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Ask HN: Where are dockable phones and text-only glasses?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Where are dockable phones and text-only glasses?

There are several new or new-feeling devices that have come out or will come out in the past year, but two obvious ones are nowhere to be found.

1. Why doesn't the phone/dockable computer exist? 2. Why is there so much emphasis on vr/ar headsets when simple text overlay would be much simpler and more useful?

I have some ideas on this but I really would like to hear other people's thoughts. About the phone/computer, I actually saw a phone (or maybe it was a tablet) that could dual boot into Android or Linux maybe 5 years ago. It would be great to be able to just plug your phone into a dock with a monitor/keyboard/mouse and never have to carry around a laptop. For 90%+ people, that would be powerful enough. The iphone 16 that just came out appears to be slightly more powerful than the m1 macs, which are only 4 years old and still decently powerful machines. Now I get that Apple would never do this because it would cut into their own sales, but why wouldn't Samsung or other similar companies?

About #2, completely detatching oneself from one's surroundings by wrapping screen-google around your head is an obviously fringe idea. On top of that it's a considerable hardware challenge so even something like Meta's upcoming chunky-but-more-or-less-normal-looking glasses will almost certainly be exorbitant. Why doesn't anybody start with a super simple pair of glasses that have text-only overlay. Also, no on-device ai or even significant compute, just connect via bluetooth to a phone. I get that Meta will never tie themselves to phones because they have a grudge against Apple, but again, why not Samsung or even Teenage Engineering? It seems crazy to say, but Google basically got the form factor right ~20 years ago with google glass. Now so much later shouldn't this be a lot easier to make a reality?

It wouldn't bother me so much, but after seeing so many distopian headsets and two or three ai pins in a short span, it really makes you wonder why simpler, more useful things don't come out.

Discussion 2 comments · 4 points · alexandermorgan · 2024-09-29
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