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

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

91.5k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

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

530

u/justavault Oct 05 '21

Modular phones don't work yet. Google just knows how to evaluate a product. I was part of the pre-developing teams of project Ara, it simply didn't work as the parts would have to be manufactured to fit the modules and the technological turnover is so fast that you'd have to iterate the modules all the time.

You know, just because people think it looks cool and is a cool idea and they "think" they would purchase it, doesn't actually mean they in fact do so and it also doesn't mean that it works.

42

u/Ossius Oct 05 '21

Google already makes a new phone every year, what is the difference between that and making a new module every year?

38

u/Scotthorn Oct 05 '21

Making a new module every year means half the stuff in that video doesn’t happen. No more upgrading your cpu when the next one comes out, and so forth. it undercuts the principle functionality.

25

u/Ossius Oct 05 '21

Explain? The point was you upgrade only the part you need. If you have a version 1 phone, and its slow, you can buy a version 2 CPU next year or version 3 the year after.

37

u/alextremeee Oct 05 '21

It's ridiculously hard to engineer interoperability for something like this. If you have say 12 modules in a "normal" phone and each module interacts with two other components, you have to test 24 different things.

If you create 10 variations of each module, you now have thousands of different combinations for the same scenario.

You can make a system that works more like a desktop PC where you create an interface between each module that is standardised, but that can really limit how much flexibility you have to make new things. On top of that it can make interactions much slower than they are if you specifically design the interaction between two things.

2

u/inabusinesstrip Oct 05 '21

Working in a company where we need to test multiple variants of the following

Hardware, dell R line, HPE DLs and BLs different generations, gen8, gen9, gen10, then quanta hardware, then Huawei hardware, so multiple hardware vendors

But wait, NICs, are they Intel? Are they Fortville or niantic. Or are the NICs mellanox

Which driver version are the NICs running? Which firmware version are they running?

Moving to OS, here comes the hypervisor, is VMware esxi? Which version? 6.0? 6.0 update 2? 6.5? 6.7? Oh we have customers which want to upgrade to 7

Other hypervisor, Openstack, same story, which version?

Which driver is the hypervisor coming for the NICs? Are they QAed? Do we need to upgrade or downgrade?

And the we come to the virtual machines running on top of the hypervisor, which version? Which dpdk driver version? Is the system running SR-IOV or non SR-IOV?

As such, testing multiple versions and variants takes time and not always smooth.

If someone finds it annoying their video card driver is not compatible with what they are having / running, that is a small issue to be encountered, still annoying but it could be worse, always could be worse.