
Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen - lewisflude
http://www.genericmaker.com/2013/09/why-phonebloks-phone-will-never-happen.html
======
regularfry
So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know
how this might be done." _Huge_ difference there. I also hear a fair bit of
"this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing.

Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device
interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can
get a usable signal that works over _meters_ from something the size of a USB
plug. Now, imagine that doesn't have to include an aerial, or much of an
amplifier, because _even if you get a dodgy connection_ you're transmitting
fractions of a millimetre into a chunk of metal, and you're looking at
something that can be shrunk down to _well_ within the scale Phonebloks needs,
for pennies a block.

With something analogous to a router running a zeroconf system on the
baseboard, it's not even particularly difficult to see how you might handle
service discovery from the blocks you plug in.

Again, this is just a hypothetical, but it's _just one_ way Phonebloks could
_technically_ be coerced into existence. I don't claim to know about any
economic reasons, but there's a saying: those saying something can't be done
should stay out of the way of those doing it.

So, less knee-jerk negativity please, it's _far_ more entertaining to try to
figure out how this _could_ be done than to wallow in a brief moment of
superiority by writing it off.

~~~
asynchronous13
An engineer will rarely tell you that something is impossible. Ask an engineer
to build a bridge across the pacific ocean. The response you get will not be
"this can't be done", but "the costs involved make it impractical".

It's similar to this phone idea. Of course a modular phone can be built, but
the trade offs involved make it impracticle.

~~~
banachtarski
Agreed here. Making a shared protocol for the cpu, RAM, and disk? Heck, how
fast is this phone expected to run exactly.

------
codeka
> the stated motivation for this design is to reduce electrical waste. The
> best way to do that in the short term is to ensure devices are more
> repairable

Right, a replaceable screen and battery and an SD card slot would get you 99%
of the features you'd actually _want_ from phonebloks, and it's actually
something that would be achievable (if there were demand, which I think is the
biggest problem here: there's just no demand for this from the majority of
consumers)

~~~
mxfh
A replaceable battery, SD card and easily replaceable screens were all
features of phones available more than 5 years ago, yet these features
disappeared because the iPhone showed that most consumers don't value those
features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product.

Besides all points mentioned already, I just can't think of a way to protect
the pin-connection from wear in daily use without adding an additional shell
or individual screws, which would make it even more bulky. Simply haven't seen
a single miniature socket yet that works well under constant external stress.

Regarding the proposed design, with all it's sharp edges and deep ridges I'm
already looking forward to weekly lint removal sessions.

In terms of total energy waste it might be worth considering that there's not
only one logistic process anymore but a mere 5 to 10(?) with each has it's own
packaging, transportation and handling footprint. So it's debatable that the
total environmental impact might be actually worse than that of a 2 year life
cycle smartphone.

~~~
001sky
_iPhone showed that most consumers don 't value those features over a sleek
integrated lifestyle product._

Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features. There is
no supply side market for these. There is no market because apple is playing
monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!

~~~
ant512
> Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features.

They _could_ have kept buying Nokia 3310s instead of iPhones if they thought
that a replaceable battery was more important than everything else they got
with the Apple product. People made the same argument about physical
keyboards, and look at what happened to RIM.

~~~
thedufer
The fact that the Droid line sells despite it being basically a keyboard
bolted onto a 2-3 year old phone shows that there is a market there. RIMs
problem was one of software - only Android and iOS smartphones are really
doing well these days, since nothing else has the app ecosystem.

Which comes back to the incremental value of features thing.

------
lessnonymous
This is one of those ideas that look good on paper (or youtube) but just isn't
practical. There's absolutely no spare space in a modern phone. If you make it
modular, each 'module' has to have enough space for its component, PLUS space
to bring it up to the next module size. This will make the phone HUGE.

The concept of an upgradable device is, however, great. Just not in the
manufacturer's interest. Apple lose out if they offer a storage upgrade.
Motorola don't sell another phone if they make the screen swappable to the
next technology.

~~~
sitharus
You can clearly see the cost of modularity if you compare my current laptop to
my previous one.

My current laptop is a 15" retina MacBook Pro. It isn't upgradable in any real
sense of the word.

My previous laptop was a 15" MacBook Pro. I could upgrade the RAM and HDD, and
with little difficulty replace the battery.

The upgradable one is 5mm-ish thicker and about 400 grams heavier.

Not a true apples-to-apples comparison, but it does show the bulk added by
having end user interchangeable connections on the hardware.

~~~
smackfu
Definitely agree with you on the space/volume issue, but I don't think most of
that weight gain comes from modularity. Because 400 grams is a lot of weight.
I think it's probably mostly the hard drive weight.

~~~
outworlder
Hsrd drives do not weight as much, unless you are talking about 3.5" drives,
not laptop drives.

------
est
This is so typically "I have this greatest world-changing idea ever, all I
need is a programmer to implement it..."

------
captainmuon
I don't buy the speed argument. In a modern PC, many things are pluggable. PCI
express can transmit up to 30 GB/s, IIRC. Even CPUs and RAM are modular. If
there was such a benefit from soldering them together, I'm sure we would be
seeing more integrated systems.

Furthermore, the modem part of many smartphones is already a black box that is
heavily isolated from every other component. It's basically just hooked into a
bus, and connected to microphone, speakers, and antennas, and doesn't
necessarily interface that much with the CPU.

I'm not sure the PhoneBloks concept would work. (Crazy ideas follow.) But what
I can definitely see working is separating the computer from the shell (case,
screen, speakers, camera, ...). We are reaching a point where the speed
difference between smartphone generations becomes meaningless. In the future,
you might be able to buy standardized "computing bricks". For one phone, you
might need a 2017 model A brick, for a tablet at least a model C, and if you
want to build a server, you just pick up a few (kilos of?) CPU bricks. These
bricks would be so cheap and featureless, that they would allow really
ubiquitous computing. Building a house? Build in a few, like power sockets.
You'll get the equivalent of today's top PCs thrown after you as advertizement
gifts.

This is not necessarily what must happen, but the reason I think it could
happen is the following: Once the raw computing sector stops growing, and
there is no longer much profit to make, the industry will want to move on. As
we are already seeing today, specs will not be the main selling point.
Instead, people will pay for features (a great camera, physical buttons :-),
wireless charging, ...), a better integrated experience, a certain design, or
a brand name (e.g. all Apple). Development will focus even more on that, and
there will be a drive to reduce the cost of raw computing to it's minimum.

~~~
rcfox
> I don't buy the speed argument. In a modern PC, many things are pluggable.
> PCI express can transmit up to 30 GB/s, IIRC. Even CPUs and RAM are modular.
> If there was such a benefit from soldering them together, I'm sure we would
> be seeing more integrated systems.

The issue between the CPU and memory isn't throughput (the vast majority of
operations are <=64 bits at a time), it's latency. Latency is directly
affected by the amount of wire between the two things. In a desktop, you can
offset the latency to a large, replaceable memory module by adding smaller
amounts of more expensive memory (cache) directly in the CPU chip.

> Furthermore, the modem part of many smartphones is already a black box that
> is heavily isolated from every other component. It's basically just hooked
> into a bus, and connected to microphone, speakers, and antennas, and doesn't
> necessarily interface that much with the CPU.

This is partially true. The CPU still needs to control the radio, and they're
constantly feeding each other data. You might want to send the audio data
through a DSP for audio processing. The microphones/speakers will be shared
between the two, and probably go through a codec. Also, Qualcomm radios and
CPUs are pretty tightly coupled. If you want to do CDMA for the US (they seem
to have patents on all of the CDMA tech) then you need to use a QC radio,
which means that you need to use a QC processor, a QC codec, ... (Source: I
used to work on audio firmware at RIM.)

------
xbryanx
The only thing that will make something like this plausible and sought-after
is expensive e-waste disposal. We have to charge the actual costs of the waste
to the waste producers.

Right now that waste cost is practically invisible to the consumer, much less
the manufacturer. If the true waste costs (health impacts, polluted water
supplies, diminishing limited resources) were factored into the decision to
get a "new" phone, computer, etc. then there'd possibly be some desire for
this type of device. But right now, I can't see this happening without that
market force.

~~~
nickpinkston
Honestly, it's probably not that bad. You could cast all the old electronics
in solid, impermeable concrete blocks and only pay pennies per phone.

------
arbus
This idea seems like it would be a much better fit for tablets rather than
phones.

You have much more room to play around with on a tablet and perhaps the
typical usage patterns of the tablet actually encourages you to swap out your
bloks for different purposes.

For example, I could switch to a better but more power consuming Wi-Fi module
when I'm at school which usually has crappy coverage but could then swap that
out for longer duration battery so that I can watch shows on the train ride
back home without compromising on screen brightness or risk the tablet dying
before I get home

------
city41
I would not want a Phoneblok phone. I don't want to think about my phone at
all. I want to use it, and put it away when I'm done. That's it. I don't want
to deal with CPU blok A has a bug in it, or doesn't quite work with wifi blok
B, or app C was written with camera blok D in mind and is a bit wonky with my
camera blok E.

It's a major reason I've always preferred the iPhone. It's also why I no
longer use Linux, same general annoyances just mostly in software instead of
hardware.

------
calibwam
People are complaining about fragmentation on Android, heck people are even
complaining about it on iPhones. How would you develop a good mobile OS with
apps on hardware you can't test against? Even if the hardware problems was
solved now, I do not think people would be happy to dev against the
"platform".

~~~
PeterisP
People did just fine developing applications for PC with the huge variety of
possible hardware, and for web where target hardware differs in size and power
by multiple orders of magnitude.

~~~
est
> People did just fine developing for PC

So fine that we ended up stuck with 1366x768 for the last decade.

------
ZenoArrow
Perhaps the technical challenges for Phonebloks will be too great. However, a
modular design is more than achievable if you don't mind reducing the number
of blocks.

Imagine you have 4 blocks: screen, battery, file storage, logic. Each of these
could easily be connected in a modular way, and in the case of batteries,
already are in a good number of phones. Whilst you might lose out on some of
the customisation flexibility that the Phonebloks concept showed, you do get a
number of decent benefits...

1\. Replacing screen if damaged or wish to have an upgrade. 2\. Can upgrade
storage space without upgrading the whole phone (SD cards are a decent way to
augment storage, but the proposed method offers the chance to expand beyond
the limits of SD cards). 3\. Replacing the logic block only allows you to have
an upgraded phone customised quicker than buying a new phone (no need to
migrate contacts, settings and media). 4\. Battery upgrades should be the norm
anyway, it's wasteful to throw away a phone just because the battery no longer
holds a decent level of charge, plus it allows for extended battery capacity
upgrades.

------
philangist
This reminds me very much of what [Bug Labs]
([http://buglabs.net/products/blocks](http://buglabs.net/products/blocks)) is
doing. Building modular hardware components for rapid prototyping and
development. Cool stuff.

~~~
bobwaycott
That's exactly what I thought of, as well.

~~~
philangist
Yeah I interned there a couple of years ago. Honestly very surprised they're
not more well known in the tech community.

------
josho
The reasons this will never happen has nothing to do with the technical
challenges, but rather the business implications.

What business is going to invest in creating commoditized platform? Certainly
not Apple or Samsung, they are busy figuring out new ways to lock consumers
into their ecosystem. So it has to be a new entry into the mobile market.

Perhaps a company like IBM has the resources to build the base platform. (This
is certainly beyond a kick starter). But, why would an IBM invest in creating
a commodity platform? How does an open hardware platform serve their, or any
other business', interests? It doesn't, and that's the real reason that we
won't see a system like this.

------
fridek
As much as it sounds fun, I very much doubt that industry will adapt it. Look
at Android which is open-sourcish, updated frequently and the whole os should
be easy to transfer between devices. In reality no one wants to allow people
to do that. Older devices are not updated and crappy additional software is
installed just for this reason - to make sure people have to buy complete new
phone often and to make sure it's the right one. I don't think it's the right
approach to shout into the void instead of, let's say, build a startup and go
on kickstarter.

~~~
noselasd
Exactly, the industry would quite likely resist building such a device - there
are very little incentive to do so - they would rather sell you a brand new
model.

As with most consumer products, especially electronic devices, there's quite a
lot Planned Obsolescence in mobile phones.

------
6ren
PC's are modular. You can mix and match (at least, until a new motherboard
standard); you can replace parts (at least, while they're still made).

One problem with mobile phones is that they haven't been fast enough - by
tightly integrating every part, you can maximize efficiency to get the best
out of the hardware. Apple does this fantastically, whereas Android is more
modular, and so isn't quite as efficient.

But now that the iPhone 5S is 40x-56x faster than the first iPhone, speed
doesn't seem to be an issue, in practice or theory. So an even more modular
phone is plausible.

------
goshx
I love to see people using the words like " this will never happen" like they
could predict the future in any way. So many have been proven wrong over the
years, I wont be surprised if this author is proven wrong again. This might
not be possible now, with today's technology, just like 10 years ago it wasn't
possible to have a computer in your pocket with multiple GHz cores and GB of
RAM.

~~~
idProQuo
Past progress is not a sure indication of future progress. Phones have made
huge leaps in the past decade, but now the leaps they're making are smaller
and more incremental. We're hitting a barrier of how much power we can pack
into a device that can fit in your pocket.

This article does a fantastic job of explaining whats up:
[http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-
slow...](http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/)

------
sirkneeland
From what I've learned of hardware engineering (basically by colocation
osmosis here at a large Finnish handset maker), it's that the needs of RF
performance alone make this thing a near impossibility, at least unless the
radio and antenna portions of the phone are considered to be "off limits" for
modularizing.

Every piece of hardware added to the phone affects RF performance by virtue of
its being made of matter (that isn't RF-transparent) and being in close
proximity. If it starts emitting or being affected by electromagnetic waves,
well that's a whole new layer of pain to deal with...

Maybe...maybe...if you wanted to consider the radio and antenna fixed, and
bring back the old external antenna that would be forever unobstructed by new
bloks...

------
gwu78
A thought experiment:

What if just the enclosure was replaceable?

For example, if an iPhone 5 user could purchase an iPhone 6 enclosure and
transfer his iPhone 5's PCB to the new enclosure (perhaps as easily as moving
a SIM card from one phone to another), then as far as the most of the non-
technical, status-conscious, exterior design-focused world can tell (this
probably excludes you, gentle HN reader), does the user have an iPhone 6?

What if were true that non-technical consumers buy phones in large part
because of how they look? After all, the differences in functionality between,
e.g., Samsung's and Apple's, phones are relatively minor. Many phones from
different manufacturers are more or less the same size.

------
lifeformed
This would be cool as a desktop. Yeah, desktops are already modular and
upgradable. But if had this Lego-like interface, anyone could do it, and it'd
be a ton of fun.

Actually, even better would be a whole computer in a single block. You could
then buy an identical computer and connect it to the first one, to make a more
powerful single computer. It'd add a little bit more of a boost of CPU power,
GPU power, RAM, and HDD. You'd never have to upgrade; instead you just keep
buying more blocks and attaching it to your old hardware. Of course it'd be
less efficient than a non-Lego computer, but it'd be really fun to use.

~~~
justincormack
Like this project [http://rhombus-tech.net](http://rhombus-tech.net)

------
hclee
Phone like phone we see today uses very highly complicated chips and its
connections to each functional modules. Something that can be detachable
easily can be really surprising.

Mobile phone SoC chip (Application processor) is heading into very uncertainty
area as fabrication process require too small transistors now. Hope that
dealing super sensitive chips, can be guided by chip experts.

Putting everything physically close in one chip is also cost and integrity
issues. More functions in a smaller area = less die cost. Blok based
components would have to consider how to compete cost where $10 everything
possible SoC is ready.

------
jwarkentin
I never figured it would be done in the way it's presented. I like it because
there's a lot of potential. And if a lot of smart hardware engineers start
working on it, we can develop something way cooler. I want to see companies
recognize that people like this idea and start moving in that direction. I
would love for this to spark pressure that moves us away from monolithic
solutions and towards something more modular.

------
goshx
You know... SK Telecom, in South Korea just announced speeds of over 200Mbps
for mobile data. I believe that speed tends to increase over time. We will get
to a point where smartphones will just become dumb terminals, using resources
from a "cloud". We are talking years from now, but that could easily become
the next big leap, IMHO.

~~~
conover
Latency is going to the hurdle there. You can have the fastest connection in
the world but if it takes 400ms to pull up someone's contact info, no one is
going to give a fuck.

~~~
kefka
No, I look at this as I would connect my laptop to a supercomputer via ssh or
PuTTY.

I still have a good amount of computing local, but for those heavy jobs, I can
send it elsewhere and have it come back to me. Think voice-text
transliteration, near immediate video processing, instantaneous (near real-
time) voice translation, map stuffs.

And if we use a system that allows shared code to migrate from one machine to
the next (think Erlang), then we don't even need that ssh tunnel... The
estimated weights on a process would send it appropriately to the right
cluster of CPUs.

~~~
sirkneeland
That is already how voice recognition, translation, etc services work on
smartphones today. At least in Google and Windows/Bing systems, that is done
in the cloud and sent back to your phone. They have simpler, less powerful
versions entirely on the phone that are used as a fallback (one explicitly
warned by the vendor to be inferior, mind you) for when the device cannot
connect to the big iron in the sky.

------
devx
PC's were once integrated, too, and then became modular. Smartphones are
integrated, but I could see a future where they become modular. It would also
follow Clayton Christen's theory of "integration/disintegration" from his
Innovator's Solution book.

------
deutronium
I'm curious if you could implement a GSM/3G phone using software defined
radio, using a device such as BladeRF/USRP.

Amittedly they're not small enough to use as a normal phone though. Maybe
you'd be able to scale down that tech though one day?

------
progx
Yes the idea is good, but can not practical implemented. Category: Fun
projects for geeks.

------
mgpetkov
The biggest problem is that all major hardware manufacturers must create
common standard and redesign their hardware components. The combined effort
would cost billions of dollars and the result will be uncertain. No one would
take the risk.

------
brendanobrien
I disagree with the principle that we should make more things to reduce waste.
I'd much rather take the 800$ I'm supposed to spend on buying this phone, and
give it to someone trying to repurpose old electronics.

------
mostly_harmless
The comments here remind me of the classic debate of monolithic kernel vs
micro kernels; It ends up with the same result that the ecosystem required for
the modular components causes too much operational bloat.

------
pivnicek
This is a great idea. Own your phone. Right now, the phones we have feel like
they are the corporation's phone and not ours.

I love this idea, and hope that they get enough interest to make a splash.

------
aba_sababa
It's also a bin packing problem :)

------
rjzzleep
i'm puzzled at why few people mention the busses needed to communicate between
the blocks. sure it looks all nice and stuff. and even if you had a lot of
money, what about the transfer speeds needed to communicate between one block
and the other?

------
pessimizer
I do not think that this would ever work. If it does, I'll take three.

------
frm1001xplrr
Your use of "never" is going to bite you in the ass, brother!

------
Sagat
It will never work because there is no apple logo on the phone.

~~~
ceejayoz
And yet, no Apple logo on what, 75% of smartphones these days?

------
azatris
It's also an appearence issue. Most women I know tend to choose their phone by
its looks. Phonebloks would not appeal to most of them ("I see the screws!")
and thus it is not a very marketable phone.

~~~
ceejayoz
Yeah, sure, it's only women who choose a phone on looks.

~~~
kefka
Heh.

My girlfriend's complaint about her android is that it's all software buttons
on the screen. She wants physical buttons ala blackberry (but absolutely NO
blackberry!)

And a bigger battery would be helpful.... As would a better antenna! She
remembers the old 5W bag phones that could get signal from hell and back.

