Comment by wanderfowl
7 years ago
The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device.
This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There, I can access the 'pro' level apps we're discussing below.
On the couch or on the go, maybe I slide it into a bigger touchscreen with some extra dumb batteries, and it's now a tablet. Throw in a keyboard case, and now it's a laptop.
And if I'm sitting on the bus or walking to work, it's my phone, and I can edit today's lecture right there, or access all my files. Maybe I'm not firing up emacs or MATLAB, but it's still there if I needed to.
This, to me, is the fantasy of convergence. And considering we're now currently paying $4000+ for the trio of a laptop, tablet, and smartphone, I suspect one could create something pretty compelling and high-end and still feel like a bargain to many.
I completely agree with your goal definition of convergence. The ability to have one device for all your computing needs. I don't expect to be able to do everything on a 5-6" phone screen, but I should be able to connect my phone to a monitor (or dock) and be able to do everything. The closest thing to this on the market is Samsung DeX but it's still incredibly limited.
or a GPDWIN2 with 4G card.
> $4000+
That's an excessive number. Great laptops can be had for under $1000.
Obviously, you could spend over $4000, but I don't think this is a reasonable number for most people. Even most 'computer' people. And who still buys tablets anyway?
iPad sales in 2018:
Q1 2018 13.17 million Q2 2018 9.11 million Q3 2018 11.55 million Q4 2018 9.67 million
I think a few people still buy them...
So if you spend $2500 on a MacBook Pro, $800 on an iPad, and then $1000 on your iPhone, boom, you're over $4000.
$4000 doesn't go very far.
Sure, it doesn't go very far in the Apple ecosystem, but you can get a solid set of equipment for much less. For examine, a Thinkpad will run $500-1500 (depending on the model), a solid tablet can be found for ~$500, and plenty of decent phones are ~$500 (mine was $250). Altogether, that's <$2000 for a solid set of devices.
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I haven't followed the happenings in the Apple ecosystem for quite a while, which may explain why I am honestly shocked at those prices.
It's incredible what people will pay for this stuff.
> And who still buys tablets anyway?
I do. I find them quite handy (I own 5 right now), although I admit that I use them as special-purpose devices rather than for general purpose use.
I do machine learning and that budget it too small.
Why not buy a $1000 server and remote into it instead of trying to run a server workload on a portable device?
Outside of Intel Phi, is there anything like an eCPU? That would be really cool, and could be exactly what we need.
Back before Thunderbolt, I used a mini-PCI-express to PCIE adapter for more GPU power. This was great for games, but I immediately became CPU-bound, which wasn't so great.
To fix this, you could have something like Big.Little but where the Big cores are external and only used when connected. Heck, then you could do something like a Big.Medium.Little architecture, where the phone's integrated Big.Little bows to the higher IPC cores in the eCPU device.
In this way, you would be able to have something that was a "soul" device that had all your settings and stuff on it, with expandable CPU & GPU computing resources. Expanded storage would also be pretty neat, but then you'd have to figure out what did and didn't need access when you were away from your "exosuit".
You should probably check this project, the EOMA68 (Embedded Open Modular Architecture): https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
The computer is actually like a computer card, that you can slide into different devices. A lot of parts like for example the casing for the laptop "case" are 3D printable.
The computer card is 65$ and then you can print your own laptop or you can buy the parts from them. If something breaks, print your own replacement part.
The icing on the cake: The "Respects Your Freedom hardware product certification" ("currently in progress with no known blockers") from the FSF for the version with Parabola preinstalled.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/support-the-libre-tea-co...
They commit to being fully Libre and want to go beyond this by:
" [...] providing full CAD files, schematics, and datasheets for all the parts (without NDAs) as well as having the 3D CAD files for the casework as a completely open GPLv3+ licensed project right from its inception. In addition, all firmware and kernel sources are GPL-licensed and will always remain so, and have been vetted in advance and do not contain any copyright violations or proprietary license-violating blobs (an extremely common practice nowadays)."
Another of their focuses is the environment.
The EOMA68 Standard: https://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA68
Microsoft tried this on Windows 8, and it was a failure - as a desktop user, it was horrible to use. Even Windows Server 2012 got on this bandwagon, with a well-placed touch in the top right corner opening the full screen start menu - of course, totally unintuitive for desktop users.
Windows 10 still contains a lot of 'tablet friendly' features, but they've been dialled down and most don't get in the way of desktop users. I think they've struck a decent balance here between the needs of desktop, netbook and tablet users, but there is nothing here for smartphone users - converging those size-constrained needs with the rest is surely the trickiest thing to get right.
When looking at creating a convergent OS, I think it's really important we look at earlier attempts, so we don't repeat past mistakes.
> And considering we're now currently paying $4000+ for the trio of a laptop, tablet, and smartphone
Wha? My main laptop, tablet, and smartphone combined don't total up anywhere near $4000.
This was the dream to me that Samsung's "Linux on Galaxy" system would get close to.
They already have DeX which provides a large screen UI for your Android device. The next step which they have trialled, but AFAIK not release was to use a separate Linux Distro for the DeX component. Maybe not quite fully converged, but pretty close.
If you look at the bill of materials for a smartphone, the SoC is like... $20? Making the sort of interconnects you'd need and making them reliable enough probably costs about that much. For most people this need can be solved with software (Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud), not hardware.
Maybe I just had a bad experience, but keeping multiple machines synced, particularly in terms of software configuration and options. Getting the various tools of a toolchain together once often sucks, doing it several times each time you make a tweak sucks extra.
Also, these sync services sound great, until you're losing data due to bad sync. I tried to use Google Drive for this and lost data. So, I'd rather have one machine, well backed-up.
You're comparing the real-world implementation of something to a hypothetical. I bet that hot-swapping base machines into different form-factors like that will be just as ridden with technical problems as cloud storage is.