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Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

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Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#61

Post by outworlder »

smackfu wrote: post #49
sitharus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can clearly see the cost of modularity if you compare my current laptop to my previous one. My current laptop is a 15" retina MacBook Pro. It isn't upgradable in any real sense of the word. My previous laptop was a 15" MacBook Pro. I could upgrade the RAM and HDD, and with little difficulty replace the battery. The upgradable one is 5mm-ish thicker and about 400 grams heavier. Not a true apples-to-apples comparis…

Definitely agree with you on the space/volume issue, but I don't think most of that weight gain comes from modularity. Because 400 grams is a lot of weight. I think it's probably mostly the hard drive weight.

Hsrd drives do not weight as much, unless you are talking about 3.5" drives, not laptop drives.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#62

Post by lifeformed »

This would be cool as a desktop. Yeah, desktops are already modular and upgradable. But if had this Lego-like interface, anyone could do it, and it'd be a ton of fun.

Actually, even better would be a whole computer in a single block. You could then buy an identical computer and connect it to the first one, to make a more powerful single computer. It'd add a little bit more of a boost of CPU power, GPU power, RAM, and HDD. You'd never have to upgrade; instead you just keep buying more blocks and attaching it to your old hardware. Of course it'd be less efficient than a non-Lego computer, but it'd be really fun to use.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#63

Post by justincormack »

lifeformed wrote: post #62

This would be cool as a desktop. Yeah, desktops are already modular and upgradable. But if had this Lego-like interface, anyone could do it, and it'd be a ton of fun. Actually, even better would be a whole computer in a single block. You could then buy an identical computer and connect it to the first one, to make a more powerful single computer. It'd add a little bit more of a boost of CPU power, GPU power, RAM, and…

Like this project http://rhombus-tech.net

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#64

Post by mason240 »

001sky wrote: post #56
mxfh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A replaceable battery, SD card and easily replaceable screens were all features of phones available more than 5 years ago, yet these features disappeared because the iPhone showed that most consumers don't value those features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product. Besides all points mentioned already, I just can't think of a way to protect the pin-connection from wear in daily use without adding an additional sh…

iPhone showed that most consumers don't value those features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product. Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features. There is no supply side market for these. There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!

>There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!

Are you going for satire?

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#65

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #59
001sky wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone showed that most consumers don't value those features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product. Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features. There is no supply side market for these. There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!

> apple is playing monopolist what? how does apple have a monopoly?

You're going down the road into a philosophical argument. Defining a monopoly requires you to define a market, which is a huge can of worms. If you make the market "computing devices" then nobody has a monopoly. If you make the market "Win32 API PCs" then Microsoft has a monopoly. If you make the market "devices that run iOS apps" then Apple has a monopoly. And so on.

The larger point is that consumer choice isn't there. You can't get an iOS device with a removable battery. That doesn't prove that current Apple customers don't want a removable battery, it just proves they value some other characteristics more, and the market may not be offering any single product that satisfies their optimal set of preferences.

When that happens it means there is room for a newcomer to disrupt the market. If someone started selling iPhones (or something sufficiently equivalent) with removable batteries, some people would buy them -- if only because it would double the resale value since the phone wouldn't become landfill after the non-replaceable battery goes flat.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#66

Post by lfuller »

regularfry wrote: post #5

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing. Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over meters from som…

In terms of performance, while it CAN be done, it would be several orders of magnitude slower than even the slowest phones on the market today.

I'll just take the processor module as an example: in a modern consumer processor, bidirectional bus speed to the CPU can be upwards of 25.6 GB/s (gigaBYTES) - compare that to the 50 MB/s typical speeds of your average 802.11 network. It wouldn't even make sense for the phone to have RAM when using such a slow interlink as it would be no faster than flash memory.

Yes, it CAN be done, but it would be so slow as to be unusable for most purposes.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#67

Post by rjzzleep »

i'm puzzled at why few people mention the busses needed to communicate between the blocks. sure it looks all nice and stuff. and even if you had a lot of money, what about the transfer speeds needed to communicate between one block and the other?

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#68

Post by Beltiras »

regularfry wrote: post #5

So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." Huge difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing. Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over meters from som…

I think the idea is really nice. Calls for some sort of standard for the manufacturers, that they converge on the Standard Shipping Container spec for mobile tech. This sort of happened with computer parts. Even Apple computers have interchangeable parts with their PC brethren, even the CPU in some cases. What you would need to do is motivate the hardware manufacturers to settle on the Container spec and the basic board and components can be built from off the shelf parts (like PC computers today).

If you manage to pitch this to the hardware manufacturers, that's your entry point to build consensus.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#69

Post by josho »

The reasons this will never happen has nothing to do with the technical challenges, but rather the business implications.

What business is going to invest in creating commoditized platform? Certainly not Apple or Samsung, they are busy figuring out new ways to lock consumers into their ecosystem. So it has to be a new entry into the mobile market.

Perhaps a company like IBM has the resources to build the base platform. (This is certainly beyond a kick starter). But, why would an IBM invest in creating a commodity platform? How does an open hardware platform serve their, or any other business', interests? It doesn't, and that's the real reason that we won't see a system like this.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#70

Post by idProQuo »

goshx wrote: post #55

I love to see people using the words like " this will never happen" like they could predict the future in any way. So many have been proven wrong over the years, I wont be surprised if this author is proven wrong again. This might not be possible now, with today's technology, just like 10 years ago it wasn't possible to have a computer in your pocket with multiple GHz cores and GB of RAM.

Past progress is not a sure indication of future progress. Phones have made huge leaps in the past decade, but now the leaps they're making are smaller and more incremental. We're hitting a barrier of how much power we can pack into a device that can fit in your pocket.

This article does a fantastic job of explaining whats up: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...

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