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

[Don Kosak]

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.

The way I understand it, the NFC chip would just be used to authenticate that you are actually sitting/standing in front of the Mac. Once authenticated, the Mac's primary network would be used to pull down what it needed.

As NFC is commonly used for banking transactions, it has the level of security (supposedly) to make a good authentication mechanism.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

This seems a little too ahead of its time...

Like I said before... this is already going on in Japan and has been for years.

 

[kelving525]

Don't Japanese Cell Phones already do this? I've seen people in Japan at the train station sliding there Cell Phones to get in.

I don't think this is for mobile payment (as is the case with Japanese keitais), but rather just having a "desktop" version of your Mac applications on your phone through NFC. The picture shows the technology behind it which can be used to make payments as well.

 

[fred222]

Wrong focus

I know folks are mentioning security, but I just have to say, people don't realize to what degree their security concerns are off base. This level of data availability to higher-ups is already there. You don't think you could be easily interrogated without your even realizing it had happened if something triggered a need to? You should be as concerned with general ethics and true process than this or that issue of where your data is. My feeling is that progress in this direction is important because absent absolute corruption, these systems help to police the policemen who have grossly abused their positions historically, much more so than it might enable new abusers. Just my gut feeling! Peace and be well, all.

 

[Eclipse278]

wow, truely the only thing the iphone wont be able to do is make calls!

 

[alhedges]

How is this better than a flash drive?

You can already do this with a flash drive, so I'm not sure I see why this is such a big deal. I mean, sure, you wouldn't have to carry the flash drive around...but on the other hand, with a flash drive, you wouldn't have to find a computer with the appropriate receiver installed, either.

Unless Apple is going to stop adding USB ports.

 

[Analog Kid]

why do you need an iphone for this?
wouldn't be simple key or card be enough?

I really don't understand any of this... Why the phone? Why the cloud? Why NFC? Did this come from Wu? It just sounds like a jumble of high profile buzzwords to me.

NFC ~ 40kB/sec at a distance of 4 inches. So you have to take the phone out of your pocket and the most it could reliably pass is an identifier.

Why do I want to host my personal information in the cloud if I have a high speed internet connection to my machine at home?

Why do I need a fancy authentication device when passwords work just fine for everything else?

Just extend Back to my Mac so I enter a mobile me user name and password at the login screen and it finds my dynamic IP address in its database, establishes a connection and I get my desktop live wherever I am.

 

[Virtuoso]

I think this may be more than just the ability to sync your bookmarks etc. What if the apps aren't installed locally and run instead on the remote servers? This is why they need the huge data center...

The o/s files and folders paradigm goes away and all apps, settings, docs etc are accessed in the cloud. Your Mac (or other device) becomes essentially a dumb terminal (thin client) and you get access to any app you like on any terminal with a net connection. All your data is securely backed up and you always use the latest version of the software. Swipe your phone to authenticate and away you go. No need to install anything.

Want the experience of using a Mac but can't afford the hardware? (a common issue holding back potential switchers) Just pay as you go for the apps you need and run them on any terminal you like. Want the power of a 12 core Mac Pro but only have access to a 2003 iMac? No problem - pay for an hour of data center time and get your Maya rendering done remotely.

Maybe I'm dreaming, but that would make more sense than a MobileMe revision and it could be a serious game changer for end users. Cloud technology has been around for well over a decade, but maybe Apple are the ones to finally make it mainstream?

 

[newdeal]

...

sounds cool but my broadband won't have enough bandwidth to support apps and photos on the cloud. Regardless I am also sure they will make you buy a new mac and it won't be available as a USB dongle for current mac owners

 

[twoodcc]

now this sounds great! but i doubt it's coming with the next iPhone, though i really hope it does

 

[roratus]

It would be nice to only have to grab my iphone on my way out the door. Now if someone will just make an electronic lock with an RFID that would allow me to lock and unlock my door.

 

[belltree]

Welcome to Japan 2008. This has already been done and I don't want to see it on iPhone 5. Don't want to have to skip this one too.

 

[Norcalchavo]

on a side note, ironic how the OP posted an image with the Giants logo on the day they won the World Series. Go Giants!

 

[neutrino23]

Nice idea to store data in the "cloud" but for many apps the US is not even close to having anything near the necessary bandwidth.

I am a photographer and shoot raw, so produce several GB a day which needs editing and reviewing.

Perhaps much higher speed like XG-PON2 will help when it eventually rolls out.

http://gigaom.com/2010/10/26/verizon-goes-up-down-at-10-gbps-in-tests/

Clearly works better with more bandwidth. In the case of photographs it wouldn't have to download your entire library. Aperture could just breeze through the smaller jpeg previews till you selected one for editing.

If you needed to upload a few GB that would be a problem.

I guess some things will take a little longer. On the other hand, no sense waiting till it is perfect before rolling it out.

Possibly this would be embraced first by universities and some corporations as they are the ones with lots of Macs around. As a student it would be cool if you could drop into the library and use a Mac to work on a paper or add some research notes and then finish up at home without dragging your laptop around. Similarly at work, you could log into the Mac in the meeting room and pull up any presentation from the last couple of years, not just the one you prepped for.

Assuming this is real I'd guess it is years away from being popular, but you have to start somewhere.

 

[Analog Kid]

The more I think about this, the less I like it. I see no reason to put the extra circuitry in there for this limited and borderline useless purpose.

 

[aegisdesign]

Right so it's a remix...

1) NFC to authenticate a login.

2) OSX Net boot / Back-to-my-Mac to get your home directory over the network.

3) Home-on-iPod redone so there's a local cache instead of having to pull everything.

4) Some cloud service so that it works when your Mac is off.


I do hope they allow other phones to authenticate using NFC. Nokias have all got NFC in from the C7 onwards. And I hope the local cache can be a USB connected drive or stick.

 

[joe2uk]

Don't Japanese Cell Phones already do this? I've seen people in Japan at the train station sliding there Cell Phones to get in.

Yes but only since circ. 1999. Also been using them to pay for small goods since 2000.

Lets all enjoy year 2000 again in 2011.

 

[res1233]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

The more I think about this, the less I like it. I see no reason to put the extra circuitry in there for this limited and borderline useless purpose.

It depends on how that thought process goes. If you thought of all the positives, then surely you would see the great potential this has.

 

[gregorypierce]

Complete awesomesauce if it happens. What I would expect to see is that you flash your phone in front of an AppleTV and all your applications are available on the AppleTV

 

[dba7dba]

As many on this thread mentioned already, this has been going on in Japan, Korea and Europe for quite a while already.

Also, 'Facetime' feature has been available for over a year in Korea. This past summer while I was traveling in South Korea I saw a lady using a small phone (not iPhone) to do a video chat, IN AN UNDERGROUND SUBWAY CAR, obviously using cell signal and not wifi.

 

[marksman]

Welcome to Japan 2008. This has already been done and I don't want to see it on iPhone 5. Don't want to have to skip this one too.

What computers in Japan can be recreated with a pass of a phone on a new computer?

Or did you just choose to ignore the key parts of the story and focus on the lesser parts?

 

[SkippyThorson]

I don’t care if it uses NFC or WiFi or what, but some form of the long-rumored “home on iPod” functionality would be a neat feature!

(I used to keep a copy of my Mac on my iPod Photo—OS and all—which I could then use to boot other people’s Macs, creating my own homebrew version of this. Very useful when I didn’t want to lug a laptop.)

I don't know why I've never thought of this. It's a great idea. One of these days I'm going to wipe some movies I never watch off of my 30gb iPod and pop a bootable OSX on there. Very cool trick I never thought of.

This also reminded me of that "Home on iPod" feature that Apple pulled at the last minute from their OSX Panther update. The shift from hard rive to flash in the iPod line-up probably killed this feature back then. I can see it finally coming out as a cloud base service with the iPhone simply serving as a "key".

Here is the original description of the feature from Apple site before it was pulled.

Home away from home

Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther's Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory - files, folders, apps - on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go. When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you're "home," no matter where you happen to be. And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you've made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory.

Thanks for sharing that. It's interesting to see what never made it into shipping products. Especially those out of Apple.

 

[Analog Kid]

It depends on how that thought process goes. If you thought of all the positives, then surely you would see the great potential this has.

Help me see the positives, then... What can this provide that couldn't be better handled with Bluetooth or a password?

 

[JAT]

This is where LTE and other technologies come into the game. High Speed mobile Internet that is not there TODAY, but that WILL be everywhere in two to five years. They're currently testing LTE with 50 - in words: fifty - Mbit/s here in Germany. This is just the beginning, and it already has wireless LAN speed. I think it's rather obvious that we can expect sufficient mobile bandwidth worldwide in a few years. Apple is not developing technology for today's needs, they have a clear vision and focus and want to own tomorrow's market.

That would be nice, but I don't even expect reasonably priced 50Mbps (<$50) on a wire here in that time period.