Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode

The future of personal computing is being dictated by the economics of it, which are that the optimal route to extract value from consumers is to have walled-garden software systems gated by per-month subscription access and/or massive forced advertising. This leads to everything being in the cloud and only fairly thin clients running on user hardware. That gives the most control to the system owners and the least control to the user.

Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.

I've heard so many "The future of personal computing" statements that haven't come true, so I don't take much stock in them.

I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)

> Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.

IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.

> we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)

We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".

> (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)

I think that's to generative AI, I would expect people to gradually replace manually creating a spreadsheet with 'vibecoding' it.

> IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.

ChromeOS already works like that, when you log in on different devices, without having to physically lug one device around that you plug into different shells.

Well, the MacBook Air is pretty much an iPad that swapped its touchscreen for a keyboard (and trackpad).

> I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".

I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.

I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet.

The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with.

(Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)

> I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.

> The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else.

Having used the same device as my tablet/laptop/desktop for a few years (previously a couple of generations of Surface Book, now the Envy, in both cases with a dock set up on my desk), I never want to go back. It just makes using it so much smoother, even compared to having tab sync and what have you between multiple devices. It's not a money thing, it's a convenience thing, which is why I think it'll win out in the end.

I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices. I definitely still want an easy way to take a keyboard with my device on the train/plane, and I don't know what exact hardware arrangement will win out for that, but I'm confident that the convergence will happen. I think phone convergence will also happen eventually, for the same reason, but how that will actually work in terms of the physical form factor is anyone's guess.

> Having used the same device as my tablet/laptop/desktop for a few years (previously a couple of generations of Surface Book, now the Envy, in both cases with a dock set up on my desk), I never want to go back. It just makes using it so much smoother, even compared to having tab sync and what have you between multiple devices. It's not a money thing, it's a convenience thing, which is why I think it'll win out in the end.

Yes, that's useful. But eg ChromeOS already gives you most of that, and a bit of software could get you all the way there.

> I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices.

I agree with the latter, but not the former. There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.

(And once you have the extra space from a keyboard, you might as well fill it up with more battery. But I'm not so sure about that compared to the argument about physical lower bounds on keyboard size.)

> eg ChromeOS already gives you most of that, and a bit of software could get you all the way there.

I don't understand what you mean here. If you're talking about some kind of easy sync between devices software, people have been trying to make that work for decades, but they not haven't succeeded but haven't even really made any progress.

> There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.

Maybe, but those limits are plenty big enough for a tablet - particularly with the size of phones these days, a tablet smaller than say 10" is pointless, and the keyboards on 11" laptops are fine. Now making a device that can work as both a phone and a laptop-with-keyboard will probably require some mechanical innovation, yes, but that's the sort of thing that I suspect will be figured out sooner or later, e.g. we're already seeing various types of folding phones going through the development process.

I think this is a really good take - Apple especially (but Google too) aren't gonna naturally invest time and resources into software that'll make you less likely to buy more of their hardware.

That said, market incentives can and do change pretty fast. Especially with climate change, and current tension in global supply chains, we could see a shift away from hardware caused by taxes or pirce hikes (I'm not saying we will though).

That'd be a game changer for how much companies might invest in changing what computing looks like.

I know many people where that is exactly the case, not everyone is doing spreadsheets or coding.

Also I haven't owned a desktop since 2003, and my last one at work was in 2006, although we may debate laptops with docking station are also desktops.

> Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time

I would say most kinds of work.

Even if you're just on teams discussions - a real keyboard is much more productive than messing around on a touchscreen. Same with just reading. Sometimes I read a forum thread on my phone and then when I get back to the real computer I'm surprised how little I read and how much it felt like.

The only thing where I don't see this being the case is creative work like drawing where a tablet is really perfect, much better than a wacom or something.

11" laptops are not fine to type on all day unless you give them huge bezels (even the 11" macbook which did have those huge bezels was space-constrained on the less important keys). Ergonomics is really important.

Sure it's fine to get by for an hour or two but spending 8 hours 5 days a week on one is a really bad idea and will provide a great path to crippling RSI. In fact using any laptop that much is a bad idea, due to the bad posture it provides (with the screen attached to the keyboard). This is why docking stations are still so important.

In software development, "desktop" is synonymous with laptop.

Laptops + docking stations are usually just as fast as a desktop. You can buy $10,000 desktops that are much faster (50+ cores, and a lot of RAM), but most developers don't find them enough faster to be worth it. (in my benchmarks rebuilds with 40 cores finished faster than rebuilds using all 50, for a 10+million line C++ project) It is easier to have everything locally where you are. If like many of us you sometimes work from home remote into a different machine is always a bit painful.

Exactly, and that also makes Surface like devices good enough way to code on the go.

> (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)

Desktop LibreOffice works fine on my Librem 5 phone.

> 11" laptops are not fine to type on all day unless you give them huge bezels (even the 11" macbook which did have those huge bezels was space-constrained on the less important keys). Ergonomics is really important.

Well, it depends on personal preferences.

I usually go for at least 15" in my laptops, but I can believe that other people would be fine with 11" for what they are doing.

The laptop / tablet hybrid is a valid form factor, and these systems are reasonably successful in the market.

Of course, that doesn't mean that they are the right device for everyone.