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Future of the iPhone: use it as a Desktop computer

A

Aucun Express

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 30, 2009
187
0
Every year, the iPhone gets more and more specs. This time, the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM. Not so long ago computers had the same amount.
I had my iPhone next to my Mac mini and then I thought: what if we could use our iPhone as a Desktop computer?
It's already easy to plug a bluetooth keyboard to it.

Apple could create a smallest version of Mac OS X, a little bit like the Ubuntu Netbook remix version.

Let's say you get an App that is called Mac OS X, you press it and then you cannot see anything on your iPhone anymore, you have to connect it to an external screen (wirelessly, I don't see Apple adding an HDMI port on the iPhone).
Then you can also plug a bluetooth mouse to it.

Part of the internal storage would be the C:/ drive.

Yeah there would be some issues, such as how to restore your iPhone if you don't have a computer anymore? Well let's say you could have an external HDD that could serve as a backup/restore tool.

But honestly, how cool would it be?
 
Apple would never do that. They might try and merge OS X and iOS more and more, but I personally hope they don't, I'd hate to have to jailbreak my desktop computer before I can use it the way I like :rolleyes:
 
Sure, it can happen - there's no technical reason why somebody couldn't make an iPhone sized device that docks with an external keyboard, vid screen and mouse, and with the proper software to make use of both multi-touch and KVM interfaces. It's already been shown that devices this sized have the horsepower to handle Internet tasks and light gaming. But will Apple do it? I have no idea.
 
that would be pretty cool. Basically to take it home and dock it and it would work kinda like the tower of a desktop computer, undock dock it and take with you as your iPhone. Though they would have to really open up ios, could you imagine the frustration of knowing you put or have something on your phone that you could only access when docked and in desktop mode but not be able to touch it when on the road in "phone" mode?
 
Aucun Express said:
Every year, the iPhone gets more and more specs. This time, the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM. Not so long ago computers had the same amount.
I had my iPhone next to my Mac mini and then I thought: what if we could use our iPhone as a Desktop computer?
It's already easy to plug a bluetooth keyboard to it.

Apple could create a smallest version of Mac OS X, a little bit like the Ubuntu Netbook remix version.

Let's say you get an App that is called Mac OS X, you press it and then you cannot see anything on your iPhone anymore, you have to connect it to an external screen (wirelessly, I don't see Apple adding an HDMI port on the iPhone).
Then you can also plug a bluetooth mouse to it.

Part of the internal storage would be the C:/ drive.

Yeah there would be some issues, such as how to restore your iPhone if you don't have a computer anymore? Well let's say you could have an external HDD that could serve as a backup/restore tool.

But honestly, how cool would it be?
Click to expand...

Well, there wouldn't be a C drive as Macs don't have that kind of designation, unless you're talking about dual-booting your phone. I think there's going to be more than a few issues, running desktop software on less than 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of ram is going to be painful to put it mildy. While the phone is great at <b>complimetning</b> what you can do on your computer (laptop or dektop) it's certainly not a replacement.
 
short answer: NO

Long answer:

no.jpg
 
Yes, as others have said, while the iPhone is nearly as fast as some older computers, modern computers have also become much faster over the years. My desktop PC has 4 cores running at 4GHz with hyperthreading (so 8 simultaneous threads) and 6GB of RAM. No phone-sized device will come close to that for a while.
 
I could see it. One device, "docks" at workstations (house, work). Defenitely a plausible scenario in the future. Especially since there is a good chance the majority of "stuff" will be in the cloud, thus only a moderatly powered computing device (iPhone) will be needed to get you there.
 
Or perhaps go one step further and have it so when you dock your iPhone with your desktop Mac the iOS software can harness the desktop's processing power?
 
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