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

(www.androidauthority.com)
442 points logic_node | 3 comments | 13 May 25 14:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.637s | source
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lanthissa ◴[13 May 25 15:03 UTC] No.43973748[source]▶
this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet, but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop.

I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen.

theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.

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dzdt ◴[13 May 25 19:20 UTC] No.43976591[source]▶
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.

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gwbas1c ◴[13 May 25 22:20 UTC] No.43978398[source]▶
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.

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pjmlp ◴[14 May 25 11:39 UTC] No.43983279[source]▶
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.

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1. gwbas1c ◴[14 May 25 14:13 UTC] No.43984795[source]▶
In software development, "desktop" is synonymous with laptop.
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2. bluGill ◴[14 May 25 16:17 UTC] No.43986302[source]▶
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.
3. pjmlp ◴[14 May 25 16:39 UTC] No.43986572[source]▶
Exactly, and that also makes Surface like devices good enough way to code on the go.