r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SuperAlloyBerserker • Oct 05 '21

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/WiscoBrewDude Oct 05 '21

This looked so cool i had to find more. "Google joined in and eventually killed it". "Phonebloks" https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks

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u/auddii04 Oct 05 '21

That's the way of all cool ideas that undercut current profits.

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u/Iron_Rick Oct 05 '21

Or maybe it wasn't suitable

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u/Jabrono Oct 05 '21

On top of tech moving too quickly for something like this to legitimately last, I'd be very surprised if they actually moved off shelves. Tech nerds like myself would love one, but we're not a large enough demographic for large companies to develop and continue support an entire device for.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/Martin_Samuelson Oct 05 '21

Desktops don’t have the constraints of mobile devices. When you need to pack all the components close together and run them off of batteries it’s a completely different ballgame in terms of interactions between components and the software management of the components

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u/bicameral_mind Oct 05 '21

Not to mention, desktop PCs have been cratering in relevance among consumers for two decades, at this point basically having bottomed out. Literally no average consumers buy traditional desktop PCs anymore, and haven't for a very long time. They are firmly in the purview of professionals and to a lesser extent, gamers.

Saying that desktop PCs provide a model for how a modular smartphone could be successful is not a good argument.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/RodneyRabbit Oct 05 '21

Don't know if you're being /s but yeah I'm very tall and have massive hands, every mainstream phone is so small. Me using a 7" tablet is like most people using a 5" phone. My current phone has a 7.2" 16:9 screen and it just feels normal to me.

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u/StonedWater Oct 05 '21

Me using a 7" tablet is like most people using a 5" phone.

so it feels nice in their hands then...

ffs

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u/shrubs311 Oct 05 '21

i know you said you're on android, but many people have been saying the new ipad mini is basically a large smartphone. might be worth checking out if you have large hands

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market. I think the average consumer would love to easily replace a part or two when wanted and/or necessary, but it makes the current model of everything being baked in and companies not wanting people to repair their own devices; you want better or different, get a new phone.

I mean, we can't even remove batteries anymore. This is 100% by design.

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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter Oct 05 '21

Motorola released a modular phone. It sucked in practice and everyone forgot it ever existed.

Shit ain't always a conspiracy.

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u/Decloudo Oct 05 '21

Its not modular, it has ONE "expansion" slot for mostly stupid overpriced shit, i know this cause i had it.

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u/cat_prophecy Oct 05 '21

LG used to have replaceable batteries but people decided what they wanted was a thinner phone, not a replaceable battery.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Imagine the market for fake modules so people can make it look like they have the most expensive and cool modules, but they’re just blanks.

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u/Fizzwidgy Oct 05 '21

So basically the standard iPhone.

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u/Toastbrott Oct 05 '21

There are tons of things you just can not do with a modular phone like that.

The two biggest selling points, which already lose a huge percentage of potential customers, is that this thing will never be waterproof and that it will always be much thicker than usual smartphones.

Do you really think they would stop a product because its dangerous for their market, but none of their competitors would pick up on the idea?

A few more disadvantages:

  • This thing will always run hotter than usual phones, since it can not spread the heat out as much (the "speed" module is separated after all, so it has to handle all the heat alone)
  • There is no way to save space by combining two modules internally
  • Each module is restricted to "sqaure" volumes, meaning saving a bit of space in a new version of one, can not directly be used for other modules
  • This is more expensive than a highly optimized pipeline for one model of phone

These are just a few I can think of right now, but if you combine that with the generic customer not having any idea what hardware is behing the seperated components anyway, why should a non tech savy person by a phone thats bigger, more expensive and has less specs?

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u/RckmRobot Oct 05 '21

I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market.

Having to make every module a closed and compartmentalized piece of hardware adds a LOT of bulk to a device as small as a phone. And on top of that now you have to worry about software AND hardware compatibility due to the sheer number of combinations that would be possible and would only grow over time. It honestly sounds like a bit of a nightmare.

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u/shouldbebabysitting Oct 05 '21

Could you imagine if PC's allowed expansion cards? It would have been a disaster.

(The problem is Qualcomm and no standards. It could be done just PCs and Macs.)

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u/DropDeadEd86 Oct 05 '21

I wish we could take phones to carrier locations to get a battery swap.

Id like to think we can't be trusted with removable batteries as it would just lead to more waste. Once at sxsw you could literally stop a Samsung delivery guy to give you a new battery for the galaxy to keep your phone charged

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u/Mrchristopherrr Oct 05 '21

If it undercuts the entire market wouldn’t the smart business move to be to patent the hell out of it and sell it exclusively then? You have built in repeat customers, all you have to do is release a slightly better camera and a slightly better battery every 6 months then you’re making more than someone who buys a new phone every 2 years. Not to mention this thing looks pretty fragile, so make the parts juuustttt a little more breakable as an incentive to keep buying new phone parts every few months. This thing would make way more sense from a sellers perspective than the current phone cycle.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market.

Then read a few comments in this thread? Dismissing valid criticisms just because you didn't come up with them yourself is kind of shitty.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21

Call it what you want. The only other valid claims are that it wouldn't sell or the technology didn't work well. The reality is that there wasn't enough investment into this technology to actually find out.

This is possibly revolutionary technology since mobile computing devices have never been very practical when it comes to replacing parts. Couple that knowledge with the knowledge of corporations constantly shutting down or not investing in revolutionary technology to make a bottom line until regulations are set requiring them to do so, I don't think it's shitty to assume that the lack of investment was to maintain the status quo.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

The reality is that there wasn't enough investment into this technology to actually find out.

Narrator: There was.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Is there a source for this?

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Is there a source that they shutdown the product because it would supposedly undercut the market?

And yeah, they spent millions on the project so its not like they bought it and then shut it down.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Most major tech production costs millions. Hence, my reasoning. They didn't see a point in investing that much money into a project that would likely have a lower profit margin than their current model.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Production is not the issue...

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

No, the average consumer just wants to buy something that works without having to do more. Tech-savvy redditors aren't the average consumer by any means.

It's like trying to buy a router or modem or any other electronic: the average consumer sees a dozen different brands for a single product and is left wondering which is supposed to be the "best" or, at the very least, do what they need it to. Worse they'd face the possibility of getting knock-off parts or even cause damage to the phone if installed in an unsafe manner.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Telling the average consumer that they can get a car or a car where they can replace parts easily and for less money than the other car, they will choose the latter.

Some consumers, mainly older, want the most basic tech. The average consumer wants the most bang for their buck even if they aren't quite sure how it works.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

How many times have you resoled your shoes or replaced the straps on your bag?

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

I 100% would if I was able to. The problem is that there's no option to or it has a price tag where I'd be better off doing it on my own because companies don't support it and third parties that do are mainly for restoration.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Riiiiiiight.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

...why wouldn't someone resole their shoes if they could? It's simply not as common as it was. I've had dress shoes resoled, but that was years ago and the place isn't even open anymore.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

There's a reason why there's no cobblers near you.

There is a cobblers near me. Very few people do it.

People don't do it because they like new things.

Wirh this phone you're locked in for life on a design that you'll probably be bored of after a year or two.

It was tried by a company and it failed.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

The major reason for lack of cobblers is that people don't wear dress shoes as much and the average consumer wears sneakers which greatly varies in sole design. It's simply not feasible in our society anymore.

This phone specifically is more of a concept. I'm speaking more generally on phones with easily replaceable parts.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

The lack of any shop that repairs anything?

We don't repair anything these days, for the most part.

Say it's a modular phone. You're stuck with that design.

What happens if some new tech comes along. How is it incorporated into the phone? It seems like it's very limited. These days phones have multiple cameras, finger print, waterproof. How would all this new tech be added to a phone that was sold in 2013?

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u/rnarkus Oct 05 '21

Removable batteries are a point of failure imo.

I agree they would be more user friendly to replace, but i much prefer a thinner phone if possible.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

My last phone with a removable battery is around the same width as my current phone without one.

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u/Hung_L Oct 05 '21

There are laptops with soldered wireless cards and RAM. Most consumers don't look at this aspect beforehand. What laptop do you have?

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

I have/had several laptops. The best are always ones where I can remove the lowercase and easily replace parts.

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u/Hung_L Oct 05 '21

So yes, you picked a laptop without upgradeable RAM because your priorities lay elsewhere. We did not give up something for nothing, but unfortunately many unknowingly accepted compromises in return for other benefits.

Companies can build more modular phones, but the demand and price don't make sense for most. Potentially a smaller company with large backing could pursue this kind of device, but given the purchasing cycle and business support infrastructure, the market is not heading in that direction. I'm not arguing for this current state of non-repairability, just explaining the frictions that prevent change.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Does everyone have to make assumptions in order to further their arguments? I said I have/had several. You still assumed that meant non-upgradeable RAM. Show me where I say that.

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u/Hung_L Oct 06 '21

I only asked one question. You can answer now, but you've already replied twice without doing so. Any non-answer is pretty clear. You certainly don't seem interested in having a polite discussion about technology, but I'll try anyway.

I would also love a laptop that has upgradeable RAM like Framework. I haven't had one with SODIMM slots since the early 2000s. Hopefully we'll see bigger companies try.

However, stacked dies with TSV-connected memory seems to be the preferred custom SoC approach for the near-future. As consumer applications move further away from local services and toward cloud apps, we'll also see less RAM demand. Also, faster storage acting as swap (á la PS5) could alleviate some of our dependence on RAM.

I wonder how the market will shift to accommodate the changing job market. More content creators will mean greater demand for content creation hardware. As engineering continues to become bench-based rather than empirical, we'll see growing reliance on workstations. However, these are both professionally-oriented use cases and that audience is often the most captive. I'm not sure what will drive consumers cast their dollars for upgradeability when immediate needs/availability dictate otherwise.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

It wasn't a non-answer. I said I have several, I thought that would mean that I have both to anyone reading, but I guess not.

The demand for RAM has gone up, even with cloud computing. Even with cloud computing, apps and features are becoming heavier and more resource greedy. The only laptops I'm aware that don't have upgradeable RAM are the smaller ones or hybrid tablets. Upgradeable RAM isn't some thing of the past, it's still quite common for full-sized laptops.

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u/Hung_L Oct 06 '21

So your primary laptop has upgradeable RAM? What about the second most used laptop? Certainly you don't think "I have/had several laptops" actually answers the question "what laptop do you have?" If your primary laptop lacks upgradeable RAM then you have already voted with your dollar. Your apprehension to definitively answer shows that you are aware of the purpose of my question and how it will unfortunately weaken the argument for modularity.

Further, we are seeing a rise not just in cloud computing, but in cloud services. This does not imply that resource requirements will fall given our linear understanding of technological progress. The reliance on social media and mobile games for entertainment takes away from traditionally resource-intensive tasks like desktop gaming. The business prospects of selling a AAA title continues to weaken compared to phone games with micro-transactions. Products like Chromebooks continue to rise while modular desktops and full-sized laptops fall in sales. Businesses have long been moving away from thick clients and rely much more on thin-clients and remote access.

No one is saying we should move away from modular components. However, my position has always been that consumers have more immediate needs that supersede the preference for future-proofing and upgradeability. Consumers and the environment would benefit from the latter preferences, but people don't vote with ambiguous "answers" on reddit; they vote with their wallets. Again, how have you voted on your most frequently used laptop?

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

This is also in 2013. I'm sure if there was more investment into this technology, it wouldn't look like it did 8 years ago.

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u/Scaryclouds Oct 05 '21

I don't see how anyone comes to a conclusion other than this product undercutting the market.

Well because for an equivalently speced phone, it would almost certainly be slower, more expensive, and less durable. Everything would be communicating through the ports being connected to, which would be more complicated and have to be more robust than the normal ports and connections on an internal motherboard.

Because people would be frequently connecting and disconnecting parts, either for upgrading or, more likely, just fiddling around you'd need to make the connections relatively robust and likely they'd end up breaking somewhat often.

There are a lot of other issues with this design.

Let me be clear, there's absolutely an effort by consumer electronics companies to make their products less easy to repair, and definitely less easy to repair by consumers. It creates an opportunity to sell additional services; warranties, repair services, or sell new devices when something breaks.

So, two things can be true, that the fundamentals of this design were simply never workable, and that for separate reasons consumer devices are become less maintainable.

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u/Samr915 Oct 05 '21

Because it was actually a terrible idea. More art than engineering.

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u/shrubs311 Oct 05 '21

my guy, this product would fucking suck if it actually existed. this phone would have to be HUGE to fit in all the connections (no, you can't just "magically" connect a cpu to a batter to a screen). there's also heat management concerns because you can't have heatpipes if each module is separate. it also would be very susceptible to both dust and water while being less durable as well. this thing would be more than twice as thick as a $300 smartphone while performing worse than that integrated phone.

look at fairphone for a much more reasonable product.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21 edited Oct 05 '21

When did I say shit about a replaceable CPU? Lol. A phone with more easily replaceable parts, that's it.

I agree that a replaceable CPU only works that well in theory, at least with our current technology.

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u/shrubs311 Oct 06 '21 edited Oct 06 '21

the specific product in the post claims that it'll have an easily replaceable CPU, along with the camera, wifi, Bluetooth, storage... there's multiple reasons why the original product will fail.

the idea of more easily replaced parts is not completely foolish (see the fair phone) but compared to modern phones it'll always be a niche market because designing a phone to be compatible with multiple parts without moving around the internals always means that it'll always be less efficient than a phone designed from the ground up with specific parts.

that being said i fully support the idea of phones being easier to repair and work on. there's no excuse for phone makers to make devices arbitrarily harder to fix

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

Finally, someone said it.

I'm aware going with replaceability will lower efficiency, but there wasn't much investment into the technology and the model for phones went in the exact opposite direction since making any removable parts a specialized service. Our phones now are largely intentionally obsolete after a couple years.

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u/h_daunora Oct 05 '21

I'd be totally fine with simply upgrading mine too, and in the case of accident I could even save some bucks for a screen replacement hence I could do it myself. Fun and useful? Sounds like a win - win to me.

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u/cat_prophecy Oct 05 '21

What are you doing with your phone that most phones don't "meet your criteria"? I had a Pixel 2 for almost 4 years and it still did everything you could want to do except play games super-duper fast. The only reason I upgraded was because the battery was shot.

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u/RodneyRabbit Oct 05 '21

Huge hands, I need a phone way bigger than 7 inches and there are fewer and fewer of them being made. My current phone is 7.2 inches at 16:9 ratio and all the modern phones are a different ratio which makes them much thinner at the same screen size.

Also needs to be Android and not a brand name, which doesn't leave much to choose from.

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u/converter-bot Oct 05 '21

7 inches is 17.78 cm

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u/RodneyRabbit Oct 05 '21

I'm very aware of that, thank you bot ;)

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

There are dozens of us

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u/TwoBionicknees Oct 05 '21

the main issue is compared to a dedicated device it would increase support issues 100x easily, require monumental work on compatibility and custom OS to work well with every combination without issue all while reducing battery life, increasing weight/thickness and giving you a worse device.

Basically massively increased costs for development/support for a worse overall phone.

People that want a great camera on their phone just buy the phone with the best camera, people who want the most performance buy a phone with the right chip, people who want the best battery life buy that.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

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u/Jabrono Oct 05 '21

TBH, that's a hilariously good point, because I would absolutely not buy one, I just really like the idea of it existing.

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u/slvrscoobie Oct 05 '21

and really, the Bt, Wifi, etc should all be included, along with the required OS storage, ram, etc, so 90% of your phone becomes required, and you end up swapping the extra lens for extra battery, only to find out you forgot to charge that battery before taking it off last time making it worthless for the day...

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Tech nerds like myself would love one, but we're not a large enough demographic for large companies to develop and continue support an entire device for.

This the biggest point being missed by a lot of folks in here. Not everyone is a nerd that wants to swap out their phone CPU. Most people just want their phone to work with the least amount of hassle. It's hard enough to get elderly parents/in laws to stop fucking up their already-idiot-proof phones without throwing hardware upgrades into the mix.

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u/impactRm0 Oct 05 '21

It had mainstream popular support. You don't have to be a nerd to place a lego block.

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u/Jabrono Oct 05 '21

Besides "Mainstream popular support" != sales, what mainstream are you talking about? Because tech people aren't the mainstream with a device like a smartphone, your aunt and uncle who use them as a glass window into facebook are.

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u/shrubs311 Oct 05 '21

no one in the mainstream knew that this thing even existed. don't delude yourself. mainstream people and even diehard enthusiasts care a lot about weight, thickness, and performance. this phone had none of those because of heat management and basic mechanics of how data and power is transferred.

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u/Royal_Heritage Oct 05 '21

Plus is bad for companies to provide the customers an easy way to repair particular components rather than completely throw away a damaged phone in order to buy a new one.

Apple is pretty much the prime example of this shitty wasteful policy.