> Laptops are a lot closer to phones than they are to desktops

Introducing the MacBook Neo.

And here I am with a laptop with a 450W brick next to it to make it function…

There is and there isn't. Your phone, almost certainly, with a shorter list of exceptions than not, has a locked bootloader and consequently cannot run unsigned software with full permissions without additional work. Sometimes that work is impossible to do. In terms of capabilities, sure, your phone is as capable, if not more capable than a desktop computer from a decade or two ago. The phone in my hand that I'm writing this from is 100 times more powerful than the computer I had as a kid. So that's an important point to make. However the specialness of phone silicon is the locked down bootloader and the downstream effects of that. You can point out exceptions where you can unlock the bootloader, but those are exceptions. The vast majority of phones you aren't going to get root on. So in that dimension, that's what's special about phone silicon. The signed chain-of-trust that is baked in and prevents you from running unsigned binaries with full permissions on phone silicon.

> There is no good phone-slash-laptop

There is: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/

Arbitrary is doing a lot of work. With MacOS you can use an iPad as a touchscreen external monitor. Try it and you’ll learn that it’s not a touchscreen OS. It’s not as simple as “not letting you”.

I have long wished for a future when I could just plug my phone into a KVM and have a full desktop experience.

Isn’t Dex similar to connecting a monitor to an M-powered iPad? Perhaps that will one day come to iPhone.

It's always funny to watch hackernews slam apple for user experience decisions based off what's best for their average customer as if every person purchasing an apple device is a hackernews.

It seems like the viability of running a computer from an A16 really just came to fruition. There's heat, performance, battery life, etc implications that the average consumer can't quite articulate but it matters to them.

Apple's goal seemed to be to decimate the Cheap Plastic Intel Laptop space, and I think they succeeded at catching the industry with their tails between their legs.

I’ve been hoping Apple would allow this for years, although it doesn’t seem like something they would do.

The fact that iPadOS now has windowing seems like it would only make it work better. iPads can already do everything necessary, so why not the iPhone?

Unfortunately I suspect that if this was ever going to happen, which I would’ve bet against, it’s now let’s likely. I suspect current Apple would rather sell me a Neo then let me use my phone. In other words I think the existence of the product might rule it out under current leadership.

Who knows. I could be wrong. Only time will tell.

I doubt that's the issue. Phones already have a baseband processor and OS in control of the modem. Also evidence if viability is all the Windows laptops with WWAN.

I remember the period of 1998-2008 or so when Windows seemed to be in absolute crisis because the average Windows user was not qualified to be using a computer connected to the internet.

I'd go visit my family in New England (more than one group) and they'd have a 640x480 screen and be doing all their web browsing through 70 vertical pixels because they'd installed 30 toolbars -- and they thought there was nothing wrong with this!

The world was reeling from a cyber war between two German teens who were trying to outdo each other with viral "love letter" programs because people would just click on... anything!

Plenty of us were looking for some platform, any platform, that would deliver us from that nightmare. It wasn't going to be the Sun Ray, it wasn't going to be Linux (talk about frying pan to the fire), it was going to be the iPhone.

Why would Apple want to sell a lapdock when they could instead sell you the same thing + a redundant SOC (aka, a MacBook) and then high-margin cloud services to sync all of your data between your two differently-shaped computers?

There isn't much demand for using phone as computer. If you are at home or work, you can buy a desktop computers for cheap. If you are traveling, you need to find a monitor and keyboard. You could carry small monitor and wireless keyboard, but then you are carrying as much as laptop. People who need to work on the road get a laptop. People who need to send email get iPad and keyboard.

Good example of the economics is that Macbook Neo or iPad Air are cheaper than new iPhone.

iPhone should export display, but more for showing videos or presentations. My Pixel 10 has USB-C display and I haven't used it, but I have computers for all purposes.

Apple should spend more effort making the iPad usable for work. It would be good candidate for USB-C display, but with iPadOS.

I think Apple is just really careful about how they segment their product line for each use case, and would never go for a "jack of all trades" solution like this.

Because people like TFA pay them not to. It doesn't matter how much you hope Apple changes course - you vote with your wallet.

It would decimate their own business.

Why would it decimate the Windows market? From my experience, there's a strong correlation between iPhone and Mac usage.

Looking at the stats, the Win:Mac ratio is 4:1 but Android:iPhone only 2:1 so it might hurt Windows. But if iPhone users are more likely to use Mac or don't use computers much already, then expanding iPhone capabilities would cannibalize Apple business.

Money.

The general public thinks phones and computers are fundamentally different. Heck, I remember arguing this point even on HN back when smart phones were first coming out and being generally on the losing side as people got very excited about "app stores" and such. I see no practical path to getting to the point that enough of us realize that there is simply no reason for our phones to be locked down the way they are that the companies are forced to undo it, especially with our elites pushing with all they are worth to lock things down harder.

The companies take that confusion to the bank.

There have been numerous attempts at making phone/laptop crossovers, where you can plug your phone into a dock and get a computer, or slide your phone into a laptop case, etc. Some of them are even still around, but they're all definitely second-class citizens. There's a variety of problems that I think they've had in the market, not least of which is the fact that the average person still sees "phones" and "computers" as fundamentally different so the product makes no sense to them, but another issue that I think has held them back is that the product inevitably work by porting the limitations of the phone into the computer, rather than porting the freedom of the computer into the phone.

In the USB-C era, there is no excuse for every phone not having a mode where you can plug it into any ol' USB-C hub/dock and be able to get a desktop environment, even down to the "middle-of-the-line" phones. It would require in most cases no extra hardware. They just don't.

That would also seriously hurt the sales of Macs. Even more so now that the Neo exists.

Other than UI and other surface differences, the fundamental distinction between a Mac and an iDevice is... what it is.

A Mac is a real computer. I can run any code I want on it. I have root.

An iDevice is like a game console. I can only run App Store apps (without jumping through a lot of hoops). I do not have root (without again jumping through many hoops or ugly hacks).

If Apple wanted to unify the platform they have two choices. The first is to abandon the "real computer" market entirely. The second is to make iDevices real computers by unlocking them.

I suspect they'd rather keep two platforms.

Under the hood they both share a lot of code, so it's not two totally distinct platforms. It's more like two sets of defaults and two "skins."

The form factor is a major difference.

HNers are significantly more technical than the median consumer and are used to text and keyboard interfaces - a large portion of humanity isn't. You see this with Foundation Models as well - most have started to shift away from only concentrating on text to TTS and STT usecases.

Also, DeX style monitor screen share with a Bluetooth keyboard has been supported since iOS 15.

Additionally, a major portion of Apple's desktop revenue is coming from poweruser and specialist demand - IT departments bulk purchasing developer laptops, designers having their entire design workflow within the MacOS environment, and video editors heavily dependent on MacOS.

Furthermore, arguments about how Apple has an incentive not to cannibalize revenue are dumb, given how open Apple is to cannibalizing revenue where PMF exists (eg. the iPad Pro versus lower tier MacBooks or the MacBook Neo versus lower tier iPads).

It still does, they just call it iOS.

That’s basically the Neo.

Apple did patent a design for a dock in a monitor for a portable device to slot into. It’s gotta be getting close to expiration now. I think the trick is heat dissipation.

My friend who is a macOS programmer years ago had an idea for a startup mode for iMacs where instead of just being a screen, the storage and video card would also be accessible over the thunderbolt bus, so you could plug a laptop in and have multiple video cards at your disposal.

Tim Apple wants you to pay thrice, once for a phone, once again for a tablet and finally one last time for a laptop.

There are other reasons.

A big factor in the success of the iPad and maybe just some degree the iPhone, but especially the iPad, is that it’s “unbreakable”. All out restrictions mean it’s computer people don’t worry will suddenly stop working because they clicked to the wrong link. It won’t get a weird virus from their email.

That is a serious upside for a lot of consumers.

Just wanting to be a gatekeeper doesn't cover measures like SIP that don't make them anything and presumably took immense man-hours to implement.

I think the more accurate view would be an intersection of some of the company wanting to make money off gatekeeping and some of the company wanting to make quality devices that stay functional and malware-free even after you give to a deeply gullible grandparent for a while, and the former using the latter as a transparent excuse much of the time.

It's also because U.S. carriers don't like people hooking up arbitrary devices that can run arbitrary software to their network. In the civilized world, you have a device that talks GSM/LTE, you're golden as long as you don't violate any transmission laws. But in the USA carriers are still doing device allowlisting because I guess they want to bin QoS and don't want pro-grade traffic going over consumer accounts, nor the added expense of support for consumer accounts with exotic hardware that "might" break the network.

My contention is that the definition of said product and its inherent capabilities is being gatekept by a corporation that would love you to buy both an iPhone and Mac, and treat them as separate. In fact, I do have both already! But I still want rights to modify my iPhone as the computer it is.

The MacBook Neo is a great example of just how fungible these categories are, at least as far as the SoC that runs them is concerned. I paid for my iPhone in full, there is no reasonable justification for why I can’t repurpose it / modify it as I see fit.