store, and tied to your Google account. They were not even sure if they would allow the resale of used modules.

Then they started talking about moving the mobile radio into the endo.

Then, right before official cancellation, they talked about a complete rethink where just a few small parts could be replaced.

Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

#80

Post by hackuser »

femto wrote: post #32
onli wrote: post #6

I don't get it. This is a IBM PC moment right here. Imagine you could standardize the smartphone. Really divide it into block, standardize the communication bus. Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers. I even think this is how Google would have beaten the iPhone. Android as the OS for an ever-evolving phone, where if a user needs more ram he would just a…

Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, or did the vast majority of PCs sold go to the dump with exactly the same configuration as sold? After a few years, it becomes a cascade of dependencies: Can't upgrade memory because the old motherboard won't support state of the art DIMMs, the bus used by current cards (ISA, PCI, AGP, PCIx) doesn't match the motherboard, power supply connector has different number of pins, an…

> Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, or did the vast majority of PCs sold go to the dump with exactly the same configuration as sold?

IME, it never did. Except for techies, hardly anyone opened their computers. I remember seeing some system offered to corporate customers that lacked upgradability (except maybe memory). At first I objected - what a ripoff - but then I realized the truth.

My impression is that PCs got their start with hobbyists and were designed for them, with extra slots and bays, etc., and to this day the designs are still adjusting to the vast majority of end-users. I think the first office suites included relational database authoring tools for everyone - as if most office workers would just whip them up as needed, like word processing documents.

Apple has always seen it differently: You couldn't (can't?) open the cases without special tools.

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