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Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

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Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#71

Post by archagon »

codeka wrote: post #25

> the stated motivation for this design is to reduce electrical waste. The best way to do that in the short term is to ensure devices are more repairable Right, a replaceable screen and battery and an SD card slot would get you 99% of the features you'd actually want from phonebloks, and it's actually something that would be achievable (if there were demand, which I think is the biggest problem here: there's just no…

Another option is to ensure that most of your phone can be recycled: http://www.apple.com/recycling/

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#72

Post by 001sky »

mason240 wrote: post #64
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 !!

>There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !! Are you going for satire?

Patents and trademarks are legal monopolies. Because of these protections, there are no non-apple "iphones". As a result, there are no ipohones with features not offered by apple. There are no a-la-carte prices for the features discussed. plain and simple. nothing nefarious, its their right by law. that being said, you cant infer/measure market values in non-existent markets. that's what the previous poster was trying to do.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#73

Post by ant512 »

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 !!

> Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features.

They could have kept buying Nokia 3310s instead of iPhones if they thought that a replaceable battery was more important than everything else they got with the Apple product. People made the same argument about physical keyboards, and look at what happened to RIM.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#74

Post by kefka »

conover wrote: post #60
goshx wrote: post #58

You know... SK Telecom, in South Korea just announced speeds of over 200Mbps for mobile data. I believe that speed tends to increase over time. We will get to a point where smartphones will just become dumb terminals, using resources from a "cloud". We are talking years from now, but that could easily become the next big leap, IMHO.

Latency is going to the hurdle there. You can have the fastest connection in the world but if it takes 400ms to pull up someone's contact info, no one is going to give a fuck.

No, I look at this as I would connect my laptop to a supercomputer via ssh or PuTTY.

I still have a good amount of computing local, but for those heavy jobs, I can send it elsewhere and have it come back to me. Think voice-text transliteration, near immediate video processing, instantaneous (near real-time) voice translation, map stuffs.

And if we use a system that allows shared code to migrate from one machine to the next (think Erlang), then we don't even need that ssh tunnel... The estimated weights on a process would send it appropriately to the right cluster of CPUs.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#75

Post by regularfry »

lfuller wrote: post #66
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…

If you were going to do something like this, it makes more sense to think in terms of a network, rather than a bus. What you'd be transmitting wouldn't be the memory contents, it would be the (much smaller) computation results. That does have implications for where you cut the modules up (you'd want your GPU to be sat right next to the screen, for instance), but doesn't fundamentally damage the core idea.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#76

Post by kefka »

ceejayoz wrote: post #23
azatris wrote: post #6

It's also an appearence issue. Most women I know tend to choose their phone by its looks. Phonebloks would not appeal to most of them ("I see the screws!") and thus it is not a very marketable phone.

Yeah, sure, it's only women who choose a phone on looks.

Heh.

My girlfriend's complaint about her android is that it's all software buttons on the screen. She wants physical buttons ala blackberry (but absolutely NO blackberry!)

And a bigger battery would be helpful.... As would a better antenna! She remembers the old 5W bag phones that could get signal from hell and back.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#77

Post by jt86 »

codeka wrote: post #25

> the stated motivation for this design is to reduce electrical waste. The best way to do that in the short term is to ensure devices are more repairable Right, a replaceable screen and battery and an SD card slot would get you 99% of the features you'd actually want from phonebloks, and it's actually something that would be achievable (if there were demand, which I think is the biggest problem here: there's just no…

It's difficult to express demand for something that doesn't exist.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#79

Post by gwu78 »

A thought experiment:

What if just the enclosure was replaceable?

For example, if an iPhone 5 user could purchase an iPhone 6 enclosure and transfer his iPhone 5's PCB to the new enclosure (perhaps as easily as moving a SIM card from one phone to another), then as far as the most of the non-technical, status-conscious, exterior design-focused world can tell (this probably excludes you, gentle HN reader), does the user have an iPhone 6?

What if were true that non-technical consumers buy phones in large part because of how they look? After all, the differences in functionality between, e.g., Samsung's and Apple's, phones are relatively minor. Many phones from different manufacturers are more or less the same size.

Re: Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen

#80

Post by city41 »

I would not want a Phoneblok phone. I don't want to think about my phone at all. I want to use it, and put it away when I'm done. That's it. I don't want to deal with CPU blok A has a bug in it, or doesn't quite work with wifi blok B, or app C was written with camera blok D in mind and is a bit wonky with my camera blok E.

It's a major reason I've always preferred the iPhone. It's also why I no longer use Linux, same general annoyances just mostly in software instead of hardware.

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