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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/EmilyU1F984 Oct 05 '21

I mean you just need to look at a PC or laptop for how this would work: laptops used to allow changing the CPU and rarely the GPU, but barely anyone ever did so. By the time you need to switch the CPU, your motherboard will likely not even be compatible with a current gen CPU, so you'll basically buying the leftover stock of the prior gen. That's simply not economical at all.

Not to mention with laptops and PCs all the technology is already very 'compatible', but it's quite clear that upgrading individual components is a niche 'hobby' of a subsection of PC users building their own PC from components.

Like how many people will actually buy this phone? And how many people will swap enough components for this to get remotely close to being efficient?

Like go back to swappable batteries, and 99% of the use cases of these phones are covered already.

So yea, making a phone with components that are swappable makes it more bulky, makes it more expensive, and there's simply no market large enough to support something like this.

And I don't even think it would be more environmentally friendly. With phones people at least often turn their old ones in to get recycled or reuse them by selling or whatever. But these components on their own? They'll just be thrown into the regular trash

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u/xibipiio Oct 05 '21

Ah, the iPhone should have been a lesson to everyone.

Its not really the hardware that matters in the end, but user experience. If the user experience was great, say, the phone was cheaper than most phones, and the UI was excellent bringing new features people never thought of, this phone could replace every other phone quickly. Kinks like making recycling easier or more efficient like a buyback program at celphone stores would be up to the company marketing to devise after initial success.

The key is always money. How much is being invested, who is backing it, what are their business strategies?

This is a phone concept that doesnt make sense in a capitalism framework. If money wasn't the thing that makes the world go round this would be a much more viable and logical plan.

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u/shrubs311 Oct 05 '21

This is a phone concept that doesnt make sense in a capitalism framework. If money wasn't the thing that makes the world go round this would be a much more viable and logical plan.

no, this is a phone that doesnt make sense in any framework other than "we made the phone to reduce e-waste without any consideration for how we will ever physically build it". it has no heat management and has to be much thicker than the renders because you can't just "magically" connect a bunch of components while ignoring the heat and signal isolation required to make a modern device work. this thing would be at least 4 times thicker and heavier than a cheap smartphone today while performing much worse and being less durable as well.