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Phone as a PC
(forum.xda-developers.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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A phone of today would out compete a laptop of 10 years ago. But the same statement was true 10 years ago: Android phones from 2013 are phenomenally better than the hilariously giant, clunky laptops from 2003. However, a phone today is not as good as a laptop today (screen res/refresh/latency, RAM/storage/connectivity, etc).
Phones in a phone form factor have already assumed all the use cases they can from the laptop world. And a phone in a shell/dock will never be as good as the real thing so what does it gain you? Apps and websites already sync state across devices. Laptop software running on a phone will always run into mobile OS constraints and limits. You'll probably be severely limited by the manufacturer's kernel configuration (containers, eBPF, etc).
Phone-as-laptop is dorky fun but you'll run into limits almost immediately.
I would argue that it's not a binary option. Whether phone can or can not perform tasks that laptop can. It's a set / range of different use-cases.
And as you said, even the glassy rectangle form factor took many use-cases from laptop. If the question is "can phone do all the tasks that laptop can do", the answer will always be "no". But if you analyse the use-cases and sort them by percentage, then I would argue that things like "browsing the web", "editing documents", "chatting with people" etc. will be the most predominant. And those are the tasks that current phones either can do or at least could do, if the appropriate software was developed for it. Yes, playing modern video games, photo editing, video editing, rendering graphics, programming and other advanced tasks would not be done easily on phone's limited hardware, and that is why PCs, either laptops or desktops, will remain the device of choice for productivity. But as my initial point stands, the percentage of those use-cases is far outweighed by casual use-cases.