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iPhone 5 to Support NFC-Based Portable 'Remote' Computing?

Great for cubicles

You don't have your own computer, you just walk into the big warehouse full of cubicles and sit down at the first open space you find. Turn on the computer, put in your day, go home. If you are working from home, it's just like you were at work except you have your cat and you can stay in your pajamas.
 
triceretops said:
You don't have your own computer, you just walk into the big warehouse full of cubicles and sit down at the first open space you find. Turn on the computer, put in your day, go home. If you are working from home, it's just like you were at work except you have your cat and you can stay in your pajamas.
Click to expand...

Yes, I've often thought it's too bad there isn't some sort of portable device that would allow you to do this sort of thing today... something that could sit on, oh I don't know, your lap or something...

We could call that hypothetical device a "laptop" computer! :D

Seriously - either way you have to own a device. Whether it's a laptop or an iPod is irrelevant. My MacBook Air is not the least bit onerous to carry around.
 
starflyer said:
Your right! I bet they haven't considered this. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Wouldn't you still have to log onto the mac? I would expect it to go to the login screen first, not your desktop.

Lock your phone, have a good password on your mac and use mobile me to wipe your phone if you get worried and I imagine you'd be fine.
 
Just as long as NFC is not required and it can be disabled. I am not a fan of cloud storage either.
 
Finally, no more worrying that my flash drive is lost. I just happen to have my WHOLE mac on my iPhone. Superb if true. :apple:
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

I don't see this taking off for some time. Seeing as many public or open macs in schools, etc will probably not be the latest generation of mac which supports NFC. Great idea though.
 
pretty cool! hey can i borrow your mac.... clickity click... hey what'd you do to my mac?:apple:
 
Sounds good to me, just hope they do a lot of field testing as i can see a lot of potential problems with this technology
 
This explains that job Apple advertised recently...

for an engineer to work on something that would blow people's minds.

I admit to having had a similar idea many years ago. Either way, I bet this technology is what they are advertising the engineering position for.

One catch of course, the client Mac you 'dock' with will need to offer decent performance to match those on your 'home' machine.
 
Now, this sounds really, really interesting.

Except for having all your software stored in the cloud (My Adobe CS package alone is several Gigabytes - that sure wont download and run in 30 secs) I believe this could come true.
 
Who is going to be the vendor that supplies an NFC chip in a replaceable battery that works via bluetooth to your iphone for CC payments? Visa?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; sv-se) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I think the point of NFC is that it's got a very short range (maybe a few cm tops) to make it more secure for payments, whereas Bluetooth has a range of up to 10 m or something, making it much easier to hack from afar if it were to be used for payments. So I dont think we're not gonna see any Bluetooth or wifi payments.

EDIT: meant to quote a previous post
 
I'm not a huge fan of cloud storage for a number of reasons. It's also one of the reasons I own a MP with 7TB of HDD space.

Having said that, for those of us who weren't eligible to upgrade our 3GS when the 4G came out, the 5G is shaping up to be a much more worthwhile upgrade...better camera, probably larger storage capacities, no antennae issues, etc.
 
Nfc

Can't arrive soon enough.

With proper infrastructure, NFC can replace the wallet, and your keys - two less things you need in your pocket.

if stores had NFC registers, they could accept payment from your phone (where you can always check your account balances, etc..).

Cars can have NFC key ignition.
 
I just don't see the point in this, but I don't see the point of tap and go either.

With Tap and go, you still need to wait for the store to scan the product etc, does it really save that much time? Why don't they just adapt the current swipe units to not require pin or signature for small amounts, so it would be swipe and go, no need for another device to hang off the cash register. It already works when you pay for parking, for significant amounts to.

As for the use on the iPhone to walk up to any computer - this is going to be a niche market product at best (how many places do you know have Macs just laying around for you to walk up and use, other than Apple Stores themselves?). Much as I hate to admit it, when you look at the figures desktops are on the way out, so in a world where everyone is moving to laptops, and Apple is blazing the trail in really small, really light laptops, what is the point of a technology to allow you walk up to a computer and make it yours?

I think by the time this becomes wide spread enough to be useful iPads & Airs will be powerful and full featured enough to take the place of the computer anyway (for any task this technology could reasonably support).

Thinking further - if everything is going to live in the cloud anyway, wouldn't just logging in to an enhanced version of mobile me be able to achieve the same result? Some option to get the computer to boot from the network, and in this case the network happens to be the cloud, and your system details. It essentially sounds like a move back to thin client computing (maybe it will work this time) being over complicated by a new gadget.

Maybe as the security device to make it work - you log in through the cloud, but you need to have your iOS device with the NFC chip near the computer to actually make it work, that makes sense.

And one last thing - will the software companies re-write their EULAs to allow this type of use - most licences are currently tied to the computer, not the user, so opening it up to run on any computer I happen to be standing next to might prove interesting.
 
In some ways we do this all the time already. A VPN connection, for example, allows you access to remote files and servers, and you could combine that with clients like Exceed, Citrix, etc. (or of course Apple could set up their own).

At many workplaces you can work from home by simply logging in through a browser, and use a Citrix client to open up your work apps as if they were running locally on your own machine. All your data is still stored on the servers at your workplace, but you access them from home just like you were sitting at your desk at work. Or, even if you're still at the office, you can sit down at anyone's cubicle, or a general machine in any lab or meeting room, and be accessing your stuff just as if it was from your own desk.

This could be Apple's attempt at popularizing such a system for the mainstream.

And this is truly nothing new when it comes to computing -- remember mainframes and terminal computing!
 
Wow, NFC really has nothing to do with Cloud Computing...

You're already using NFC if you have a smart credit card or one of those little keychain cards that you can wave in front of the gas pump.

It has a chip with your billing information in it. You attach it to a bank account, and depending on the setup assign a PIN number or transaction limit. (Most are setup without PIN's)

You wave the phone within an inch or two of the receiving PAD to approve the transaction.

A lot of gas stations have pumps that work this way with a convenience card you can buy (prepay)/sign up for (credit).

In Japan, Europe, and other countries they've been using NFC ready phones for about 10 years to buy groceries, gas, and even buy soda or candy from vending machines.

It's about time the US got with the program.
 
Why would we need a new type of radio to enable wireless sync? We have WiFi, we have Bluetooth, and we have USB. No way NFC is fast enough to sync a few gigs of apps and files, unless they're just talking about bookmarks and settings and small things like that, which would be fine being done online.

Which would actually be that stupid buzzword instead of what the article makes it sound...

How many dedicated antennas do we need? Sheesh.
 
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