> The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
> I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
why? my oneplus has 12 GB of RAM, 8 cores, and 256 GB of storage (plus expandable with SD card). It's plenty capable for development/desktop use. I've done dev on a raspberry pi with 4 GB and 4 cores, I don't see why the oneplus wouldn't be a more than acceptable "laptop"
If there were iOS dev tools on the iPhone, I think they’d probably be built around Xcode’s Interface Builder and resemble something like a touch friendly version of Visual Basic or REALBasic, simply because the smartphone typing experience is so ill-suited for writing code.
On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
From a hardware point of view, your average iPhone is definitely fast enough for many types of development.
What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature:
I believe iOS and iPadOS both support standard HID devices if connected through a USB-to-Lightning or USB-C adapter. I've used a Logitech MX Ergo on an iPad Mini and thought that was pretty neat.
I thought about getting a Magic keyboard and pairing that and the Ergo to the iPad as a lightweight SSH solution for traveling.
You're missing the point. The point is _NOT_ whether _ANYBODY_ would use them, the point is that you should own your device and be able to install any software on it that you want.
...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
Indeed, developing directly on the smartphone would be ridiculous. But, to be honest, I have similar feelings to developing directly on a laptop. There's no position I can place it at to have an ergonomic position; I always end up feeling like I'm hunched over a tiny screen. Which is why, when I get into work, I dock it and use an external monitor + kb/m.
So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
It really wouldn't require that much work. Just expose the unix tooling these devices are running under the hood anyway. Expose the actual file system not a toy one. All of these complaints kind of go away when you simply jailbreak your iphone, expose the filesystem for yourself, and can do whatever thanks to the built in unix ecosystem the device already runs, but walls off from you normally until its jailbroken.
There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc.
Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment.
I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
A lot of Android phones are capable of this (OnePlus, Samsung) but for reasons I don't understand Google disables it on the Pixel devices. I was infuriated when I tried to plug in my Pixel to a USB-C to HDMI cable and went down the troubleshooting rabbit hole only to find out that something I used to do all the time on my OnePlus wasn't possible.
> There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc...Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more.
Because many people can do everything they need on their undocked phone already.
For me, my phone is an auxiliary device and my preferred device is the computer. But I'm sure I'm in the minority.
Apart from dev work, almost off the other apps I use has a tablet and phone version. But I wouldn’t want the phone version other than staying on top of things. I’m typing this on the iPhone only because I’m laying on the couch and too lazy to get up. Even reading an ebook is a pain on such small screen.
It makes sense for the user but then you've just killed a lot of products you've convinced users to buy. It's ridiculus when you consider how many redundant computers people have in their homes. Smart TV. Watch. Laptops. Desktops. Phones. Even cars. In a perfect world you'd just have a central server that all of these dummy screens just tap into perhaps, either a handheld dock or a little thing in your closet. However, that would stop us from spending a grip on all these different product lines, all the different redundant things.
Garmin has made a brand of themselves doing this. Every sport activity, there's a running watch, a golf watch, a whatever the hell watch, a gps this, a gps that, a bike computer, whatever, all bespoke and siloed for a few activities, when really they could just sell you a single slab that connects to a gps and could do whatever. But then, they'd only be selling you one product and not dozens.
> "redundant computers people have in their homes. Smart TV. Watch. Laptops. Desktops. Phones. Even cars. In a perfect world you'd just have a central server that all of these dummy screens just tap into perhaps"
This is a nonsense, how is my phone going to tap into a central server at my home to do the image processing of taking a filtered video while on holiday? Stream MBit/sec over international cellular networking at my cost? Why would I want my car to tap into a handheld dock which I have to remember to bring with me and means my home computer is unusable by anyone else for the duration of my journey? How is my watch benefitting by having a long range wireless radio constantly running instead of a low power internal processor?
Maybe there's a lot of different devices because there's a lot of different ergonomics for the different tasks, all of which are improved with different kinds of computing devices? Like, if all I want is a running watch, I really don't care about it having a heavily rugged design like I might for some kind of hiking watch. I probably also don't care about connectivity to bike sensors. I probably also don't need a large satellite antenna on it. Nor do I need a big display and a mount for it and the ability to attach a sonar fish finder on it. I just want it a small and light as possible while still tracking heartrate, maybe connect to a wireless chest band, and an average quality GPS to follow my tracks.
But at the same time, if I'm on a boat and trying to look at charts and trying to find the fish, I don't necessarily care about it being small and light, I want it to be pretty big, and it needs to plug into the sonar fish finder and depth sensors on the boat.
But the ergonomics defines the needs for those computing devices.
I want that running watch to be pretty tiny, so it can only have a tiny battery. It doesn't have much of a display, so it doesn't need much graphics capabilities. Since it's barely interfacing with other devices it doesn't need a lot of peripheral support. It's not really going to load a lot of data files and doesn't need much RAM.
That fish finder is going to run a high resolution display as it's main duty so it needs a decent GPU. It's probably going to be connected to the boat's 12V system, so it doesn't need to be concerned with power usage. It's going to do a lot of reads from data files and need to hold chart data and overlay other information. It needs a lot of connectivity options for all the accessories I'm going to hook up to it.
In the end the needs for the compute are pretty different based on the different tasks. I don't want an ESP32 as a desktop and my watch doesn't need dual 3080's and 128GB of RAM.
This. I liked the idea from HP with there X3 phone and the Lapdock so much. All the CPU power and memory was i the phone. You could connect it to the Lapdock wireless or with a cable. The Lapdock was just a monitor, a keyboard and a battery. The idea was so cool. Sadly when it came out, Windows Mobile was already death.
I’d choose to use Xcode on Mac, but you _can_ write apps in Swift Playgrounds on iPad, and even upload them to App Store Connect for publication in the App Store.
Isn't that just a thin client though? the actual "machine" is the server and you're just remoting into it? I don't think I'd consider that "developing" on an ipad since without the server it's totally dead in the water. I'd call that developing on a server
People have been developing code for the last 50 years with command line ides. So long as the device has a command line and privileges its as fine of a platform as any, and orders of magnitude more performant than the hardware a lot of developers historically made a career out of. IO should be easy considering these things already have bluetooth and could interface with a keyboard. You don't need a mouse for command line work after all.
You know what though? Shortcuts exists on iOS. What is shortcuts? It’s a visual programming language for making apps on your iPhone. It allows you to interact and program your phone in a sensible manner for a small screen. Yeah it doesn’t give you keys to the kingdom, but the types of things you might want to do to automate using your phone are there.
I've seen those but never fully comprehended what it was about or experimented. I need to watch some Youtube videos on the subject and take a bite into that world.
??? Those are MinGW LLVM/Clang, MinGW GCC, and Cygwin GCC, respectively. I don't count either as truly native Windows, like I said earlier -- Cygwin certainly isn't.
Yup. I always wanted to develop, compile, and run programs on a small screen device that is meant to be a personal communication and media consumption device!
Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it. The whole article feels clickbait to me TBH.
And who should have that power of implementation? You, because of your opinion? The companies? Or the people who bought and paid for the devices?
It is emphatically not the case that there exists any meaningful difficulty or cost to do the implementation. Just open/root the devices for those who choose to do so and let them go. Or would you rather limit freedom?
Opening up a device just because a very niche user base (HN isn't representitive of general public) has a proof-of-concept use case that isn't productive in most cases, that would bring maintenance issues and possible attack vectors?
I'm glad Apple doesn't do that and focus on what generally matters.
I mean, I feel like I've heard this argument a lot...
"HN isn't representative of general public"
"We don't need file browsers because the general public doesn't use it"
"You shouldn't be able to install Emulators because the general public doesn't"
If we follow this reductive line of reasoning, nobody would ever do anything on an iPhone besides buy stuff. The iPhone supports hundreds of features that aren't representative of the general public, Apple chooses to deny you this one because they are afraid of it hurting their bottom line.
> Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it.
I disagree. If a device's hardware is capable of something, it should be implemented as soon as possible. Now, it shouldn't be forced on everyone, but having options available has traditionally improved software quality a lot. Even if that capability is bad, exposing it sooner is better than realizing it too late.
Meant by whom? To some, device they carry in their pocket is meant to be a light hacking tool. That modern devices can't do that even if the owner wants it is a travesty.
> Yup. I always wanted to develop, compile, and run programs on a small screen device that is meant to be a personal communication and media consumption device!
I don't even know what this means. Why wouldn't you?
I think the point is that these are all general purpose computers at their core but some have unnecessary barriers erected in userspace to narrow what the user can do.
I wouldn't code on it as-is but perhaps I could plug it into a hub at a desktop or find some other use for it.
Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM to run than I used to have total in hard drive space (for operating systems that also had hypertext document viewers, that rendered the same visual result as today). All new protocols have to run over port 443; I doubt there's been a new protocol port registered with IANA in 5 years. Smart devices have no keyboards and rely on swiping on glass. Everything runs off an internet connection so you can't really leave your house or a major city and keep things working, to say nothing of vendor service outages. Android could run regular old Linux and apps and give you a desktop, but it doesn't, because we are not holy enough to receive a useful user interface. Samsung had DeX in their phones like 10 years ago but apparently that's done for, and good luck finding any modern devices that support the standards needed to do things like output video, audio, ethernet, etc via USB-C. Bluetooth is still total garbage. We still have no audible user interfaces other than shitty cloud-vendor-specific "assistants" (even though I made my own audible user interface 15 years ago for a Car PC with nothing but open source tools). We still pay the same amount for a computer today that I paid for one 20 years ago (although adjusted for inflation I guess those older ones were more expensive). Computers today do exactly the same thing they did 20 years ago: save a document or image or video over a network, display it, print it. The only difference is they now do it in a much slower, more wasteful way. And programming is still a thing. To make a new program, a bunch of humans have to sit around typing out lines of text into a screen, and going through a laborious process to compile and test it all, and it's still full of bugs.
We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don't have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.
I have a 20 year old laptop. Literally, I bought it for $1700 in 2003. It doesn't run any software better than the $20 raspberri pi I also have. It certainly doesn't run software better than the $1200 desktop I built recently - that one can play games on one monitor while web browsing on another (sometimes I'll kick of a compile on that machine between matches and neither seems to be hurt too bad by both things running, if I tried that on the old laptop I'd probably have to call the fire department).
Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches.
When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past.
I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.
>Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor)
A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead.
On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time.
Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
Why would i use a mouse to open apps and navigate a menu? I press a button and get a new terminal. I press a different button and launch a chrome window. Another one brings up a curated menu of common apps navigable by keyboard (either iterate through or search by typing the name). It all happens in under a second (except launching chrome, but that's mostly chrome not my system).
Im not denigrating files and folders. Im not upset that desktop is the name, its fitting for the metaphor they were going for, its just a silly use of my screen - most of the time the "desktop" should be under actually useful windows that are doing actual useful work. Hell if i wanted a grid of clickable things I'd install something like EWW and have a button that poped up that grid instead - the problem with the desktop (besides being a bad metaphor) is that it's functionality should be overlay not underlay.
When I use a real operating system instead of an entertainment kiosk I use dmenu to open programs. But most people find using the mouse more intuitive than the keyboard.
I think it's actually quite good that you get back to the desktop by clicking the 'minimise everything' button. It reduces cognitive load to switch tasks by making everything currently open "go away" and then starting a new task, rather than just loading up every new task on top of the old one. It's like opening a new window for a new task vs just opening 500 tabs in one window. Better yet are systems with multiple desktops where you start a new activity ("Okay checking my emails is done, time to do some budgeting") by going to a new desktop and then clicking Excel or GnuCash or whatever.
The desktop is for most people just a generic collection of random stuff. That seems chaotic and bad and messy, but I think it's actually really powerful. It's like the filesystem. Probably for every type of document there is a better way to browse it. Photos are best browsed in a photo browser. Videos in a video browser. Documents in a document browser. But a traditional file browser is the best generic browser of things. Similarly, an overlay application launcher is probably better for quickly starting a program, and a 'recent files' launcher might be better for that, and a 'favourite folders' thing might be better for that, etc. etc. But in practice people tend towards a kind of 'managed chaos' that intentionally-designed systems don't handle very well. It's the backup, the default, the catchall. Every system needs something like that. That's what your desktop ends up being.
Go to an office. Is everything filed perfectly? No, most stuff is and then there's always, inevitably, a 'miscellaneous' section. Everyone has that little jar with random screws and twist-ties and rubber bands and those little tags things that go around bread bags when they're twisted and a couple of coins. Everyone has that drawer which has USB cables and old phones and permanent markers and foreign coins from that time you went overseas. You need a 'random miscellaneous shit' category.
> the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better
The hardware is.
The software has trended in the opposite direction. Software made today can't run on old hardware - not because the architecture is different or incompatible, but because the old hardware doesn't have enough resources to waste. The software is doing literally the same thing it used to, but slower and more bloated.
> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications.
During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake.
In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on.
This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's).
The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A).
For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.
Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices.
Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system.
Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device.
modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.
To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN.
There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search.
How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.
It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents.
>How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to?
All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day.
And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state.
These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago.
They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter".
They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers.
So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns.
Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access!
And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often.
For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures.
IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is:
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card.
2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup.
3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
> But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot
Fully agreed there. It would be nice to have some real widely used standards in this space. I'd love to just have a single API available to query any of my datasets wherever they may be. When I open a picture picker I should see files from my NAS, from Google Photos, from my local device, from any remote device I can access at the moment, from a NextCloud instance, etc.
Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.
Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe?
I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't.
You can choose whatever words you want for it, but there's a difference between the targeted polished UX of "there's an app for that", and a morass of software that may or may not serve your needs that kind of sort of works together if you hold it right.
For the same reasons Android just actively broke it. Sandboxing is a matter of user security, if you let apps violate sandboxing then you can't have a meaningful permissions system.
You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.
It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.
You've gone and conflated user and application permissions. I was talking about owner permissions. The device owner should always have the ability to backup any file on the system. Only Apple controls the entire system. They can and should give this control to the owner.
The difficulty I had just copying things from one phone to another recently was ridiculous. You’re right, this should be a basic function. I have files I’ve copied from computer to computer that were originally from the late 80s.
I have this problem also with Windows, it's one of the two purposes for which I made https://dro.pm. If it's too large for email or there's no email client installed, I wouldn't know for the life of me how to copy things on Windows without spending >5 minutes setting up shared folders, firewalling, and then undoing the changes when done. Uploading to a website and typing over a very short link is done in ten seconds
Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
Cool service, probably shouldn't be used for anything you don't want to be public. The URLs seem to change incrementally, and https://dro.pm/g is self referential for that reason, probably. You can go letter by letter to look at various thicks people share.
Yes, I'm hoping that's obvious as it'll be inherent to such easy-to-use links, though the site has such low traffic and I know from access logs that nobody is guessing these links in an automated fashion, that a few seconds of exposure are almost negligible, depending on what it is you're posting.
If the links were unguessable (or had a password option, as has been proposed many times), you'd also lose much of the convenience. But unguessable links is an option if you use the second tab, effectively the same as a password.
Especially if you use "delete after opening", the custom link can be extremely short-lived (no one will guess that in time) and you got an indicator of compromise as well. (I personally trust this enough for ID cards and passwords, but of course that's with the benefit of being the owner and knowing all of the above plus that there is no secret logging.)
Fwiw, I also like the "social network" effect so far. I've discovered interesting things on dro.pm by looking at what people use my service for. Currently, /q has an interesting youtube video that I wanted to continue watching on my phone for example :)
iOS has come a long way, though. There's a local file system I can access and move files around with. I can run Syncthing on it (with Möbius). I can even run Linux on it (iSH), including a package manager. I can use qpdf to decrypt a PDF I downloaded with Safari, and I can even run Python and compile C code, on the device, with acceptable performance.
It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
You can't do any of these things without doxxing yourself to Apple, as you can't install apps without an Apple ID, and you can't get an Apple ID without a phone number.
Signing up for an account with your personal details is not "doxxing yourself". Doxxing is when someone else publicly reveals your personal information on the internet.
My android devices have all come with basic file system browsers, but even better, I can choose from a plethora of full featured apps for full file system access. This is one of the issues that has kept me away from iphone, though.
Yep, this is the main reason I use Android. It also means I can modify things on the OS level to e.g. fabricate false GPS data and supply it to apps that insist on GPS access to be functional.
On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
Out of curiosity, are you referring to rooted Android, or some variant that provides the user some protection from apps "knowing"? GrapheneOS seems to provide some of this (Storage Scopes, network permission, etc.) but not all.
Custom mod of LineageOS, not rooted stock Android, although you might be able to accomplish it with rooted stock and some frameworks like Xposed, they can be detected by some apps, and some apps actually do detect those frameworks and ban users. WeChat is particularly notorious for this kind of detection. If you get banned you not only are disconnected from communicating with your family and friends, you can't even book train and flight tickets, you can't buy food at many places that only take mobile payments and don't take cash, just for a stupid framework. So it has to be done on the OS level.
I was thinking about getting an xperia, I asked about rooting/custom rom and apparetly unlocking the bootloader will delete keys that the camera needs to run. Seeing as it's designed as a cameraphone first and foremost, that's a bit of a major feature to lose.
Why, as a user, is that story (even without losing the camera) would any of that sound better than just having the app store require that apps follow some approval guidelines about what they are allowed to do with privileges and what they are allowed to do when denied privileges?
Unfortunately, you can't really have sideloading and an app review process. If sideloading is trivial/normalized for users then it'll be trivial/normalized for bad actors wanting to exploit those users.
To stay in touch with friends and family who only use a certain app for communication and social event planning. I don't have the energy to convince them and an entire country to move off said app.
To get permits to certain wilderness areas that require GPS permissions to even apply.
To get on restaurant waitlists before arriving. (Some restaurants insist on your phone-reported GPS location being within a certain radius to get on the list. Welcome to Silicon Valley in 2023)
According to the App Store rules for iOS, An app can’t withhold functionality when you deny it GPS access unless it’s required for the app’s functionality.
Why would I use an app that requires unnecessary permissions?
The SSH client Prompt uses GPS permissions as a round-about workaround to ensure your SSH connection is not reaped and closed by iOS while in the background.
I seem to recall very Android phone I've had came with an app called "Files". If not named "Files", they always had some kind of baked-in file browser. The last few phones have been Pixels, I don't remember exactly the specifics of the one on the Motorola devices I had prior, but on the Pixel devices its this app:
No ads. Sure, it tries to group things by categories and searching at the very top, but its still easy to see "Storage devices" which lets me navigate the actual folder structure. My Pixels have come with USB-C male to USB-A female adapters which allow me to plug in things like flash drives, memory card readers, cameras, external hard drives, even other Android devices and access the files through the Files app.
Modern Android (11 onwards) no longer allows full filesystem access for file manager apps. Apps can opt into exposing some of their files for management by implementing a horrible Java API designed for cloud storage services. Some vendors' forks probably disable this change but that's not something that can be relied on.
Meanwhile iOS also has sandboxing but at least you can still meaningfully use normal goddamn filesystem APIs and there's now a system file manager.
Minecraft for Android has two storage locations in-game: Application (default, not accessible to users) and External (accessible to users by connecting their phone to a computer).
I cannot backup my worlds without either using a third-party tool, or paying Microsoft $4 for the privilege of uploading my world to their server (Realm), changing my storage location to External and then downloading it back. Ridiculous.
So exactly why do you need access to the file system? You have access to a location where you can share files between apps. Any application that supports access to file picker gives you access to any of your installed document providers like iCloud, Google Drive, Box, an attached USB drive, a network drive and the local device.
And direct access via the Files app.
The one thing missing is that admittedly there is no way to add your own music to the music library on the phone itself.
I pretty much never use it on my Mac, all the apps I use show the filesystem in a sidebar and have a fuzzy search feature. Even Apple apps (like Xcode) have that so clearly they're aware of how bad the file picker is.
But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.
A counter-datapoint of one, from me: I don't miss the file system browser at all. I have been a little bewildered by the iOS "Files" app, and the addition to the sharing widget of "Save to Files" - I never use it. I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose and that no one would ever use it, but I don't miss it and don't have a need or want for it.
Sometimes I want to collect a couple of files and documents from emails, and make sure they are both available and together in a place. That's about the only time I use it, but I find it pretty handy in those occasions. It's more of a temporary place though, rather than something permanent.
Such as tracking you every moment of your waking life. How modern technology has become so evil, looking back. Nowadays every device we have is clearly spyware, from the point of view of 1999.
TFA says this clearly. The whole point of the article is that the device can be used to develop and build software for the device, on the device, without an external system...
"e-waste consumption slabs" really does a disservice to all of the art that has been created with these devices (visual, auditory, textual), all of the communities that have been built by information sharing and network effects, education that has come from looking up anything at any time, and the exploration that apps like Maps, Weather, Translate, etc encourage and enable.
"I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.
I used to be able to do something similar on my Sharp Zaurus SL5500 with the stock rom: there were various interpreters and compilers available for it and the built-in keyboard had mappings for the needed characters so I could write small programs and then compile and run them right on the device.
I had one of these and a Psion when I was a kid. These days I have an Android phone. I know about the Astro Slide but my phone is already great. I have a pocket Bluetooth keyboard but it's not an optimal size. I'd love a 4 row scissor switch Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket with my phone. I get such retro feelings.
I'm not entirely stuck in the past. Maybe I'll make use of an old phone as a remote touch screen keyboard, with Gboard on an old phone and WiFi keyboard on the new one. I feel like hybrid physical/swipe keyboard could be interesting though.
I had one running NetBSD together with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving purposes. With the driver for the WiFi card patched to enable monitor mode. Had two different antennas, a quarter wave dipole, which I made myself, and also an Andrew QD-2402, a 16dBi antenna (!) that could receive WiFi APs from more than 20km away, when on high ground.
You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only.
And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it.
I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere...
It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.
"Soon after HP's merger with Compaq in 2002, HP discontinued its Jornada line of Microsoft Windows powered Pocket PCs, and continued the iPAQ line that started under Compaq."
"But then HP encountered the grim reality faced by anyone trying to compete with Apple in mobile devices: making competitive hardware is difficult, and attracting developers is even more so. It's the Catch 22 situation I spoke about in my earlier webOS analysis: no apps = no customers = no developers = no apps." https://web.archive.org/web/20110925012246/http://mobile-dev...
There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. I believe Mozilla tried to invest in this pretty heavily.
But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.
Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.
Can confirm. I recently demoted my old Samsung S7 to be Wifi-only and work stuff-only. MFA, mobile email when I'm not at my desk, etc.
When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
Personal laptop is much thinner and lighter, and I'm less concerned with losing it on travel compared to my work laptop. Also - accessing work resources requires a crap-ton of security policies applied to the device (full control including remote wipe, a stack of security & endpoint management software, just to be able to authenticate with my work account) which I don't want to install/grant on my personal laptop.
That's an interesting value system. Why is losing a work laptop more concerning than losing your personal laptop? losing either of them isn't great, but the company has far more resources than you to protect and replace the laptop than you do.
Yeah but it's yours. Replacing it is so much harder for you than it is for corporate IT which buys laptops by the pallet.
If you'd lost a work laptop ever than yeah I could see not wanting to lose another one, but the mere possibility of losing one isn't anywhere near being "the person who is always losing their work laptop".
Losing my personal laptop would be a big deal for me. Losing my work laptop, while still not ideal, is just what IT calls Tuesday.
I want to like this setup, but the NexDock's input devices (especially the touchpad) are so bad. Like, near unusably bad. Which, for a device that's mostly I/O, is a shame.
I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
> Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.
Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
> Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time.
Thinking of the people I know, about a third of them don't personally have any kind of real "PC" kind of computing device (laptop/desktop). Many get by with just their phone and a tablet, not even a laptop. They might have a work laptop, but that's usually only for work-related tasks; they don't have any permanent desk setup in mind for computing. This percentage of people is growing, not shrinking.
And to think, I've got that much exposure to people with that kind of computing lifestyle, and yet nearly half of my friends are people in PC gaming culture and go to things like massive LAN parties and watch game tournaments on Twitch.
I'd say people who have gaming PCs are an enthusiast of sorts. Step out of professional contexts and gaming PCs and a lot of people don't even bother with laptops these days. Having a dedicated space in your home for computing seems to be more and more rare these days.
In most Areas HN is popular in, it’s still normal to have a laptop for school, work, or at least odd things like tax returns and document processing. You could use a tablet or phone but people tend to buy a laptop.
In areas where you do very much see phone and no laptop being common or the norm, the trend is towards increasing laptop ownership, not declining laptop ownership. It’s not a matter of phones displacing laptops so much as phones being more important and accessible.
iPadOS is mostly delivering on what you describe. Plug into monitor, mouse, keyboard, window manager, multitasking. Only gap is the “open/unlocked” bit, but Apple is making slow progress there.
It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
iPadOS has some real weird limitations when it comes to big screens. For example, the small iPads don't support stage manager despite being more than powerful enough to drive a measily 1080p display. Their weird window managed also makes for a suboptimal desktop experience, with the weird mouse blob making the entire thing look more like a non-touch tablet than a real desktop.
They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
As others have mentioned, Samsung DeX does this very well. Plus, there are several apps out there for setting up a near Linux desktop experience on the device. Previously DeX itself used to support running Linux applications, it's a shame they dropped that.
As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra.
It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
Yes, they load up Android with their own versions of apps in an attempt at end-user lock-in to their ecosystem, plus various other, what I consider, unnecessary padding that's not uninstallable.
The new life breathed into an older Samsung device by the installation of LineageOS is what I consider the proof of this.
Overall it's entirely subjective, however. I prefer minimal base Android so that I can choose which apps are allowed to annoy me with their various reminders to create an account, log in, look at these new features, rate me, etc.
Other (less technologically savvy) family members love their Samsung apps and the ecosystem, and just find my setup to be confusing or overly complicated.
Right. Whereas we want to strip the software down to the bare minimum into some sort of platonic ideal state, it turns out all the Samsung stuff is actually quite useful and actually is what most people want. It's really quite useful stuff!
That reputation was why I had stuck to brands which stayed closer to a more vanilla Android experience.
My experience with their latest stuff has been that they do still have a lot of bloat and duplicated functionality, but the base experience is much closer to stock Android than what I remembered from their older phones. To put it differently, it looks and feels similar to the near stock Xperia 1 ii I switched from but has all sorts of little differences.
I actually find myself using a lot of the functionality too, so it feels a bit less "bloated" to me.
I haven't really noticed ads though. They do recommend stuff, eg their camera app has a bunch of modes and the "Expert RAW" mode was shown in the app but required a download from their app store. I don't really count those since they're somewhat more relevant than say, Windows advertising candy crush on the start menu.
Meh. Not really. I notice a few things here and there but avoiding Samsung apps is pretty easy.
With Samsung I can plug in a USB-C to HDMI cable and duplicate my screen with zero effort. And with DeX, apparently I can turn my phone into a desktop?! I never tried before last week but when I plugged in aforementioned cable, I get a DeX prompt. Exit, and I see the screen. Hit "enable DeX" and it turns on a mode that shows something like a desktop screen on the external display.
Perhaps the fact this isn't known or operationalized by companies means it has a ways to go, or that laptops are easier for remote workers. But it's cool stuff.
I think this depends on region, and the type of phone.
I am in Canada and have never seen ads or bloatware on Samsung phones. I currently use a Galaxy Z Fold 3 connected to a lapdock via USB-C video out. DeX is a very nice desktop environment for the phone.
I have a midrange Samsung tablet (FE model) and the only "bloat" I've noticed is a Google Now replacement that I can't uninstall. That's very annoying, but that's also the only unnecessary application on there.
Samsung has to package certain applications with their device to allow Google Play, like Chrome. Google has convinced people that their browser is the norm (not the perfectly fine Samsung Internet) and that any manufacturer making their own apps to compete with theirs is "bloat".
The well-integrated Samsung calendar is a lot better than Google Calendar, but Google forced companies for years to install their version as well, despite their failure to capitalize on the unique hardware features of some devices. The same is true for many other Google apps.
I don't think I've seen random ads in Samsung's pre-installed apps. Samsung Health on my (non-Samsung) phone started advertising their new phone at me, which disturbed me, but it seems to have stopped doing that soon after all by itself. My guess is that they received more backlash than anticipated.
I'm pretty sure I could give Samsung Dex to a lot of people and they'd be fine using it as a daily driver for their computer. It does everything most people want out of Windows (a browsers and light office work) and it's not nearly as bad as some other attempts. With modern smartphone CPUs, the UI is smooth and responsive, and Samsung's design makes me a little jealous as a Linux user because it's honestly just better. I'd even go do far as to call it better than Windows 10's UI in some ways.
If you're ever near a store that had Samsung tablets on display, I recommend you try putting one of the demo units in Dex mode. It's a toggle in the quick toggles and it'll turn the tablet into a full desktop (which is perfectly fine for the massive screens tablets have these days!).
Hell, if Jetbrains keeps developing their remote coding platform, I bet I'd be able to do programming work from a tablet and a sleeve as if I was working on my Linux laptop.
Just be careful not to disable the ui, adb or something else that is essential. I haven't found anything that can't be disabled, yet. Always backup your important data in case you have to reset to factory defaults.
I have a Samsung A32 and the bloatware has been completely unobtrusive for me so far, and no ads either.
My purchasing and usage habits for mobile devices is to get something new that is mid or low-range, use it until I notice performance issues, or the bloatware does something I don't like, then flash a custom ROM.
That's served me pretty well in the past, but I may still have hangups from teething pains with rooting devices and compatibility issues on custom ROMs back in the 2010's
The entire vision behind Windows 10 cross platform apps was inspirational. Code once run then across phone, tablet, desktop, and Xbox. And Hololens... I guess.
The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
Indeed. I have a Nokia 950 and in many ways WinPho was a really nice phone OS; Microsoft's endless jerking about of developers as it went 6.5 -> 7.x -> 8 -> 10 did it no favours.
Absolutely, as soon as developers and customers found a nice place - they would pull the rug from under them. I got into the WinPho around Win 8/8.1 and it was pretty cool and the update to Win10 showed to much promise that vanished the instant they stopped working on the hardware. To be fair if I was in Nadella's position, even though I loved the Lumia line - I would have done the same.
I have said that in technology one step ahead is an innovator, two steps ahead is martyr. Windows phone was Martyr.
I think Microsoft finally got it right around Windows 10, but the damage had already been done. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8/10 had caused too much damage to the brand.
Now, Samsung Dex is doing what Microsoft wanted to do, but very few people know about it. That probably has to do with how uncommon USB-C docks are, and how many of those docks use DisplayLink instead of a normal standard to do video. It's a real shame, because a modern phone is more than powerful enough for most people's computer work.
Apple has a better solution with Continuity, if you are near your Mac there is an icon for the activity you are doing on the iPhone that you can click to continue it on the Mac. So you can just finish an email using the keyboard if you want.
That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while.
You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
Phones are powerful enough these days, but computers are more powerful. I carry work laptop between home and office, but I couldn't do work on phone. Computers are also cheap, I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as spare desktop.
The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs.
Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
I thought about this quite a bit when my phone and table started supporting Samsung Dex. It's a great system and I could literally do every single thing I need to on my phone.
In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc.
I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
> I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc.
> But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more.
Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.
The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.
The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.
The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.
But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"?
Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.
Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.
For context, I've exclusively used macs as daily work tools for 2 decades. The reason I did so was because I got tired of trying to make BSD work, and also burned out from windows.
I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works".
But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable.
That's basically what we want from appliances.
I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there.
Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.
(VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.)
With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy.
Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling.
That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience.
(This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.)
I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
I think there is a GNU/Linux distro which can do that. Not sure whether it was KDE Neon or some feature of Framework laptops or another one, but they had a video where they plugged the phone onto a screen and were aber to use both.
Does the Deck count? It's just a laptop with a weird keyboard, you don't exactly put it in your pocket. Attaching an external display to s device running Arch isn't all that unique.
I just don't see the appeal of this. I still need a screen and a keyboard to use it in desktop mode. Then I can just bring a laptop. My data is in the cloud and my settings sync - so the only way this could be "better" is that I don't have to buy a phone and a laptop I guess?
I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac.
That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
But in the office, there could be a beefy workstation waiting for me. As long as we're not talking about floating workplace setups (which I'm no big fan of) or cutting costs, I still don't see the upside.
That's true, but I think different people have different needs and preferences.
Many companies give developers laptops (even though workstations would be faster) so evidently some people already trade portability for power, so having your phone be your main computer would just be a further step in that direction.
For people who aren't developers, e.g. managers doing email, browsing, Excel etc., I'm sure a phone would be powerful enough.
> There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. <...> But it went nowhere.
It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
HP did build a mobile phone with Windows Mobile (X3) and something they called Lapdock. It was like a slim Notebook, but just the screen and the keyboard. You could connect it wit the phone with a cable or even wireless. All the CPU and memory was in the phone. The Lapdock was just really just a second screen and a real keyboard. I have no Idea, why no other company made something like that for android phones. I mean all the tech is already there an it works (DEX).
I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.
While previous machines had those possibilities enabled to allow the user to do much more, it also means those possibilities were wide-open to any third-party software that was installed on the machine.
It's not that modern machines can't do those tasks, but that they generally shouldn't do those tasks.
It's not unreasonable for device manufacturers to sandbox and restrict access to functionality to protect the majority of their users.
Even despite these attempts the app stores are full of malware, just imagine how much worse it could be if these apps could also compile their own variants and then abuse Bluetooth/Airdrop to spread it.
You don't have to "imagine," you're basically describing most of the history of viruses and Windows. So what?
I'm entirely unconvinced by this sensationalist take; I'm quite certain we've lost more than we've gained from turning general purpose computers into nanny-state locked down devices.
I work with undergraduates sometimes and its amazing what we can take for granted in terms of computer literacy these days. Some of these kids haven't touched a desktop OS until they get into college, at which point they are just using like google docs and sheets and the filesystem within those webapps. They don't really get what files are, what file types are, what folders are even, and look at me like I have two heads when I say copy and paste some text to a document, save it, send it over.
You think they'd be hamstrung for life but honestly, there isn't much computer literacy in the workforce from what I've seen, either. They'd fit right in. It just sucks to think about all the kids who might have gone further with computing if more of it was exposed to them, instead of locked up basically until they get into college and demoralized by a crushing CS curriculum, since highschools and middle or elementary don't really teach this stuff either.
I teach IT at a university, undergrads and grads. All of this is exactly correct. The oddest thing is explaining to people my age (I'm 46) how many of my IT students are likely less knowledgable about those kinds of basics (despite having other, to me odd, skills, like fake instagram accounts and such)
If apple was concerned about these protections they'd just put it behind some sort of toggle. Right now its kind of an extortion situation since they change you money for a developer license, and void your warranty for jailbreaking. If it was all for the users benefit then they'd offer to reset a jailbroken phone back to factory settings at the genus bar instead of refusing service.
How hard is doing development on Android, really? You can just build the app and run it, can't you? Equating that with Apple's genuinely awful stance is lazy and hurts the cause.
I originally started a reply to you to tell you why you're wrong, but after thinking through the contemporary process, I agree. It's pretty trivial to install an app and do dev on android without any external machine, and you can easily plug in a keyboard and/or mouse and use that too. I agree much with OP but I think he's being a little too hard on Android
Rasberry Pi and some other SoC-based embedded boards allow on-board development but it's never as much fun as it should be. At the end of the day I prefer some mixed model where I run VSCode or similar on the PC and download/remote-debug on the target.
It's so cool to see modern workflows and software on old devices. I chase this through my retro computing hobby, seeing how far I can take old machines.
Do any HN users have a recommendation for a lightweight distro that would run on an SSE1-only Pentium III CPU? The most recently supported Ubuntu distro is a little too heavy for it.
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There is a more compelling argument about the iPad not being able to do software development since it is marketed as a laptop replacement.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
why? my oneplus has 12 GB of RAM, 8 cores, and 256 GB of storage (plus expandable with SD card). It's plenty capable for development/desktop use. I've done dev on a raspberry pi with 4 GB and 4 cores, I don't see why the oneplus wouldn't be a more than acceptable "laptop"
I guess I'm just not used to phones being as powerful as they are.
On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature:
https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
https://youtu.be/Ku6eQvYRDrk?t=342
I thought about getting a Magic keyboard and pairing that and the Ergo to the iPad as a lightweight SSH solution for traveling.
...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
You could do the same with a phone
Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment.
I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
Because many people can do everything they need on their undocked phone already.
For me, my phone is an auxiliary device and my preferred device is the computer. But I'm sure I'm in the minority.
https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
Garmin has made a brand of themselves doing this. Every sport activity, there's a running watch, a golf watch, a whatever the hell watch, a gps this, a gps that, a bike computer, whatever, all bespoke and siloed for a few activities, when really they could just sell you a single slab that connects to a gps and could do whatever. But then, they'd only be selling you one product and not dozens.
This is a nonsense, how is my phone going to tap into a central server at my home to do the image processing of taking a filtered video while on holiday? Stream MBit/sec over international cellular networking at my cost? Why would I want my car to tap into a handheld dock which I have to remember to bring with me and means my home computer is unusable by anyone else for the duration of my journey? How is my watch benefitting by having a long range wireless radio constantly running instead of a low power internal processor?
But at the same time, if I'm on a boat and trying to look at charts and trying to find the fish, I don't necessarily care about it being small and light, I want it to be pretty big, and it needs to plug into the sonar fish finder and depth sensors on the boat.
I want that running watch to be pretty tiny, so it can only have a tiny battery. It doesn't have much of a display, so it doesn't need much graphics capabilities. Since it's barely interfacing with other devices it doesn't need a lot of peripheral support. It's not really going to load a lot of data files and doesn't need much RAM.
That fish finder is going to run a high resolution display as it's main duty so it needs a decent GPU. It's probably going to be connected to the boat's 12V system, so it doesn't need to be concerned with power usage. It's going to do a lot of reads from data files and need to hold chart data and overlay other information. It needs a lot of connectivity options for all the accessories I'm going to hook up to it.
In the end the needs for the compute are pretty different based on the different tasks. I don't want an ESP32 as a desktop and my watch doesn't need dual 3080's and 128GB of RAM.
Tell that to those of us that wrote games on a TI-83.
You think Windows dev shouldn't happen just because you don't like it?
AFAIK there is no native GCC compiler for Windows. You have to use a pseudo-Linux environment like Cygwin or MinGW.
might want to check your facts before spouting nonsense. there is, and has been for many, many years. more than one in fact:
https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw
https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-gcc
https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/x86_64/release/...
Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it. The whole article feels clickbait to me TBH.
It is emphatically not the case that there exists any meaningful difficulty or cost to do the implementation. Just open/root the devices for those who choose to do so and let them go. Or would you rather limit freedom?
I'm glad Apple doesn't do that and focus on what generally matters.
"HN isn't representative of general public"
"We don't need file browsers because the general public doesn't use it"
"You shouldn't be able to install Emulators because the general public doesn't"
If we follow this reductive line of reasoning, nobody would ever do anything on an iPhone besides buy stuff. The iPhone supports hundreds of features that aren't representative of the general public, Apple chooses to deny you this one because they are afraid of it hurting their bottom line.
I disagree. If a device's hardware is capable of something, it should be implemented as soon as possible. Now, it shouldn't be forced on everyone, but having options available has traditionally improved software quality a lot. Even if that capability is bad, exposing it sooner is better than realizing it too late.
For 99.9% of the people, stability and security is more important.
I don't even know what this means. Why wouldn't you?
I wouldn't code on it as-is but perhaps I could plug it into a hub at a desktop or find some other use for it.
We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don't have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.
Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches.
When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past.
I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.
A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead.
On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time.
Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
Im not denigrating files and folders. Im not upset that desktop is the name, its fitting for the metaphor they were going for, its just a silly use of my screen - most of the time the "desktop" should be under actually useful windows that are doing actual useful work. Hell if i wanted a grid of clickable things I'd install something like EWW and have a button that poped up that grid instead - the problem with the desktop (besides being a bad metaphor) is that it's functionality should be overlay not underlay.
I think it's actually quite good that you get back to the desktop by clicking the 'minimise everything' button. It reduces cognitive load to switch tasks by making everything currently open "go away" and then starting a new task, rather than just loading up every new task on top of the old one. It's like opening a new window for a new task vs just opening 500 tabs in one window. Better yet are systems with multiple desktops where you start a new activity ("Okay checking my emails is done, time to do some budgeting") by going to a new desktop and then clicking Excel or GnuCash or whatever.
The desktop is for most people just a generic collection of random stuff. That seems chaotic and bad and messy, but I think it's actually really powerful. It's like the filesystem. Probably for every type of document there is a better way to browse it. Photos are best browsed in a photo browser. Videos in a video browser. Documents in a document browser. But a traditional file browser is the best generic browser of things. Similarly, an overlay application launcher is probably better for quickly starting a program, and a 'recent files' launcher might be better for that, and a 'favourite folders' thing might be better for that, etc. etc. But in practice people tend towards a kind of 'managed chaos' that intentionally-designed systems don't handle very well. It's the backup, the default, the catchall. Every system needs something like that. That's what your desktop ends up being.
Go to an office. Is everything filed perfectly? No, most stuff is and then there's always, inevitably, a 'miscellaneous' section. Everyone has that little jar with random screws and twist-ties and rubber bands and those little tags things that go around bread bags when they're twisted and a couple of coins. Everyone has that drawer which has USB cables and old phones and permanent markers and foreign coins from that time you went overseas. You need a 'random miscellaneous shit' category.
The hardware is.
The software has trended in the opposite direction. Software made today can't run on old hardware - not because the architecture is different or incompatible, but because the old hardware doesn't have enough resources to waste. The software is doing literally the same thing it used to, but slower and more bloated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake.
In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on.
This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's).
The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A).
For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.
Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system.
Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device.
Really wish it wasn't this way.
It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search.
How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
>How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to?
All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day.
And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state.
These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago.
They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter".
They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers.
So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
You can build abstractions on top of the files and folders (and almost everyone does), but still provide access to regular files.
The entire point about files and folder abstractions is that they are portable across platforms and they are technically sound.
They want a moat, so they built one.
Who is disrespecting the users now?
Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access!
And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often.
For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures.
IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
Fully agreed there. It would be nice to have some real widely used standards in this space. I'd love to just have a single API available to query any of my datasets wherever they may be. When I open a picture picker I should see files from my NAS, from Google Photos, from my local device, from any remote device I can access at the moment, from a NextCloud instance, etc.
Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun?
Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it.
If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad.
Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now.
Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't.
Certainly app and application are synonyms.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/more-than-1000-android-apps...
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...
You can allow certain common kinds of sandboxing crossover - apps that want to touch the camera roll, apps that want to touch wireless/location data (which are one and the same), ones that want to use the contacts, etc. But at the end of the day if you don't fall into one of these buckets you're going to have an awkward experience going into the OS and approving moving stuff into/out of the sandbox.
It'd be nice if you could allow complete crossover for certain apps - so, VLC can touch all of the podcast app files, or whatever. But I can understand why they don't even want to cross that rubicon.
You've gone and conflated user and application permissions. I was talking about owner permissions. The device owner should always have the ability to backup any file on the system. Only Apple controls the entire system. They can and should give this control to the owner.
Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
If the links were unguessable (or had a password option, as has been proposed many times), you'd also lose much of the convenience. But unguessable links is an option if you use the second tab, effectively the same as a password.
Especially if you use "delete after opening", the custom link can be extremely short-lived (no one will guess that in time) and you got an indicator of compromise as well. (I personally trust this enough for ID cards and passwords, but of course that's with the benefit of being the owner and knowing all of the above plus that there is no secret logging.)
Fwiw, I also like the "social network" effect so far. I've discovered interesting things on dro.pm by looking at what people use my service for. Currently, /q has an interesting youtube video that I wanted to continue watching on my phone for example :)
It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
Why, as a user, is that story (even without losing the camera) would any of that sound better than just having the app store require that apps follow some approval guidelines about what they are allowed to do with privileges and what they are allowed to do when denied privileges?
Unfortunately, you can't really have sideloading and an app review process. If sideloading is trivial/normalized for users then it'll be trivial/normalized for bad actors wanting to exploit those users.
To get permits to certain wilderness areas that require GPS permissions to even apply.
To get on restaurant waitlists before arriving. (Some restaurants insist on your phone-reported GPS location being within a certain radius to get on the list. Welcome to Silicon Valley in 2023)
Lots of reasons.
Why would I use an app that requires unnecessary permissions?
FLOSS file-managers were decent already in the 90s.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
No ads. Sure, it tries to group things by categories and searching at the very top, but its still easy to see "Storage devices" which lets me navigate the actual folder structure. My Pixels have come with USB-C male to USB-A female adapters which allow me to plug in things like flash drives, memory card readers, cameras, external hard drives, even other Android devices and access the files through the Files app.
Meanwhile iOS also has sandboxing but at least you can still meaningfully use normal goddamn filesystem APIs and there's now a system file manager.
I cannot backup my worlds without either using a third-party tool, or paying Microsoft $4 for the privilege of uploading my world to their server (Realm), changing my storage location to External and then downloading it back. Ridiculous.
And direct access via the Files app.
The one thing missing is that admittedly there is no way to add your own music to the music library on the phone itself.
I pretty much never use it on my Mac, all the apps I use show the filesystem in a sidebar and have a fuzzy search feature. Even Apple apps (like Xcode) have that so clearly they're aware of how bad the file picker is.
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ https://ubports.com/
Also, the iPhone can do things the Jornada can't.......
Sure and you can write your own apps for some devices on a mainframe, even today
Wow, this quote really hits the nail on the head.
"I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.
You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only.
And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it.
I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere...
It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.
"In mid-August 2011, HP announced that they would be discontinuing all webOS devices." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
According to the linked source:
"But then HP encountered the grim reality faced by anyone trying to compete with Apple in mobile devices: making competitive hardware is difficult, and attracting developers is even more so. It's the Catch 22 situation I spoke about in my earlier webOS analysis: no apps = no customers = no developers = no apps." https://web.archive.org/web/20110925012246/http://mobile-dev...
But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted.
But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc.
But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
If you live in the EU.
I look forward to Emacs on the ipad.
[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
Part of your personal brand at work should be "not the guy who is always losing his work laptop".
Plus, my personal laptop is cheap, old and encrypted.
If you'd lost a work laptop ever than yeah I could see not wanting to lose another one, but the mere possibility of losing one isn't anywhere near being "the person who is always losing their work laptop".
Losing my personal laptop would be a big deal for me. Losing my work laptop, while still not ideal, is just what IT calls Tuesday.
For what it's worth, I've never been caught up in the 10+ rounds of layoffs which have taken place in my career across all the places I've worked.
https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co...
Hardware side:
https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/
I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery.
While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
"Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
Thinking of the people I know, about a third of them don't personally have any kind of real "PC" kind of computing device (laptop/desktop). Many get by with just their phone and a tablet, not even a laptop. They might have a work laptop, but that's usually only for work-related tasks; they don't have any permanent desk setup in mind for computing. This percentage of people is growing, not shrinking.
And to think, I've got that much exposure to people with that kind of computing lifestyle, and yet nearly half of my friends are people in PC gaming culture and go to things like massive LAN parties and watch game tournaments on Twitch.
I'd say people who have gaming PCs are an enthusiast of sorts. Step out of professional contexts and gaming PCs and a lot of people don't even bother with laptops these days. Having a dedicated space in your home for computing seems to be more and more rare these days.
I hate to break it to you, but outside of tech, a lot of people have no desktop, no laptop, and just a smartphone these days.
In areas where you do very much see phone and no laptop being common or the norm, the trend is towards increasing laptop ownership, not declining laptop ownership. It’s not a matter of phones displacing laptops so much as phones being more important and accessible.
However, we'll just have to accept that most people don't want this. It's a niche use case.
It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra.
It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
The new life breathed into an older Samsung device by the installation of LineageOS is what I consider the proof of this.
Overall it's entirely subjective, however. I prefer minimal base Android so that I can choose which apps are allowed to annoy me with their various reminders to create an account, log in, look at these new features, rate me, etc.
Other (less technologically savvy) family members love their Samsung apps and the ecosystem, and just find my setup to be confusing or overly complicated.
My experience with their latest stuff has been that they do still have a lot of bloat and duplicated functionality, but the base experience is much closer to stock Android than what I remembered from their older phones. To put it differently, it looks and feels similar to the near stock Xperia 1 ii I switched from but has all sorts of little differences.
I actually find myself using a lot of the functionality too, so it feels a bit less "bloated" to me.
I haven't really noticed ads though. They do recommend stuff, eg their camera app has a bunch of modes and the "Expert RAW" mode was shown in the app but required a download from their app store. I don't really count those since they're somewhat more relevant than say, Windows advertising candy crush on the start menu.
With Samsung I can plug in a USB-C to HDMI cable and duplicate my screen with zero effort. And with DeX, apparently I can turn my phone into a desktop?! I never tried before last week but when I plugged in aforementioned cable, I get a DeX prompt. Exit, and I see the screen. Hit "enable DeX" and it turns on a mode that shows something like a desktop screen on the external display.
Perhaps the fact this isn't known or operationalized by companies means it has a ways to go, or that laptops are easier for remote workers. But it's cool stuff.
I am in Canada and have never seen ads or bloatware on Samsung phones. I currently use a Galaxy Z Fold 3 connected to a lapdock via USB-C video out. DeX is a very nice desktop environment for the phone.
Samsung has to package certain applications with their device to allow Google Play, like Chrome. Google has convinced people that their browser is the norm (not the perfectly fine Samsung Internet) and that any manufacturer making their own apps to compete with theirs is "bloat".
The well-integrated Samsung calendar is a lot better than Google Calendar, but Google forced companies for years to install their version as well, despite their failure to capitalize on the unique hardware features of some devices. The same is true for many other Google apps.
I don't think I've seen random ads in Samsung's pre-installed apps. Samsung Health on my (non-Samsung) phone started advertising their new phone at me, which disturbed me, but it seems to have stopped doing that soon after all by itself. My guess is that they received more backlash than anticipated.
I'm pretty sure I could give Samsung Dex to a lot of people and they'd be fine using it as a daily driver for their computer. It does everything most people want out of Windows (a browsers and light office work) and it's not nearly as bad as some other attempts. With modern smartphone CPUs, the UI is smooth and responsive, and Samsung's design makes me a little jealous as a Linux user because it's honestly just better. I'd even go do far as to call it better than Windows 10's UI in some ways.
If you're ever near a store that had Samsung tablets on display, I recommend you try putting one of the demo units in Dex mode. It's a toggle in the quick toggles and it'll turn the tablet into a full desktop (which is perfectly fine for the massive screens tablets have these days!).
Hell, if Jetbrains keeps developing their remote coding platform, I bet I'd be able to do programming work from a tablet and a sleeve as if I was working on my Linux laptop.
adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 name.of.the.packet
Just be careful not to disable the ui, adb or something else that is essential. I haven't found anything that can't be disabled, yet. Always backup your important data in case you have to reset to factory defaults.
My purchasing and usage habits for mobile devices is to get something new that is mid or low-range, use it until I notice performance issues, or the bloatware does something I don't like, then flash a custom ROM.
That's served me pretty well in the past, but I may still have hangups from teething pains with rooting devices and compatibility issues on custom ROMs back in the 2010's
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum
The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
I have said that in technology one step ahead is an innovator, two steps ahead is martyr. Windows phone was Martyr.
Now, Samsung Dex is doing what Microsoft wanted to do, but very few people know about it. That probably has to do with how uncommon USB-C docks are, and how many of those docks use DisplayLink instead of a normal standard to do video. It's a real shame, because a modern phone is more than powerful enough for most people's computer work.
That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while.
You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs.
Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc.
I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
> But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more.
Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.
The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.
The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.
The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.
But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.
Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works".
But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable.
That's basically what we want from appliances.
I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there.
Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.
The Mac Pro is an example of this.
It's fine? Never stuck with it
... and the UserLAnd app then gives a normal Linux terminal with all tools or Linux Desktop apps.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO>
(VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.)
With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy.
Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling.
That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience.
(This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.)
I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac.
That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
Many companies give developers laptops (even though workstations would be faster) so evidently some people already trade portability for power, so having your phone be your main computer would just be a further step in that direction.
For people who aren't developers, e.g. managers doing email, browsing, Excel etc., I'm sure a phone would be powerful enough.
It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
It's not that modern machines can't do those tasks, but that they generally shouldn't do those tasks. It's not unreasonable for device manufacturers to sandbox and restrict access to functionality to protect the majority of their users.
Even despite these attempts the app stores are full of malware, just imagine how much worse it could be if these apps could also compile their own variants and then abuse Bluetooth/Airdrop to spread it.
I'm entirely unconvinced by this sensationalist take; I'm quite certain we've lost more than we've gained from turning general purpose computers into nanny-state locked down devices.
You think they'd be hamstrung for life but honestly, there isn't much computer literacy in the workforce from what I've seen, either. They'd fit right in. It just sucks to think about all the kids who might have gone further with computing if more of it was exposed to them, instead of locked up basically until they get into college and demoralized by a crushing CS curriculum, since highschools and middle or elementary don't really teach this stuff either.
I teach IT at a university, undergrads and grads. All of this is exactly correct. The oddest thing is explaining to people my age (I'm 46) how many of my IT students are likely less knowledgable about those kinds of basics (despite having other, to me odd, skills, like fake instagram accounts and such)
Hard disagree. It's absolutely unreasonable to infantilize users and lock them out from fully utilizing their purchased hardware.
I would still use my Nokia N900, with literally just enough updating to work on the modern networks, if such a thing were possible.
Do any HN users have a recommendation for a lightweight distro that would run on an SSE1-only Pentium III CPU? The most recently supported Ubuntu distro is a little too heavy for it.