Google has gotten worse and worse at this. It used to be that they would launch something right when they announced it. Then they would launch something invite-only when they announced it. Now they announce things without even having a clear idea of when or how those things will launch.
that means nothing, the first-gen pixel was discontinued before the second-gen was announced too. and the chromebook pixel is hardly the only chromebook out there. it's a thriving product line, and the pixel series is a very very unimportant part of it.
Disappointed about this one - I guess this was just too early (like glass). They had to create a lot of both hardware AND software to make it work. Expensive and risky work for a single company to take on.
I was honestly holding off on a cell phone upgrade hoping to get my hands on the developer version of this early 2017.
I had to scroll half way down the page to find someone like me... I'm disappointed as well.
A lot of people here talk about performance and size. We seem obsessed with them in cell phones but at what point does performance and size become good enough and we can focus on things like sustainability and repairability.
> Axing Project Ara is one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Google's various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones.
Check out their efforts on the new Fuschia OS. I'm fairly certain it's Google's attempt to design a mobile OS from scratch to get rid of some of the overhead introduced into Android as a function of it being a Linux derivative.
[this will be a dead post because dang is a bitch]
Ignoring that Android has been replacing ChromeOS rather than the other way around (the PixelC, and now the Android runtime on Chromebooks), your conspiracy about Fuschia is hilarious garbage. Fuschia is essentially vaporware intended for extremely small scale IoT products. It isn't replacing Android, however much Android haters might wish and dream it.
Not sure, but contrary to what many think, the Linux kernel on Android lacks many APIs and the set of allowed stable libraries is quite small.
With Android N, they took the extra step to kill native apps that dare to link to Android native libraries, if not part of the stable list, like libpng for example.
Regarding Fushia the overhead seems to actually be anything under GPL.
Replying here to grobbles dead comment: I don't care one way or another. I'm simply repeating what an engineer on the project told me. There are more constructive ways to make a point/learn info from others...
Don't dismiss that thought so quickly. 2-3 years ago all indications were that they wanted to merge Android into ChromeOS (based on statements Sundar made at the time) which went nowhere. Over the last 1 1/2 years or so it seems like they sorted out which end is the tail and which end is the dog and have flipped the strategy around accordingly.
I have one of those gut feelings that it's simply a matter of time. I think I actually speculated about the eventual convergence of Chrome OS and Android back when I was filing out the form to get a Cr-48 way-back-when. We shall see, it's all "just" software...
What the heck is the deal with big companies naming things in horribly ambiguous, confusing ways? Is there an actual reason for doing that, i.e. it's proven that this somehow leads to better sales or something?
This is a Fuchsia casualty, and it won't be the last. Google cannot afford to innovate with hardware until they are done replacing the open-source kernel in Android. Once that's done, and OEMs are accustomed to writing Fuchsia drivers instead, they can use increased leverage over manufacturers to drive hardware innovations in directions they want.
I had high hopes for this, but seeing how fragmentation is harming Android when the phone is a single integrated device - seems unrealistic they would be able to get all these components to play well together among various OEMs.
I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old.
Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?
Is the evidence for this view, that they cancel a lot of interesting projects? I think a simpler explanation for that would be that trying lots of new things is just a good strategy, even if you know 90% of them will fail.
Certain types of products need by-in from 3rd parties to make them work. I could see Ara being in this camp, so it's better to control the message about it, instead of some 3rd party leaking details. May also help to get those 3rd party companies to reach out to you.
Like Project Vault that was made public at IO in 2015. It looked very promising. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like Mudge left Google a month later, then the project died. I hope there's more to the story because what kind of organization has a product's success completely reliant on one person?
This is why I haven't been able to stand the IO hype for years. When are people going to realize it's a tech demo, not product announcements? Do thy not realize most of the announced projects have gone nowhere?
This is why I haven't been able to stand the IO hype for years. When are people going to realize it's a tech demo, not product announcements? Do thy not realize most of the announced projects have gone nowhere?
I'm not sure they ever said Ara was going to be the next best thing. I only read a few reports, but they always highlighted how it was a total experiment.
"They intend to make a phone cheap enough to be accessible to 5 billion people. To do so, they need to create an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers robust enough that it could literally challenge giant incumbents like Foxconn and even Samsung. The head of Project Ara, Paul Eremenko, says he is planning "the most custom mass-market product ever created by mankind" without a trace of irony in his voice."
The challenge they will always face. Once you get to this scale, there's no way to avoid it. I, for one, don't find it duplicitous - what if Google was a movie studio? The shame that they aren't is that we'll never see a technology giant's Pootie Tang (one of my favorite films, beloved by many, its name itself a piece of pop culture, though it failed on any metric a shareholder would consider)
They were calling for partners to build modules and announcing that they had multiple partners already. I think that's a valid enough reason to talk about it.
There are enough leaked press stories on secret projects they are working on but not announcing until they have gone the distance.
It's alomost certain that other companies, like Apple and Microsoft are working of similar things but they just don't make public announcements about their internal hackathon proof-of-concepts
They didn't just talk about it. They called for partners to build the modules and had multiple partners already. If this was a lie from the start, it would've been easier to not go through the trouble.
I think there was reporting about this regarding Andy Rubin. After he was pushed out of Android, Larry Page basically gave him a robotics division to keep him around. He made some acquisitions, there was no real follow through and he left and is now a VC.
I just want to know how pervasive that is across the company.
Trying, announcing, pursuing the project for 3 years and suddenly announcing that the project shows that random ideas are being chased without proper vision & leadership.
But in the instance of this phone, a more straightforward strategy seems clear: to break down the monolithic phone market and suppress the unique market position of big competitors like Samsung. As in this quote from a wowed reporter from The Verge --
Just as importantly, though, Project Ara could have a ripple effect on the entire mobile industry. One of the goals is to "democratize the hardware ecosystem, break it wide open, basically disintermediate the OEMs," Eremenko [then the project lead] says, "so that component developers can now have privy [sic] with the consumer."
To have that strategy work, you would need zero cost, zero volume connectors that stay together forever if desired, yet come apart easily.
Otherwise, the guy building the integrated system would offer a smaller, sturdier phone at lower cost that suits 90+% of the market, leaving scraps for you, forcing your prices up, decreasing your market even further, forcing your prices up, etc.
There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.
> There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.
Huh? PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard was a standard feature in more or less all laptop until just a few years ago.
Every PC laptop I've bought or used, at every price range (including cheap Acer emergency replacement after theft), had a peripheral slot. Higher end models had two. Even the Thinkpad on my desk right now has a ExpressCard slot.
No, I didn't. The cheap Acer's slot turned out to be handy for a Wireless G+ card when the builtin wifi stopped working. Most of the time, the little placeholder plastic thing never gets removed.
Flip it around, would anyone want to apply to Google if they weren't doing big visionary things? I've met a lot of people who want to work at Google, not because anything they want to achieve in life is only possible if they do it with Google's resources, but simply because "It's a magical place." as Phil Coulson would say.
So whether or not it keeps people from leaving, if it is effective at getting people to apply to Google first, it meets its goal right?
From my experience working there some of the "moonshot" type projects were rather hit or miss in terms of retention. Some, like the self driving car one, attracted a lot of great talent, some of the more interesting power related ones were only interesting to people who cared about power efficiency. But the feeling that anything is possible is intoxicating until you realize what you have to give up to make something possible. Then its sort of hit or miss.
Most of us at Google are not working on on moonshot projects, and still have a happy life. Still, most non-moonshot projects that people are working on are growing nicely, have a long term view, and making lots of impact. Also having free good quality, healthy food with big variety all day long makes a huge impact in life quality.
But even the things that aren't "perks" are still way beyond what most non-valley companies offer as benefits (insurance, retirement, education, leaves, parental benefits, internal training/development, etc). None of that is uniquely special, and many non-tech companies have pieces of the puzzle, but imho Google is unique among companies it size with the breadth and quality of employee benefits it offers.
Having a good availability of food which is mediocre (and rapidly declining in terms of appeal, variety, and nutrition) is not a meaningful perk. It is the minimum viable offer when you force most of your employees to work in the middle of nowhere where there are ~no local food options, and spend too much time of their time commuting to justify spending time preparing their own.
In this respect I'd probably even prefer Apple where the food is not free (and the price has generally been increasing) but the quality has been much better maintained than at Google.
Google has lots of offices. I'm at the Zurich office, as this is my preference, but there are enough to choose from. I wouldn't go to Cupertino as I wouldn't like to have to drive everywhere (I prefer a bit of walking and 10 minutes by train), but I respect people who like those places.
Still, I'm not comparing Google against Apple (which is one of the top revenue/employee companies), but against smaller companies, startups and all the other companies in the world that can't compete that easily with the quality of life that these companies provide.
I wanted to work there but after three nonsensical phone interviews and some feedback from ex-Googlers I came to the conclusion, even if I had the skills to be accepted, their culture is not something I would enjoy.
Sadly, these repeated failed hardware efforts are all totally sincere. There is a sort of pump-and-dump hype cycle but people are really drinking the kool-aid internally. So far they are still a software company failing to create internal hardware startups.
I never saw the potential of this project given how slim the phones are getting and how the hardware is literally attached to screen. The design and aesthetic would have to be compromised for these modular phones. The two places where this would have been useful are camera and battery but there is literally no innovation happening in these two departments so expect for the next 2-3 years, our batteries and camera specs will not significantly change due to technology limitations and size constraints.
> The two places where this would have been useful are camera and battery but there is literally no innovation happening in these two departments...
From what I see in headlines the camera and battery are the two areas with the most innovation. Apple has a major ad campaign featuring photos shot on iPhones. Almost every new phone release mentions improved battery life. (Admittedly, these energy improvements may come more from decreased consumption than improved storage.)
I see most marketing discussing the following features:
1. Camera
2. Battery life
3. Screen size/resolution
This makes sense given that there aren't many other areas to radically innovate. Someone's already tried adding decent speakers, a kickstand, and various exclusive apps.
Unfortunately I don't see them. Nokia Windows phones were far more advsncedin terms of cameras than current iPhones or Samsung galaxy s7s. Anand tech said as much about this in their reviews. I don't see any improvement in my battery life from iPhone 5S to iPhone 6S. Do others see any improvement?
I never saw the potential of this project given how slim the phones are getting and how the hardware is literally attached to screen. The design and aesthetic would have to be compromised for these modular phones. The two places where this would have been useful are camera and battery but there is literally no innovation happening in these two departments so expect for the next 2-3 years, our batteries and camera specs will not significantly change due to technology limitations and size constraints.
There are too many tangible benefits to close integration between CPU, screen, battery, and antennas -- the latter of which is probably the most difficult to modularize.
A much better tactic would've been 1-2 expansion ports for specialized hardware modules -- everything from credit card readers (a la Square), medical sensors, portable oscilloscope, etc. A standardized peripheral interface for hardware expansion slots across all phone variants could've really enabled a whole bunch of new applications (and industries). I'm sad to see it abandoned entirely.
(I wonder if there weren't some strong personalities that kept the "100% modular or bust" mentality?)
You are mistaking a few conductors for a well-designed peripheral. The surrounding mechanics and size matters a lot for mass-market peripherals... especially if the aim is to seamlessly integrate them (semi-permanently) into any phone. This means things like size, volume, nearby mechanical connections, robustness, and industrial design. With OTG, you'd be plugging and unplugging all the time (every time the devices goes into your pocket) -or- building "cases" one a phone-by-phone basis. That's not a standard peripheral... that's a hack with a dongle.
An Ara-esque expansion slot could've created a real standard.
A modest cable leading to the peripheral in question is likely an acceptable form factor, and far more robust than trying to make one standard for a thing to bolt on to.
Motorola did exactly what you're asking for. It's called Moto Mods and if it isn't abandoned as a failure within 3 years I'll eat my hat. https://www.motorola.com/us/moto-mods
Yes, this is the rough idea, except that it was "designed exclusively for the moto Z". The fact that one proprietary mod standard didn't take off is hardly strong evidence against the general idea, and especially the viability of an open standard.
You're right about the tight integration, but Ara could have ushered in better integration with offboard modules as well. And it would be fun for the things you don't want as features all the time. As an example I would have loved an Ara phone with a removable Tango module.
So a modular phone is a bad idea, but what about the spec? I could imagine widgets that connect to mountain bikes, toasters, and ski helmets; the phone is just enabling.
> the company may work with partners to bring Project Ara’s technology to market
No Google! That is not acceptable! You can not always make people hope for years and then just drop it. When you start with marketing you take on some responsibility. You lost someone who believed in you.
Do you know Pokemon? Don't you think collectable phone parts would not be a great business model? Even if this only barely works I thought it could make a lot of money and therefore was quite sure that someone would build it.
I think your naivete is as beautiful as the freshest spring rose.
I wonder what this move has to do with what phone manufacturers are doing in general: hiding away components like the battery that were once open to the consumer, making it difficult to do anything but buy a new phone if the battery alone dies out. One can't get more anti-modular than that, and the Nexus 5X has the same deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYFbSpvSE-w&feature=youtu.be...
First of all the simple things: Getting back the replacable parts feature of old phones.
Then context optimization: At one time I may need additional battery life, and another time I may need a second sim card.
Playing around myself: It could also become a raspberry pie with more add-ons and for the more software oriented tinkerers, and I am one of them. Playing around with the pie was always nice, but I didn't fully use it because the more creative stuff always required really working with the hardware, what I don't like at all.
Also let's not forget the Pokemon effect: If there is something that can be collected, ppl will have fun just in the collecting. And not everybody may agree but funding tech experiments by people paying for fun is a valid business model for me.
Modular smartphones or computers are still a great idea. They may have had trouble easily capitalizing at this time without interfering with other products.
I am not surprised either. It is more of a gimmicky idea, than a revolutionary moonshot one. It is somehow hard to picture where is the market and how to convince customers to buy it.
It is 2016 and a lot of people are still not very good with computers, let alone mobile phone components. We live in Silicon Valley so it might be hard to understand this very simple fact. I invite everyone to go to an Apple store and just sit there and watch the scores of folks come in and have to be sat down and explained, slowly, about the simplest concepts for macOS or iOS. I have mad respect for Apple Geniuses.
Now, imagine a phone that has all these components and imagine the overhead of supporting that. Now you might say it is for tech people..that market is not big enough to warrant the R&D and support. Right call Google.
Yes, yet people still came into the Apple store with questions in 2007 regardless of how easy you thought it was. Just because it is easy for you doesn't make it easy for the other 80% of the population.
Yeah the first couple of iPhones were more like fancy featurephones than what Microsoft and Nokia was shipping under the smartphone moniker. But because it had this touchscreen thing going, it had to be a smartphone according to the MSM.
Never mind that Apple for the longest time ran a bunch of ads that was basically instruction videos on how to reach things like maps.
I just switched to iOS after being Android for a while. Current Android Settings are great, at least in stock Android. They've finessed them over the years. They were poor two or three versions ago for sure.
This doesn't surprise me. I feel like the concept is nice, but they have to do a kick-ass job as making sure everything goes together well and can't just randomly fail -- I would hate if my phone's data got corrupted because a piece of it randomly fell off my phone or accidentally spilling some water on it, which would not affect a normal phone but may seep into between a pair of component edges. But beyond that, and more importantly, it has to make economic sense. Would it have been cheaper than a random cheap phone, especially in the developing world?
It was an interesting idea but I could never see it working myself. It looked like a solution in search of a problem.
So you're meant to buy a phone shell and separate components to plug into this, where you can upgrade different components over time? Ignoring technical issues, wouldn't the shell get out of date quickly as well as the components (with some components being incompatible with other shells and components)?
It doesn't sound cost effective considering how cheap phones are getting and how often we are seeing physical hardware changes still (e.g. fingerprint readers, screen size, thinnest).
Maybe the success of mobile phones is because of their lack of modularity, not in spite of it.
It's possible. But all I'm saying is that, in terms of it being "a solution looking for a problem", there is a historical precedent showing that openness/modularity can have powerful benefits. It would be hard to say for sure if that can/would/will apply in the mobile space as well. But it's not something, IMO, one should write off out-of-hand.
> Modularity worked out pretty well for the PC. When you make things open, there's no way to imagine ahead of times the things people will come up with.
I agree with this but the extreme space constraints of a mobile make this comparison less accurate. A PC is often not space, weight or battery life constrained and has the space and power for big dual graphics cards, huge heatsinks, water cooling, big fans, multiple hard drives etc.
I just can't see how it's feasible to create a modular mobile that will compete with current flagship phones which are likely pushing the space constraints and specs to the limits (is this accurate?). This sounds unlike how you can build a PC to compete with prebuilt options.
A better comparison is comparing modular phones to modular laptops. Laptops are weight, battery and space constrained as well and I haven't seen upgradable laptops gaining traction. Is that because of similar technical issues?
I always thought that Ara might be a useful platform not so much for smartphones but for all those hand-held custom devices, you could plug in a credit card reader, laser, special cameras, voltmeter or whatever you need.
I always thought they take it a certain distance to maintain cred, then ditch it as the last thing they want is 3rd parties hooking stuff up to their things.
But just about everyone has some such need, as well as components they couldn't give less of a shit about (the camera comes to mind, for me). The SoC is the expensive part that would need the economies of scale, but sadly there don't seem to be that many options in that space anyway.
If it came out tomorrow it'd be 10 years too late. Cellphones seem to have hit a plateau. All the parts are now good enough in a cheap phone that no one really needs this.
I got a $150 aluminum phone with a huge battery, nice enough camera, fingerprint scanner, 3GBs of RAM, expandable storage, etc. etc. ... I don't feel like I need expansion options.
What can the higher-specs really offer now a days?
Samsung has the right idea, maybe we'll need better phones for VR. Or maybe built in picoprojectors will be a game changer. But for that you'll need a whole new phone - not just a module snaps on.
Do you really think so? I have an impression that the market is kinda OK with short battery life. Otherwise there would be a trend in this way. Maybe after other specs reach their practical limits?
I hate the battery life of my iPhone 6. Every time I see how skinny it is I wonder why they could not have just added a bit of space for a larger battery.
I just bought the Xiaomi Redmi 3 [1] with 4100mAh. The battery life is excellent. 2 to 3 days of battery is a comfort I missed from the "dumbphone era".
For me it was 2 to 3 weeks of battery. Smartphone batteries are just miserable, and I'd happily take a heavier & thicker phone to get better battery life.
There are plenty of well-designed battery/protective enclosures for smartphones. Thus those who want the extra battery life and are prepared to deal with the extra thickness and weight can do so.
Now if you want 2 weeks of battery life on a pocket supercomputer, well, good luck with that.
Yep, that's the one I have. I honestly rarely get to 50%, but you stop feeling guilty about leaving the screen on for too long and it's just more pleasant to use never having to worry about the battery. + it's incredibly cheap and still super thin
I bought a waterproof phone, and it has been a surprisingly useful feature to me. Not because of all the times I've dropped it in the toilet, or decided to do scuba photography, but rather the peace of mind I get from knowing I could fall in a pool at any moment and get out without a $600 fine from the phone company. Or that I can go for a jog and use it as an ipod even if it looks like it might rain. Prop it up in a corner of the shower and listen to news podcasts while I get clean.
Or, basically, I just don't have to think or worry about water or moisture at all. Never expected to appreciate that feature so much.
Meanwhile elsewhere: Fairphone 2 is available, is modular and user-repairable (iFixit: 10/10: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523). Ara looked cooler, but I guess I should cease any high hopes for Google innovation or market disruption. Which is sad, but probably the way things go in this world.
Which only means it will be stuck on Marshmallow, not Lollipop -- until Fairphone releases a core module with another chipset on it (https://shop.fairphone.com/spareparts/coremodulefp2.html). At least that is the promise. Might even use something from Mediatek which will probably drive the price down.
I hope they do go for a cheaper SoC - that core module is more expensive than the entire phone that's in my pocket alone. I get that the price reflects ethically sourced materials, but they're gonna have to do something about the price.
I wonder how they'll handle software and retaining data through a cross-platform upgrade - a build for Android for the msm8xxx series won't run on a Mediatek SoC.
> I wonder how they'll handle software and retaining data through a cross-platform upgrade - a build for Android for the msm8xxx series won't run on a Mediatek SoC.
At worst, ask people to reflash to another Android ROM when switching. User software and data is on another partition anyway, and you can force Android to recompile all user applications by clearing your cache partition.
That makes sense. All those connector pins and latches were inherently going to be troublesome and fragile.
There's a market for various instruments one could attach to a phone, but it's not a mass market. You can get USB devices which give you a spectrum analyzer or an OBD-II connector, and there are apps to drive them. They're not something you get at phone stores.
Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knew this was the ultimate result on the very day they announced it.
To make something modular you need to wrap each piece in its own case, add bulky connectors, etc. Both weight and volume are at an extreme premium in mobile devices. All that metal/plastic going in to making the pieces modular is stealing volume and weight from the battery.
The only realistic way to make the power envelope is to use an SoC, which means the CPU, GPU, and RAM must all be in the same module. That doesn't leave a lot worth upgrading... maybe just the radio module. Jumping up in screen resolution would mean replacing the SoC to get a better GPU too.
Modularity worked in desktop PCs because they have gobs of space and an AC power connection.
First thing that came into mind when I heard about project Ara was that, laptops aren't modular because the increased size and weight will out weigh the benefits. Seemed like the same situation applies to smartphones, only worse.
Some people are obsessed with weight/thickness in mobile devices, but not as many as the manufacturers think there are. "modular" really comes down to "repairable" which means extra engineering would have to go in to the fact that you couldn't just glue most pieces together.
It _would_ add a little size/mass overhead, but it wouldn't have to add a lot. It would just cut in to bottom lines to build and maintain a consistent form factor. Allowing people to replace parts means they'll be buying fewer new units. My last two laptop purchases were definitely due to a hypothetically fixable problem in an unrepairable form factor.
I also wouldn't mind slightly thicker phones, but not necessarily for modularity. I just want to see phones that can be dropped flat on their faces on a concrete sidewalk and still remain in usable condition (i.e. no shattered screen).
Making the screen completely modular would be one way to achieve this, since you can just replace the screen with a new one if the old one breaks in a drop. But it can be achieved much more easily and cheaply by simply slightly recessing the screen (or by slightly raising everything around the screen) so the glass never has to make direct contact with concrete in the event of a drop.
This is how bumper cases work, and my $3 bumper case has saved my $400 phone enough times that I'd never use a new phone without one. That said, I really wish this kind of resilience was built into the phone itself, so I'd never have to have to cover up the nice design and great feeling materials on my phone with a cheap, bulky, hideous case.
Using a separate case still adds a lot more bulk than would be necessary if the protective layer was built into the phone itself. This is just yet another example of the unavoidable cost of modularity that people have been bringing up everywhere in this thread. And even the nicest and most expensive cases I've tried have never really been able to compare with my actual phone in terms of quality of material and design.
> Making the screen completely modular would be one way to achieve this, since you can just replace the screen with a new one if the old one breaks in a drop
iPhone 4/4S did this just fine, undo two screws and the glass comes right off ready to be replaced for like $10.
iPhone 5> they started fusing the glass to the sensor IIRC so this became far more expensive/cumbersome
Slightly recessing the screen may not be enough. It's certainly not enough for asphalt. You'll need several millimeters of distance, and are probably much better by just placing some protective screen above it (although that increases the chance of something getting damaged - it'll just be the protective screen instead of the real one).
I've had good luck in choosing phones with cases just elastic enough to break a bit while protecting the screen (even without any kind of cover). But I never brought into the hard-case movement by Apple.
>Some people are obsessed with weight/thickness in mobile devices, but not as many as the manufacturers think there are. "
That's not what sales numbers say. People repeatedly buy the thinner/lighter models (which also seem more "advanced to then") over heavier alternatives.
> "modular" really comes down to "repairable" which means extra engineering would have to go in to the fact that you couldn't just glue most pieces together.
I think those are quite different: a phone that screws/clips together where you can replace a damaged screen is a very different prospect from one made of pluggable blocks.
They used to be modular until companies started to follow Apple down the current path. I had a Dell Inspiron with removable battery, removable DVD drive, and PCMCIA slot for modular functionality.
Now we have come somewhat full circle with Apple's Macbook which has meagre hardware functionality and relies on USB-C to provide the missing functionality in a modular fashion. However it means a nest of cables so it's probably not what anyone wants when they want a modular laptop.
I had the same thing. Sure it was bulky, heavy plastic at the time, but it never had the investment to evolve into something more efficient.
We didn't have to go down the road to soldering all the bits to a tiny motherboard, but Apple's vision of "small and light at all costs", including performance and battery life, killed all the other paths for the foreseeable future.
Apple is the only vendor that has a 15" laptop with high-res screen and quad-core processor that gets 8+ hours of battery life. The only laptops with greater battery capacity than the Macbook Pros are the Thinkpads with extended batteries that stick out of the machine.
Realistically your Dell Inspiron was only slightly more modular than most early Android phones. Battery and external storage were swappable, but the bulk of the remainder was all integrated.
I remember the old mid-2000 MacBooks. I had one with an easily accessible hard drive and ram right under the replaceable battery (which I did have to replace once too).
People forget Apple was sued, and lost, in the 1990s for telling people to buy new iPods instead of selling replacement batteries. They started moving to user serviceable stuff briefly, but then went back to their own ways and people haven't challenged them since.
It was the 2000s, 2005 was the settlement date, iPods didn't exist in the 1990s. They didn't lose, strictly speaking, they settled (which is not the same as admitting fault). Settling lets them save face, even if they may not have had a liability, by not dragging their name through the muck with regards to the poor performance of the batteries and iPods.
You still have modular laptops. For example, for a Clevo W230SS (known as "Sager NP7338" in some parts), you can choose the display (1080p or 2560x1440 matte IPS, or 3200x1600 glossy), CPU, up to two hard drives (or was it three? Can't recall), W-Lan module, keyboard layout, RAM amount+brand+frequency et cetera. For its bigger brother (which is 17.1'', as opposed to the 13.3'' W230SS), you can also select the optical drive (different brands of DVD and Blu-Ray R-only or R/W drives --- the 13.3'' variant is too small to fit one).
The battery is swappable, and the whole thing opens with a set of phillips (you know, the '+' shape) screws.
Although you can't choose the GPU when ordering, newer ones tend to have newer models, implying that's also modular (just fixed to a selection of one at a given time).
So, yeah --- you can get a modular laptop, but you have to know where to look.
> They used to be modular until companies started to follow Apple down the current path. I had a Dell Inspiron with removable battery, removable DVD drive, and PCMCIA slot for modular functionality.
And how much did it weigh? Laptops have come a long way since even just 10 years ago. My rMBP is almost a pound lighter than my original Macbook, despite having a 15.4" versus 13.3" screen, a quad core versus dual-core processor, and a 96 watt-hour battery versus a 55 watt-hour battery.
And even if I was willing to cart around that extra 0.8 pounds, I wouldn't want to spend that extra weight budget on increased modularity. I'd much rather they, say, push the battery life to 14-15 hours instead.
Sure. For me the most important concern of a laptop is mass. Then screen resolution. rMBP is a good choice if you rank these two criteria as highly as I do.
"They used to be modular until companies started to follow Apple down the current path. I had a Dell Inspiron with removable battery, removable DVD drive, and PCMCIA slot for modular functionality."
PCMCIA was so great. In my entire experience of computing and consumer electronics, I think PCMCIA is still my favorite technology. I miss it a lot.
Laptops are less modular than desktops but way more modular than phones. HDDs, SSDs, and RAM can generally be upgraded, whereas in phones only the SD card can be upgraded. (In both, batteries and screens can be replaced with OEM parts.)
even if there wasn't a plan to do that, that's how the idea was received.
Compare the reactions from HN when it was made clear that you could not upgrade CPU/GPU/RAM/battery/screen individually
That was the original notion. Although radio probably could've gone into a separate module if they wanted it to, given the radio's frequently a discrete component anyways.
The big change that happened with the "reset" was that the display, primary battery, and AP (SoC) all became part of the frame. The original notion was that all the parts of the phone were modules, all connecting to the AP (which is also a module) via the frame's UniPro network-- the frame itself has little intelligence. (The way this works is actually pretty neat; I hope some of the network stack sees the light of day in some form or another.)
AP or APU stands for Application Processor [Unit] which is more or less synonymous with SoC. The semantics of it are pretty boring, and the term seems a little strange considering modern cell phones are fairly identical to modern computers besides the fact that a few more functions are packages in a single IC.
If my previous phone had been modular, I expect I'd still have it, but with a 2×nanosim module in place of the previous sim.
What I'm saying is that replacing the VGA card isn't the only sensible form of modularity. Replacing the case/screen with a watertight one when you move house to somewhere really rainy makes sense, etc.
I think LG have done something very neat with the new G5 and modular phone design. Having that accessory swap bay on the phone allows you to add all sorts of different tools or capabilities to the handset.
It's not ideal because they integrated it with the battery bay, so you have shut the device off to make a swap you're replacing the end of the removable battery tray, which is also a pretty boss feature given the complete sealed flagships everyone else produces now).
But, it mates both a solid, SoC platform with some modular flexibility, vice having to bluetooth tether accessory cases to your phone.
Ah, thanks, I hadn't known about that, but I'm not remotely surprised by it.
I'm not even especially concerned by it, though I'd (obviously) prefer if everyone just used the standard charge protocols rather than thirty different "nod-and-a-wink" handshakes.
I suppose absent external pressure there's not much reason for the SoC vendors to opt for the standard over their own proprietary thing, though, is there.
Isn't that an extension port rather than a modular phone? You can add some features via extension modules but the phone itself isn't modular. And technically that's "just" the phone acting as a USB host, coupled to the software support for modules.
Screen replacement, camera, DSP and audio out, radio, sensors, USB port, all could be upgradeable or at least, replaceable to fix breakage.
Yes the phone would be bigger, but I believe the main reason this has gone nowhere is that people have got used to seeing phones as replaceable units at the phone level, not at the component level, and there's more money in selling a shiny new Galaxy Over9000 than there is in selling a swap-out for a busted screen.
> Both weight and volume are at an extreme premium in mobile devices. All that metal/plastic going in to making the pieces modular is stealing volume and weight from the battery.
This is probably mostly right, except that the size and weight of current mobile phones is probably largely determined by display, battery and case design/protection. I'd like to see some real numbers here. My guess is that 5-10g of plastic and connectors wouldn't make much of a difference and could easily be compensated with a slightly smaller battery and screen if size/weight become an issue.
> Modularity worked in desktop PCs because they have gobs of space and an AC power connection.
Many things have changed since the 80s, modularity is now unattractive for most users.
It's not that modularity has become unattractive, it's that smaller form factors have become more attractive.
A larger form factor is a potential side effect of modularity.
I don't think modularity was ever very attractive in most consumer electronics for the "average joe" who just wants something that does the job they bought it for.
modularity can't work on phones because evil developers will isolate the baseband processor from the rest of the system. destroying the perverts with stingray devices ability to use them as spyware devices.
What good is a mobile phone if your local sex offender can't use its microphone whenever they feel like it to listen to everything you say and "do".
Now with USB and Thunderbolt it seems we are back to the 8 and 16 bit days of selling computers as appliances, specially due to the thin margins that are currently being used.
Outside gamers, even customizable desktops seem to be a dying breed.
The move from Spectrums to the PC was mostly driven by my parents. I would have gotten an Amiga 500 if given the choice.
Like many others commenting on this news, every I got to upgrade my PC during the 90's and early 2000, I had to buy a new one due to the cascade of required updates.
Since 2003 I only use laptops and am fine with the limited upgrade options.
I have a desktop machine, originally intended for games which I discovered shortly after building it that I no longer especially cared to play. I don't know that I'm going to bother with another one; the only reason I can think of that I might want to do so is because I can fit more monitors on it than I can on a laptop.
As terrible as this idea is for phones -- it's perfect for home automation.
Having each and every widget doing its own network and software stack is just a mess. Nevermind having to power all these gadgets.
There's very little reason to have more than one base in a room, that could handle all the non-switch/non-outlet duties. (cameras, air quality sensors, motion sensors, mics and speakers for echo-type interaction, tv input, etc.)
If all those features were just modules that stacked on top of a base (and could be swapped independently), you'd really have something.
Home automation is, by the nature of it, a series of distinct functions spread throughout the home (e.g. front door lock, garage control, temperature control, lights in each room, sprinkler system, washer/dryer alerts, etc); so you're going to need each of these geographically separate things communicating into a central control "hub."
You cannot physically move these things into a module on the central control hub. Most of them have to be in the location they're already at (e.g. physically in the front door).
How does making the control hub a modular unit help with the complexity of home automation? If anything it further adds to the complexity. A lot of the solutions now just use WiFi networking and a standard protocol.
I think what he's saying is that rather than selling a bunch of different devices (or one device with every sensor under the sun), you sell a "room base", and a bunch of different monitoring plugs that can slot into the "room base".
If your laundry room doesn't really need a camera, it just needs a thermometer, you just slot in the thermometer plug into that room base, etc.
Basically, yeah. Some stuff is necessarily distinct. But an awful lot of it is not. And given the way this tech is advancing, and the cost of retrofitting, most of the stuff people will first encounter and install will fall under the umbrella of "not distinct".
(e.g. people are going to buy an Echo or a Dropcam long before they refit their house for smart switches/outlets/bulbs/appliances.)
Agreed. I'm surprised they thrashed for so long. My current smartphone is glued together, and there are all kinds of cabling gymnastics behind the screen that make repair tricky.
A modular cellphone would be bulky, likely power hungry, and despite its modularity, it would not be easy to upgrade whatsoever.
Doesnt Motorola have a phone out right now that's modular? I see advertisements every day for it on the El train in Chicago. It looks silly and impracticable but it's clearly possible.
It wouldn't be so terrible if they adapted it to laptops though.
You missed one other possibility and that's structural components. If any of the parts of the device can be part of the hardened envelope then you lose less space.
For instance, a thinner PCB bonded to or traced onto the inside of the case. Or look at the research in automotive circles for batteries that can support a physical load.
And also one of my peeves about Apple phones is that the chassis is so strong that you don't need a cover, but only a few people I know don't use a case, so phone plus case is heavier.
I'd like to see someone build a phone that HAS to have a case, and comes with one, which you can replace. You could do the same with the modular design and then you wouldn't have to make individual pieces bomb proof.
It's not that I don't think it's inevitable that the project was cancelled now. I'm just thinking in ten years when some of this is sorted out and we have no reason to keep making phones smaller, this plan might come back again. It's just another project that came out before its time.
> And also one of my peeves about Apple phones is that the chassis is so strong that you don't need a cover, but only a few people I know don't use a case
If Apple would stop making their phones so damn sleek and slippery I would skip the case too. The primary purpose of my case is to make it harder to drop in the first place.
Some background ... I have been very, very interested in a modular phone platform for many years now - mainly due to my desire to isolate computing modules from baseband modules and have hard switches for things like GPS/microphone/wifi/etc. For me the goal was control and security, not gimmicks like projector modules, etc.
In fact, I went so far as to contact several small electronics designers and fabricators and drew up some initial plans. rsync.net and (pre-release) 0x.co kept me busy, so I didn't get much further than that.
But in answer to your point:
"To make something modular you need to wrap each piece in its own case, add bulky connectors, etc. Both weight and volume are at an extreme premium in mobile devices."
No, not really ... the design direction I was going in was a to have one or two or three plastic cases, depending on how large (how many modules) you wanted your phone to be and then the modules themselves were bare daughterboards that had connectors such that you could assemble them like a grid.
So in that fashion, each module would not need its own packaging and case - you simply started with a plastic package (case) that was large enough for whatever "grid" you wanted to assemble.
And, of course, you could add a second (or third, or fourth) battery module.
310 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadI was honestly holding off on a cell phone upgrade hoping to get my hands on the developer version of this early 2017.
A lot of people here talk about performance and size. We seem obsessed with them in cell phones but at what point does performance and size become good enough and we can focus on things like sustainability and repairability.
Their new phone line will be called Pixels.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/01/exclusive-googles-ne...
It seems very unlikely, but there's a part of me still wondering.
Ignoring that Android has been replacing ChromeOS rather than the other way around (the PixelC, and now the Android runtime on Chromebooks), your conspiracy about Fuschia is hilarious garbage. Fuschia is essentially vaporware intended for extremely small scale IoT products. It isn't replacing Android, however much Android haters might wish and dream it.
With Android N, they took the extra step to kill native apps that dare to link to Android native libraries, if not part of the stable list, like libpng for example.
Regarding Fushia the overhead seems to actually be anything under GPL.
What the heck is the deal with big companies naming things in horribly ambiguous, confusing ways? Is there an actual reason for doing that, i.e. it's proven that this somehow leads to better sales or something?
Google just deprecated gcc and will only offer clang on future NDK versions.
Native apps are so constrained in Android that they could replace Linux with something else and only OEMs writing drivers would notice.
Fuchsia takes this further by not having any GPL component at all.
Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?
If they intentionally failed, I would agree, but I have seen no proof of that. Many ventures fail, regardless of resources and best intentions.
Hah. Without evidence, lots of them.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...
The biggest part of making something the next big thing is actually producing a product.
Of course there is, keep it secret until they're close to release.
There are enough leaked press stories on secret projects they are working on but not announcing until they have gone the distance.
It's alomost certain that other companies, like Apple and Microsoft are working of similar things but they just don't make public announcements about their internal hackathon proof-of-concepts
Most things are less obvious I imagine.
Isn't this the modus operandi of startups though? Most of them fail too, but they hardly ever get their feet held to the fire like Google projects.
It's as sad as Facebook's rampant feature theft from Snapchat. Sure, not illegal, not surprising, but also not impressive.
I just want to know how pervasive that is across the company.
Like any other business.
But in the instance of this phone, a more straightforward strategy seems clear: to break down the monolithic phone market and suppress the unique market position of big competitors like Samsung. As in this quote from a wowed reporter from The Verge --
Just as importantly, though, Project Ara could have a ripple effect on the entire mobile industry. One of the goals is to "democratize the hardware ecosystem, break it wide open, basically disintermediate the OEMs," Eremenko [then the project lead] says, "so that component developers can now have privy [sic] with the consumer."
Fun to read the puff piece in retrospect: http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...
Otherwise, the guy building the integrated system would offer a smaller, sturdier phone at lower cost that suits 90+% of the market, leaving scraps for you, forcing your prices up, decreasing your market even further, forcing your prices up, etc.
There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.
Huh? PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard was a standard feature in more or less all laptop until just a few years ago.
Dell Expiron 5520 (2012) http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/dell/dell_inspiron_15r_...
Sony VAIO A-series (2012) http://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/sony-vaio-e-seri...
ASUS G73JH (2010) http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/asus-k42j-revie...
HP Pavilion dm3t (2010) http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-pavilion-dm3t-20...
Just some random models, I literally just put the name of a brand + a date in the past and opened a review. No ExpressCard in any of them.
Maybe you went out looking for laptops with such slots? It was hardly "every laptop" and even less "at every price range" that had them.
So whether or not it keeps people from leaving, if it is effective at getting people to apply to Google first, it meets its goal right?
From my experience working there some of the "moonshot" type projects were rather hit or miss in terms of retention. Some, like the self driving car one, attracted a lot of great talent, some of the more interesting power related ones were only interesting to people who cared about power efficiency. But the feeling that anything is possible is intoxicating until you realize what you have to give up to make something possible. Then its sort of hit or miss.
"It's a magical place"
In this respect I'd probably even prefer Apple where the food is not free (and the price has generally been increasing) but the quality has been much better maintained than at Google.
Still, I'm not comparing Google against Apple (which is one of the top revenue/employee companies), but against smaller companies, startups and all the other companies in the world that can't compete that easily with the quality of life that these companies provide.
Source: worked at Google for 2 years
From what I see in headlines the camera and battery are the two areas with the most innovation. Apple has a major ad campaign featuring photos shot on iPhones. Almost every new phone release mentions improved battery life. (Admittedly, these energy improvements may come more from decreased consumption than improved storage.)
I see most marketing discussing the following features:
1. Camera 2. Battery life 3. Screen size/resolution
This makes sense given that there aren't many other areas to radically innovate. Someone's already tried adding decent speakers, a kickstand, and various exclusive apps.
My biggest surprise is that it was still chugging along until now.
A much better tactic would've been 1-2 expansion ports for specialized hardware modules -- everything from credit card readers (a la Square), medical sensors, portable oscilloscope, etc. A standardized peripheral interface for hardware expansion slots across all phone variants could've really enabled a whole bunch of new applications (and industries). I'm sad to see it abandoned entirely.
(I wonder if there weren't some strong personalities that kept the "100% modular or bust" mentality?)
An Ara-esque expansion slot could've created a real standard.
A modest cable leading to the peripheral in question is likely an acceptable form factor, and far more robust than trying to make one standard for a thing to bolt on to.
but it seems LG has reliability with it http://www.alphr.com/lg/1002753/lg-g5-review-2016s-cleverest...
> the company may work with partners to bring Project Ara’s technology to market
...vague, but maybe.
I wonder what this move has to do with what phone manufacturers are doing in general: hiding away components like the battery that were once open to the consumer, making it difficult to do anything but buy a new phone if the battery alone dies out. One can't get more anti-modular than that, and the Nexus 5X has the same deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYFbSpvSE-w&feature=youtu.be...
>The battery isn't immediately user accessible but isn't too challenging, or too adhered, to replace.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5X+Teardown/51318#s112...
Then context optimization: At one time I may need additional battery life, and another time I may need a second sim card.
Playing around myself: It could also become a raspberry pie with more add-ons and for the more software oriented tinkerers, and I am one of them. Playing around with the pie was always nice, but I didn't fully use it because the more creative stuff always required really working with the hardware, what I don't like at all.
Also let's not forget the Pokemon effect: If there is something that can be collected, ppl will have fun just in the collecting. And not everybody may agree but funding tech experiments by people paying for fun is a valid business model for me.
Now, imagine a phone that has all these components and imagine the overhead of supporting that. Now you might say it is for tech people..that market is not big enough to warrant the R&D and support. Right call Google.
I'm a computer guy and it's a struggle to find things.
Never mind that Apple for the longest time ran a bunch of ads that was basically instruction videos on how to reach things like maps.
They still won't tell you what drives an app is using data on. I need to free up space somewhere but can't tell where.
And don't get me started on the shitty Google apps that can't be removed or moved to SD.
These days what comes up as the SD is more correctly a folder on the emmc (internal storage).
Its just that for legacy reasons it is treated as the primary removable storage by Android.
There is a Android/data/"app vendor uri"/ tree within that simulated SD that is used as a dumping ground for various files.
So you're meant to buy a phone shell and separate components to plug into this, where you can upgrade different components over time? Ignoring technical issues, wouldn't the shell get out of date quickly as well as the components (with some components being incompatible with other shells and components)?
It doesn't sound cost effective considering how cheap phones are getting and how often we are seeing physical hardware changes still (e.g. fingerprint readers, screen size, thinnest).
Modularity worked out pretty well for the PC. When you make things open, there's no way to imagine ahead of times the things people will come up with.
More to the point, how well is it working out for /modern/ laptops. Look at the drive in that market.
You are relying on the assumption that the "modularity" is independent of the form factor; that if it worked in the PC, it can work in a mobile phone.
Maybe the success of mobile phones is because of their lack of modularity, not in spite of it.
It's possible. But all I'm saying is that, in terms of it being "a solution looking for a problem", there is a historical precedent showing that openness/modularity can have powerful benefits. It would be hard to say for sure if that can/would/will apply in the mobile space as well. But it's not something, IMO, one should write off out-of-hand.
I agree with this but the extreme space constraints of a mobile make this comparison less accurate. A PC is often not space, weight or battery life constrained and has the space and power for big dual graphics cards, huge heatsinks, water cooling, big fans, multiple hard drives etc.
I just can't see how it's feasible to create a modular mobile that will compete with current flagship phones which are likely pushing the space constraints and specs to the limits (is this accurate?). This sounds unlike how you can build a PC to compete with prebuilt options.
A better comparison is comparing modular phones to modular laptops. Laptops are weight, battery and space constrained as well and I haven't seen upgradable laptops gaining traction. Is that because of similar technical issues?
I got a $150 aluminum phone with a huge battery, nice enough camera, fingerprint scanner, 3GBs of RAM, expandable storage, etc. etc. ... I don't feel like I need expansion options. What can the higher-specs really offer now a days?
Samsung has the right idea, maybe we'll need better phones for VR. Or maybe built in picoprojectors will be a game changer. But for that you'll need a whole new phone - not just a module snaps on.
1: http://www.kimovil.com/en/where-to-buy-xiaomi-redmi-3s-3gb-3...
Now if you want 2 weeks of battery life on a pocket supercomputer, well, good luck with that.
I have one of their phones. It lives up to the ruggedness advertising.
Also, more mass in the phone means more force on impact.
Or, basically, I just don't have to think or worry about water or moisture at all. Never expected to appreciate that feature so much.
But even if I hadn't, it was super cheap. Look up the Sony xperia M4 Aqua, it's only $150 unlocked on amazon.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/why-isnt-your-old-pho...
I wonder how they'll handle software and retaining data through a cross-platform upgrade - a build for Android for the msm8xxx series won't run on a Mediatek SoC.
At worst, ask people to reflash to another Android ROM when switching. User software and data is on another partition anyway, and you can force Android to recompile all user applications by clearing your cache partition.
There's a market for various instruments one could attach to a phone, but it's not a mass market. You can get USB devices which give you a spectrum analyzer or an OBD-II connector, and there are apps to drive them. They're not something you get at phone stores.
To make something modular you need to wrap each piece in its own case, add bulky connectors, etc. Both weight and volume are at an extreme premium in mobile devices. All that metal/plastic going in to making the pieces modular is stealing volume and weight from the battery.
The only realistic way to make the power envelope is to use an SoC, which means the CPU, GPU, and RAM must all be in the same module. That doesn't leave a lot worth upgrading... maybe just the radio module. Jumping up in screen resolution would mean replacing the SoC to get a better GPU too.
Modularity worked in desktop PCs because they have gobs of space and an AC power connection.
It _would_ add a little size/mass overhead, but it wouldn't have to add a lot. It would just cut in to bottom lines to build and maintain a consistent form factor. Allowing people to replace parts means they'll be buying fewer new units. My last two laptop purchases were definitely due to a hypothetically fixable problem in an unrepairable form factor.
Making the screen completely modular would be one way to achieve this, since you can just replace the screen with a new one if the old one breaks in a drop. But it can be achieved much more easily and cheaply by simply slightly recessing the screen (or by slightly raising everything around the screen) so the glass never has to make direct contact with concrete in the event of a drop.
This is how bumper cases work, and my $3 bumper case has saved my $400 phone enough times that I'd never use a new phone without one. That said, I really wish this kind of resilience was built into the phone itself, so I'd never have to have to cover up the nice design and great feeling materials on my phone with a cheap, bulky, hideous case.
iPhone 4/4S did this just fine, undo two screws and the glass comes right off ready to be replaced for like $10.
iPhone 5> they started fusing the glass to the sensor IIRC so this became far more expensive/cumbersome
I've had good luck in choosing phones with cases just elastic enough to break a bit while protecting the screen (even without any kind of cover). But I never brought into the hard-case movement by Apple.
That's not what sales numbers say. People repeatedly buy the thinner/lighter models (which also seem more "advanced to then") over heavier alternatives.
Focus most of your efforts putting the good stuff into the thin phones and then run the numbers how everyone is buying thin phones!
I think those are quite different: a phone that screws/clips together where you can replace a damaged screen is a very different prospect from one made of pluggable blocks.
Now we have come somewhat full circle with Apple's Macbook which has meagre hardware functionality and relies on USB-C to provide the missing functionality in a modular fashion. However it means a nest of cables so it's probably not what anyone wants when they want a modular laptop.
We didn't have to go down the road to soldering all the bits to a tiny motherboard, but Apple's vision of "small and light at all costs", including performance and battery life, killed all the other paths for the foreseeable future.
I might investigate EOMA68 stuff, though it is likely years before it'll be viable, if ever (especially given their anti-intel sentiment): http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68
Apple is the only vendor that has a 15" laptop with high-res screen and quad-core processor that gets 8+ hours of battery life. The only laptops with greater battery capacity than the Macbook Pros are the Thinkpads with extended batteries that stick out of the machine.
The PC was the outlier that allowed for easy expansion.
Now we have USB instead of Amiga expansion bays, that required a table with big enough width. Instead we scatter cables and hubs.
People forget Apple was sued, and lost, in the 1990s for telling people to buy new iPods instead of selling replacement batteries. They started moving to user serviceable stuff briefly, but then went back to their own ways and people haven't challenged them since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#iPod_bat...
It was the 2000s, 2005 was the settlement date, iPods didn't exist in the 1990s. They didn't lose, strictly speaking, they settled (which is not the same as admitting fault). Settling lets them save face, even if they may not have had a liability, by not dragging their name through the muck with regards to the poor performance of the batteries and iPods.
The battery is swappable, and the whole thing opens with a set of phillips (you know, the '+' shape) screws.
Although you can't choose the GPU when ordering, newer ones tend to have newer models, implying that's also modular (just fixed to a selection of one at a given time).
So, yeah --- you can get a modular laptop, but you have to know where to look.
And how much did it weigh? Laptops have come a long way since even just 10 years ago. My rMBP is almost a pound lighter than my original Macbook, despite having a 15.4" versus 13.3" screen, a quad core versus dual-core processor, and a 96 watt-hour battery versus a 55 watt-hour battery.
And even if I was willing to cart around that extra 0.8 pounds, I wouldn't want to spend that extra weight budget on increased modularity. I'd much rather they, say, push the battery life to 14-15 hours instead.
There's no point adding any extra module, people do not upgrade anything besides RAM, and everything that wears off is included.
PCMCIA was so great. In my entire experience of computing and consumer electronics, I think PCMCIA is still my favorite technology. I miss it a lot.
- screen - battery - processor (cpu/gpu/memory/radio) - everything else (sensors, interconnects, speakers, storage, etc.)
Almost all phone processors are a BGP stack with memory on top of cpu/gpu/radio on a single die.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740451
The big change that happened with the "reset" was that the display, primary battery, and AP (SoC) all became part of the frame. The original notion was that all the parts of the phone were modules, all connecting to the AP (which is also a module) via the frame's UniPro network-- the frame itself has little intelligence. (The way this works is actually pretty neat; I hope some of the network stack sees the light of day in some form or another.)
I can understand why this could be a useful internal experiment. But, clearly, some people at Google expected this to be a viable product. Baffling.
Where they really working on it?
What I'm saying is that replacing the VGA card isn't the only sensible form of modularity. Replacing the case/screen with a watertight one when you move house to somewhere really rainy makes sense, etc.
It's not ideal because they integrated it with the battery bay, so you have shut the device off to make a swap you're replacing the end of the removable battery tray, which is also a pretty boss feature given the complete sealed flagships everyone else produces now).
But, it mates both a solid, SoC platform with some modular flexibility, vice having to bluetooth tether accessory cases to your phone.
http://www.androidauthority.com/htc-10-lg-g5-breach-usb-type...
I agree USB-C is standard and will be THE new standard (over Micro-USB). But very few manufacturers are getting USB-C right.
I'm not even especially concerned by it, though I'd (obviously) prefer if everyone just used the standard charge protocols rather than thirty different "nod-and-a-wink" handshakes.
I suppose absent external pressure there's not much reason for the SoC vendors to opt for the standard over their own proprietary thing, though, is there.
Yes the phone would be bigger, but I believe the main reason this has gone nowhere is that people have got used to seeing phones as replaceable units at the phone level, not at the component level, and there's more money in selling a shiny new Galaxy Over9000 than there is in selling a swap-out for a busted screen.
This is probably mostly right, except that the size and weight of current mobile phones is probably largely determined by display, battery and case design/protection. I'd like to see some real numbers here. My guess is that 5-10g of plastic and connectors wouldn't make much of a difference and could easily be compensated with a slightly smaller battery and screen if size/weight become an issue.
> Modularity worked in desktop PCs because they have gobs of space and an AC power connection.
Many things have changed since the 80s, modularity is now unattractive for most users.
It's not that modularity has become unattractive, it's that smaller form factors have become more attractive.
A larger form factor is a potential side effect of modularity.
I don't think modularity was ever very attractive in most consumer electronics for the "average joe" who just wants something that does the job they bought it for.
What good is a mobile phone if your local sex offender can't use its microphone whenever they feel like it to listen to everything you say and "do".
Now with USB and Thunderbolt it seems we are back to the 8 and 16 bit days of selling computers as appliances, specially due to the thin margins that are currently being used.
Outside gamers, even customizable desktops seem to be a dying breed.
I was fine with the old ways.
The move from Spectrums to the PC was mostly driven by my parents. I would have gotten an Amiga 500 if given the choice.
Like many others commenting on this news, every I got to upgrade my PC during the 90's and early 2000, I had to buy a new one due to the cascade of required updates.
Since 2003 I only use laptops and am fine with the limited upgrade options.
Having each and every widget doing its own network and software stack is just a mess. Nevermind having to power all these gadgets.
There's very little reason to have more than one base in a room, that could handle all the non-switch/non-outlet duties. (cameras, air quality sensors, motion sensors, mics and speakers for echo-type interaction, tv input, etc.)
If all those features were just modules that stacked on top of a base (and could be swapped independently), you'd really have something.
Home automation is, by the nature of it, a series of distinct functions spread throughout the home (e.g. front door lock, garage control, temperature control, lights in each room, sprinkler system, washer/dryer alerts, etc); so you're going to need each of these geographically separate things communicating into a central control "hub."
You cannot physically move these things into a module on the central control hub. Most of them have to be in the location they're already at (e.g. physically in the front door).
How does making the control hub a modular unit help with the complexity of home automation? If anything it further adds to the complexity. A lot of the solutions now just use WiFi networking and a standard protocol.
I'm just not understanding your concept at all.
If your laundry room doesn't really need a camera, it just needs a thermometer, you just slot in the thermometer plug into that room base, etc.
(e.g. people are going to buy an Echo or a Dropcam long before they refit their house for smart switches/outlets/bulbs/appliances.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527774
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7597090
It's too bad we can't keep a score of people's accuracy. We might be able to learn something.
A modular cellphone would be bulky, likely power hungry, and despite its modularity, it would not be easy to upgrade whatsoever.
Ara was DOA.
You missed one other possibility and that's structural components. If any of the parts of the device can be part of the hardened envelope then you lose less space.
For instance, a thinner PCB bonded to or traced onto the inside of the case. Or look at the research in automotive circles for batteries that can support a physical load.
And also one of my peeves about Apple phones is that the chassis is so strong that you don't need a cover, but only a few people I know don't use a case, so phone plus case is heavier.
I'd like to see someone build a phone that HAS to have a case, and comes with one, which you can replace. You could do the same with the modular design and then you wouldn't have to make individual pieces bomb proof.
It's not that I don't think it's inevitable that the project was cancelled now. I'm just thinking in ten years when some of this is sorted out and we have no reason to keep making phones smaller, this plan might come back again. It's just another project that came out before its time.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
If Apple would stop making their phones so damn sleek and slippery I would skip the case too. The primary purpose of my case is to make it harder to drop in the first place.
In fact, I went so far as to contact several small electronics designers and fabricators and drew up some initial plans. rsync.net and (pre-release) 0x.co kept me busy, so I didn't get much further than that.
But in answer to your point:
"To make something modular you need to wrap each piece in its own case, add bulky connectors, etc. Both weight and volume are at an extreme premium in mobile devices."
No, not really ... the design direction I was going in was a to have one or two or three plastic cases, depending on how large (how many modules) you wanted your phone to be and then the modules themselves were bare daughterboards that had connectors such that you could assemble them like a grid.
So in that fashion, each module would not need its own packaging and case - you simply started with a plastic package (case) that was large enough for whatever "grid" you wanted to assemble.
And, of course, you could add a second (or third, or fourth) battery module.
Yes, they could make it stronger in the modular approach. But this means even more unnecessary plastic and metal casing.
Camera upgrades would sell like hot cakes.