Instagram.

I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.

That's exactly why I miss the Samsung DeX [1], it gave me the option to turn my mobile phone into a desktop, solving one choice problem. But, of course, there’s always another choice around the corner. I don’t even trust Linux in battery management, and while Chrome OS Flex [2] offers a decent alternative, in the end, I don’t miss notebooks and their battery-draining habits. I’ve learned to embrace the fruit… and its own ecosystem: iPhone + MacBook.

I expect someone will really wake up soon, but as long as companies like Microsoft continue to be cash cows, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Even if Qualcomm makes the chips, Microsoft Windows won’t handle the energy efficiently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX

[2] https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/

Seems like an obscene amount of computing power for a personal computer. Who is pushing their desktop that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive emails and write a document.

My fiance takes a lot of videos on her phone. She has become a pretty talented video editor. Watching her “work” is actually a wild experience because it really is a whole different way of using a computer. She is comparably fast to someone on a desktop editor.

4K video editing — you need a pretty powerful desktop PC to smoothly edit/preview 4k video. CPU, GPU, and memory.

You underestimate what people do with their phones these days

AR, CAD, Video Editing, games, etc..

Even just sending a video on WhatsApp requires transcoding

Apple showed several AAA games like Assassin's Creed running on iPhones.

Even for the most mundane phone usage I find the faster and faster socs being better at driving mobile safari to keep up with desktop websites. That alone I think is worth periodically upgrading.

They can subsidize the costs of developing fast chips with iPhone margins and then use the faster chip tech in their computers.

I imagine at some point you’ll be able to take your phone to any screen and use it as a desktop computer. Obviously there are a lot of UI differences for touch vs keyboard interfaces, but it feels like that’s going to be the future at some point.

They also take pictures and videos. That takes a ton of compute nowadays, with all the computational photography stuff going on in the background. Most laptops cannot do realtime processing and compression of 8K video.

I do. I can almost do my entire knowledge worker job from the phone. My 14 is getting slowed down by iOS Microsoft Office enhancements, so hopefully the 16 can make me just as productive as I was last year.

LLM / Extracting objects from pictures / Generating pictures

Can turn the chip off faster to save power probably.

Add a wireless keyboard, mouse and monitor then you’ve got a desktop computer.

Not gonna happen from Apple but I’m eagerly awaiting the day.

They started allowing console emulators on the store very recently.

Mobile computing performance is largely bounded not by how much work you can do this second but by how much work you do without exhausting your battery too quickly to be usable or overheating.

Comparing them as if both were equally capable of going flat out is deceptive.

Other things being equal working faster means spinning down quicker and using less juice.

I need that kind of power, not for apps, but computational photography and videography.

These people will be fine with regular iphone 16.

Local AI obviously

640k ought to be enough for anybody, huh?

Imagine if people could replace their phone battery! (some do)

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I’m mostly happy with the computing power of my iPhone SE. It has been a bit sluggish lately. It could be new apps being less efficient but I suspect it’s mostly the phone throttling because the battery is old and can’t supply as much current without dropping voltage.

Yet I think the computing power of the A18 is great, and plan to upgrade to iPhone 16 now. Not for what I need today, but for what I need years down the line. Phones last a long time these days. The processor in my iPhone SE (2nd gen) is ancient, yet it’s still OK. My kid will probably use it for a couple of years more.

I’d say that there is a decent chance of phones becoming actually good smart assistants now. Much of that will be driver by specialised hardware, but the general processing power will be useful for some of that processing.

Show me a chip 10000x more powerful and I’ll show you a program that runs 10000x slower

At this point it should be possible to just read the page and extract only actually meaningful and relevant information (+ navigation bits) from it, effectively presenting a "reader mode"-like view instead of the original page content with all the junk and bloat.

Reinforces my belief that there must be evolutionary pressure forcing apps and shells to be just buttery sluggish.

You can get ad blockers in the app store, btw.

For this use case, since we are already talking about the phone being wired to some physical infrastructure, I don't think it's too much of a leap to imagine a dedicated cooling dock for the phone.

Put a Frore AirJet MEMs fan (or conventional fan) on a holding pad, and that phone could sustain vastly better performance.

Ideally I'd love to see gaming handhelds so the same. I would love a Deck with for example the upcoming Strix Halo APU, that has to throttle way down when portable, that can't effectively cool itself and doesn't have the batteries to run at it's real capabilities. But then you dock the Deck onto a big power supply with active cooling and boom: gaming monster.

We ought to be building portable systems that need external cooling assistance to be fully utilized. Scaling down is enormously effective & advantageous today.

The other point I'd make is that while, yes, maybe even an unaided phone isn't going to win a sustained benchmark, most users on desktops are probably near idle 90%+ of the time. the phones inability to sustain high power isn't really a key factor at all for most computing usages. That there happens to be a big display and keyboard and mouse doesn't really mandate more than what a phone already offers, for the vast vast vast majority of desktop use. So why not?!

It'll be exciting to see Android 15 finally bring forward this promise and potential. I doubt it'll cause a big shift fast. But these capabilities are going mainstream, and phones should be up to it!!

Can't wait till we start getting USB4 phones!

The concept works just fine, Samsung etc have at various times demoed this exact concept with their own android handsets.

Sure it might not be able to run at 100% load for long periods due to cooling restrictions, its still going to be more than fast enough for a lot of the activities most people do.

One of the nice things CPU improvements bring us - the amount of thermal "volume/mass" needed for a given task is going down all the time, and right now an iPhone would comfortably drive a monitor and keyboard, just like the iPad with similar cooling constraints and physical architecture already does.

The screen on the latest iPhone runs at up to 2,868 x 1,320 at 120hz on the Pro Max - some desktop monitors would actually be easier to drive (1080/60 etc) than its own internal display.

I find that for writing (not coding, writing) I don't need the external monitor. There's an even simpler solution.

I just pair my phone with a lightweight butterfly-foldable BT keyboard ($40) and I can type on the train, plane, etc. It works really well, no laptop needed.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C1VSRZ59/?th=1

It's a great way to take notes in a lecture hall too, or to do some writing in a cafe while I'm traveling. I've done lots of long-form writing this way and it's perfectly fine. Also great for writing HN comments with.

Lugging a laptop around always seemed overkill to me. Even an iPad is too much weight to carry around.

A phone and a foldable keyboard is all I need.

You could create a cooling, charging dock for that purpose with an HDMI or DP out. Hell, you could put it in the base of the monitor even. It's definitely feasible for a company like Apple and I could see a market for it in the corporate space.

Current generation computers, sure, but I think there's still steady progress toward increasing amount of compute per unit of energy. For phones, that's almost as important for heat dissipation as it is for battery life, as we're less likely to get more energy per unit of volume in the near future.

There were people in the Zen 5 release thread saying the reason AMD had < 10% of the increase on single core after 2 years is just the reality of physics. In half that time this year Apple to the single core score of the iPhone from below the 7950X to above the new 9950X.

Scaling has slowed down in some aspects, it's definitely not the late 90s anymore where your PC is just obsolete 4 years later, but things like this are a good reminder execution by chip designers is still by far the bigger factor in how large the generational growth will be.

They do! It's called the M1 MacBook Air.

Based on current available silicon we can assume M4 chips especially the “Pro” ones will be a major jump expected by M1 Pro owners.

Qualcomm perform close to M3, Intel’s latest chips also perform close and compare to the M3.

But the iPad M4 benchmark already showed very interesting results and I guess all those are based on same design and fabrication process.

100%, for mobile devices performance has more to do with overall efficiency than it does actual long lasting compute heavy workloads.

> That’s a killer business feature, never own a laptop again

It's also a business killer feature which would kill their MacBook sales. So, won't happen anytime soon imo.

This is why I want hardware to be open for me to install whatever else I want on the damned phone.

This hardware is too good to be wasted.

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So Apple could not sell many Macbooks anymore? Good luck with that idea