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

> We're still largely doing on our phones and laptops the same things we were doing in 2005. I'm surprised it took this long

Approximately no-one was watching 4k feature-length videos on their phones in 2005, or playing ray traced 3d games on their laptops.

Sending plain text messages is pretty much the same as back then, yes. But these days I'm also taking high resolution photos and videos and share those with others via my phone.

> I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad.

Samsung's DeX already does that.

> I'm fully agreed with you on the wasted processing power-- I think we'll eventually head toward a model of having one computing device with a number of thin clients which are locally connected.

Your own 'good enough' logic already suggests otherwise? Processors are still getting cheap and better, so why not just duplicate them? Instead of having a dumb large screen (and keyboard) that you plug your phone into, it's not much extra cost to add some processing power to that screen, and make it a full desktop pc.

If we are getting to 'thin client' world, it'll be because of 'cloud', not because of connecting to our phones. Even today, most of what people do on their desktops can be done in the browser. So we likely see more of that.

> Approximately no-one was watching 4k feature-length videos on their phones in 2005, or playing ray traced 3d games on their laptops.

Do people really do this now? Watching a movie on my phone is so suboptimal I'd only consider it if I really have no other option. Holding it up for 2 hours, being stuck with that tiny screen, brrr.

I can imagine doing it on a plane ride when I'm not really interested in the movie and am just doing it to waste some time. But when it's a movie I'm really looking forward to, I'd want to really experience it. A VR headset does help here but a mobile device doesn't.

We were watching videos and playing games on our laptops in 2005. Of course they mostly weren't 4K or raytraced, don't be silly.

The thin client world is one anticipating a world with fewer resources to make these excess chips. It's just a speculation of what things will look like when we can't sustain what is unsustainable.

you position it vertically against something in bed and keep it close enough (half a meter) so that its practically same size as tv which is 4-5 meters away and you enjoy the pixels. i love doing this few times a week when im going to sleep or just chilling

> We were watching videos and playing games on our laptops in 2005. Of course they mostly weren't 4K or raytraced, don't be silly.

The video comment was about phones. The raytracing was about laptops.

Yes, laptops were capable of watching DVDs in 2005. (But they weren't capable of watching much YouTube, because YouTube was only started later that year. Streaming video was in its infancy.)

> It's just a speculation of what things will look like when we can't sustain what is unsustainable.

Huh? We are sitting on a giant ball of matter, and much of what's available in the crust is silicates. You mostly only need energy to turn rocks into computer chips. We get lots and lots of energy from the sun.

How is any of this unsustainable?

(And a few computer chips is all you save with the proposed approach. You still need to make just as many screens and batteries etc.)

Hmm ok, for me a phone at 50cm is way smaller than a TV but mine is also not 5m away. In bed I usually use my meta quest in lie down mode.

Our disagreement is probably in the "mostly only need energy to turn rocks into computer chips". I think our economy is a lot more fragile and complicated than that. And that economy relies on non-renewable resources which are dwindling, in a world which is posed to offer less of its renewable resources, which includes people and their labor. (This is a compounded problem, since people and their labor are what would drive recycling, say, to extract gold from old chips.) And important knowledge (say, about how to make CPUs) is something that can be lost with just an unlucky coincidence, or something like another world war.

You don't need to imagine a total economic collapse. Take any resource that goes into a chip, and contrive any reason we'll have to consume significantly less of that resource. How do you solve that?

Well, we have highly-redundant compute-per-person. I personally have nine pretty capable computer chips to my person, just in the building I'm in. That's a lot, and that represents an excess in resource consumption. A phone-as-motherboard laptop solves one of those chips. If we make the same games we're making today but we go back a decade or two in graphics, then we can have fewer consoles and gaming PCs, too.

I'm not saying "one chip for many devices" is a panacea. There are other things we might do. Maybe laptops and phones can be made to have display input, for example.

> And that economy relies on non-renewable resources which are dwindling, [...]

We are sitting on a giant ball of matter. None of our resource use is actually using up material, we are just transforming matter.

We might be running out of resources that are cheap and easy to transform (eg cheap oil), but all of these are problems we can fix with enough energy. And eg solar power is going to provide more and more cheap energy. Fusion is also going to come to the rescue in a few decades (and we already had nuclear fission for ages.)

The economy is pretty resilient. Not even a global pandemic left all that much of a mark three years later.

> Take any resource that goes into a chip, and contrive any reason we'll have to consume significantly less of that resource. How do you solve that?

With substitution, economising and ingenuity. Eg early transistors were made of gallium, but we use silicon these days. That's a substitution.

> Well, we have highly-redundant compute-per-person. I personally have nine pretty capable computer chips to my person, just in the building I'm in. That's a lot, and that represents an excess in resource consumption.

Less than you'd think. These days, the main expense is for the power to run your chips, less so than the energy to make the chips. And having redundant chips around that aren't turned on doesn't cost any of the former.

> If we make the same games we're making today but we go back a decade or two in graphics, then we can have fewer consoles and gaming PCs, too.

Btw, that's one of the answers about what people would do in case of resource shortage for making chips.

> I'm not saying "one chip for many devices" is a panacea.

And I'm saying it would only save you a few chips, but wouldn't save you on batteries nor screens etc.

(And even a 'dumb' screen needs quite a few chips these days.) Hey, even Apple's chargers have more powerful chips in them these days than their first stand alone computers a few decades ago had.

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Btw, you can economise on powerful chips even more, if you do most of the heavy computing in the cloud: even your combined phone/laptop/desktop chip would still be idle most of the time. The cloud can eg use one million chips for three million people. That's even better than one chip for one person (which you touted as better than nine computers for one person.)

I think ultimately, we disagree about whether or not it's inevitable that we end up having an economy that can transform sunlight into a perpetual recycling machine. I think that's not inevitable, especially in a scenario where we're left dealing with a climate collapse.

Having 'target display mode' on laptops and whatnot is one way that would save the chips that go into screens, which is why I mentioned it above. I agree that computing in the cloud can also reduce the number of chips used (although that does rely on chips to keep the internet going, etc.)

> I think that's not inevitable, especially in a scenario where we're left dealing with a climate collapse.

A 'climate collapse' is extremely unlikely. Look at studies on the (prospected) economic impacts of climate change. Wikipedia has an article on it, for example.

In any case, the forecasts expect something like perhaps 20% total reduction in GDP over say the next 100 years compared to the scenario without global warning. (But that's on top of our regularly scheduled single-digit percent per year regular economic growth.)

20% is a huge impact! It's bigger than Brexit. But it's also only about as big as the per capita gap between the US and the UK. And the UK is far from a collapsed nation.

And: in case you want to mention that the economy ain't everything. Yes, I totally agree. That's why my argument works in reverse: the economy can only function when the environment hasn't totally collapsed. Thus if leading experts project around a 20%-ish reduction in GDP, that means that the don't project a collapse in the environment.

As a sanity check: financial markets also don't seem to expect a collapse of the global economy anytime soon.