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Your phone is an entire computer

medhir.com

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Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#71

Post by hyperhello »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #59
hyperhello wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitrary is doing a lot of work. With MacOS you can use an iPad as a touchscreen external monitor. Try it and you’ll learn that it’s not a touchscreen OS. It’s not as simple as “not letting you”.

Maybe it doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but i take issue with it being a touchscreen OS. I suspect most people who would want to run MacOS on an ipad would attach the appropriate user interface devices.

Like a keyboard and trackpad, yes, and the battery would be in the base, and…

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#73

Post by medhir »

bottlepalm wrote: post #70
jsheard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was already the case with the M-series chips, which are shared between Macs and higher-end iPads. The Neo just extends it to the A-series as well.

Yep I know, and now using a last gen A chip, I feel they are really rubbing our faces in it. Like Apple is saying, "Nice iPhone 17 Pro w/ A19 w/ vapor cooling chip you have there; you know you run a full general purpose OS on it, but we're not gonna let you, nanananana :p"

No exactly, Apple is playing in our faces, all while people continue to defend the “differences” of device categories and the subsequent justification of shipping iPhones and iPads with locked bootloaders.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#74

Post by medhir »

etchalon wrote: post #42

Some people insist there is no difference between a product and a capability and I honestly don't know to communicate to those people.

My contention is that the definition of said product and its inherent capabilities is being gatekept by a corporation that would love you to buy both an iPhone and Mac, and treat them as separate. In fact, I do have both already! But I still want rights to modify my iPhone as the computer it is.

The MacBook Neo is a great example of just how fungible these categories are, at least as far as the SoC that runs them is concerned. I paid for my iPhone in full, there is no reasonable justification for why I can’t repurpose it / modify it as I see fit.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#75

Post by xp84 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #37
bigfishrunning wrote: post #31

Is this news to anyone? of course it is! The reason that they don't let you run MacOS is absolutely arbitrary, in support of you buying another device. It also allows them to avoid the cost of supporting MacOS in another form-factor. This feels more like a facebook post that would shock my mom then a HN article...

I have long wished for a future when I could just plug my phone into a KVM and have a full desktop experience.

Samsung DEX isn't far off from this, it's just that you're limited to Android instead of Linux, MacOS etc.

But Apple will surely never allow such a thing since their main interest is in selling as many pieces of hardware to each of the Apple Faithful as possible. So they with a straight face suggest that a single human needs an iPad Pro (which easily tops $1500 with the eye-wateringly-expensive keyboard and a storage upgrade) and a laptop. Nevermind that they may have the same chip inside.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#76

Post by xp84 »

7speter wrote: post #66
retired wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Dex similar to connecting a monitor to an M-powered iPad? Perhaps that will one day come to iPhone.

I thought i saw there was similar functionality as dex available on usb c ported iphones (and ipads)? You can hook up a mouse and keyboard, maybe even a monitor? I thought I saw it in passing… I still have a lightning iPhone

You can connect keyboard, mouse, and video, but you just get screen mirroring on the screen (or it can properly display a full-screen video in some apps, I think... though DRM video may refuse), so, it's pretty limiting.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#77

Post by [deleted] »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #61
ianburrell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much demand for using phone as computer. If you are at home or work, you can buy a desktop computers for cheap. If you are traveling, you need to find a monitor and keyboard. You could carry small monitor and wireless keyboard, but then you are carrying as much as laptop. People who need to work on the road get a laptop. People who need to send email get iPad and keyboard. Good example of the economics is…

Imagine an executive placing their phone on a magnetic dock as they sit down, which automagically connects to the screen and gives them access to everything they were doing before. Also easy to imagine a university computer lab where everyone brings their own compute and IT doesn't have to manage physical desktops. I'm skeptical that there's "no demand" for that kind of functionality rather than a lack of good implem…

[deleted]

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#78

Post by xp84 »

bottlepalm wrote: post #2

Anyone have a theory why Apple hasn't done this yet? They release an 'iBook' which is basically a wired or even wireless lapdock for your iPhone running OSX in a partition. Seems like that would decimate the entire Windows, laptop, even desktop market in short order. Everyone with an iPhone, no longer needs their laptop/desktop. Just buy a cheap iBook and there's a good chance it'll already be better than most consum…

Why would Apple want to sell a lapdock when they could instead sell you the same thing + a redundant SOC (aka, a MacBook) and then high-margin cloud services to sync all of your data between your two differently-shaped computers?

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#79

Post by iamtedd »

Arcuru wrote: post #35

I seem to recall the Carriers having some pretty strict requirements on the devices that can connect to the mobile networks. Anyone know if that's (still) the case? I'm not trying to defend Apple here, I'm just curious if there would be some kind of carrier validation issues if you slapped a full desktop OS on a phone.

I doubt that's the issue. Phones already have a baseband processor and OS in control of the modem. Also evidence if viability is all the Windows laptops with WWAN.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#80

Post by reactordev »

chmod775 wrote: post #47

There's nothing much special about phone silicon. They generally run a bit slower than their desktop/laptop counterparts because of power and heat limitations. At the top end on a desktop power usage doubles for lower double-digit percentage gains. You can shave that off and not lose much. Laptops are a lot closer to phones than they are to desktops when it comes to power and thermal limitations*, so re-using a "phon…

And here I am with a laptop with a 450W brick next to it to make it function…
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