I would love to see this take off, but I worry that everybody thinking about it has the wrong idea about modularity. Tweakers fuck with their phones on a daily basis. They'll jailbreak, load new OSes, try out a dozen apps a week and own two or three cases. I'm not going to pull numbers out of my ass, but my experience holds that these guys ('cuz they're never girls) are a minority in the market. Yet these are the guys that are focusing on "modular" and they're designing it around themselves - thus the magnets to hold shit together, thus the oversized chassis, thus the "tweak on/tweak off" approach to design. Me? I'd tell AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Claire's, Best Buy, Ben Bridge, Nordstrom, you name it that I'm selling franchises for a line of phones that follow the "watch" model. I'd sell tool kits and certification for cost and I'd put certified techs on my website and allow them to advertise for free. Then I'd come out with a chassis that doesn't go together like legos, but can be upgraded in fifteen minutes by a semi-skilled technician with a satchel full of tools. Most people are going to want to build a phone that does what they want and use it. If it doesn't do what they want they'll want to swap maybe one or two things, not everything. The majority of the design is going to be static - yes, you'll want to be able to take it apart but you aren't going to be doing it at parties. Even then, you could build a "sled" chassis that allows you to hardpoint on removable components. You could use it for prototyping, you could use it for demoing, and your geeks could rawk it all day long and swap modules in and out like legos. 'cuz really: A photographer is gonna want lenses. He might swap from a video CMOS to a still CMOS but he's more likely to have both installed. A health nut is going to want bluetooth and possible pulse ox. He's good with everything else. A fashion maven is going to want a half-dozen easy cases. Everyone is going to want a couple batteries. Other than that, shit's gonna stay put, mostly - the chip will stay until it's old. The screen will stay until it's old. The keyboard? Yeah, people might want a keyboard they can put on and take off. But most of the modularity of the design doesn't really need to be user-operable and that seems to be the model everyone pursues. Were I Google I'd build a big goddamn ecosystem of module prototypes, open-source them, then get my "explorer" program in gear to get hardware devs and an ecosystem of bodega repair and upgrade shops. And then fuck apple. I'm not Google though.
It reminds me a bit of desktop computers: Tired of your slow CPU? Open it up and swap it out. Need more RAM? Open it up and swap it out. It turns "toss out the computer" into "toss out a few chips." I got my laptop in 2010. It's still kicking okay, but if I wanted to stop the disk thrashing when I open 20 browser tabs, it'd just be a matter of swapping out the RAM. Same goes for faster boots with a SSD. Same goes for compiling and a CPU. This can be repeated until hardware makers decide they need a new type of socket to improve performance. Outside of tech enthusiasts and niche markets, I see the benefits as less of the present: "lemme hotswap my camera at a party" and more of the future: "I want 802.11ac, lemme toss the radio instead of tossing the phone." "I cracked my screen, lemme replace that." A little cheaper and a little more environmentally friendly than the current smartphone situation.Most people are going to want to build a phone that does what they want and use it. If it doesn't do what they want they'll want to swap maybe one or two things, not everything. The majority of the design is going to be static - yes, you'll want to be able to take it apart but you aren't going to be doing it at parties.
It makes sense, really. We've reached a point where the average consumer doesn't need all the goddamn horsepower you can buy anymore, either in a phone, or a desktop, or a laptop, or a tablet. If people had discipline about photos and videos they'd never need to upgrade again, other than the pernicious habit of making ever-more-resource-intensive operating systems. But something like this would just about solve the problem. Build two, maybe three buses - a girl-sized phone, a nerd-sized phone, and a texting flipper. Give it three slots (two front, one back) for cameras. Give it a wireless slot. Give it a charge/IO slot. Give it a battery slot. Give it a speaker slot (or two, 'cuz people think you get stereo an inch apart FFS). Build it all around a memory slot, a CPU slot, a GPU slot and three different sizes of screen slots and you're off to the races. It'll take a company like Google or Amazon to do that, though, because in order to pursue this model you have to be hell-bent on annihilating your competition through forbearance of profit.
Yeah, that's the trouble. On one hand, the consumer doesn't need to replace their entire phone as often. On the other, the consumer doesn't need to replace their entire phone as often. Plus all the headaches of compatible hardware, 3rd party knock-offs, and dysfunctional, proprietary drivers. I don't know if that's necessarily true of phones / tablets / laptops, but it definitely happened in the desktop market. I could build a fancy gaming computer now for less than my laptop costed in 2010.It'll take a company like Google or Amazon to do that, though, because in order to pursue this model you have to be hell-bent on annihilating your competition through forbearance of profit.
We've reached a point where the average consumer doesn't need all the goddamn horsepower you can buy anymore, either in a phone, or a desktop, or a laptop, or a tablet
Best phone I ever had was an iPhone 3G running iOS 3. That was pretty much the pinnacle of usability. Compared to my wife's hot-shit 5S, it didn't have: - a magic-ass fingerprint sensor not quite as good as the one I disabled on my Thinkpad in 2006 - a selfie camera - Facetime - a compass It did, however, have a maps app that would get you where you were going most of the time. Sure, no turn-by-turn but that's because Steve Jobs was often an ass. See also: Copy and Paste, which weren't available until this operating system. I've used the compass on my phone twice now. You can probably guess how much the selfie camera and Facetime get used. So really, in the six intervening years between then and now, the major improvement in my life is turn-by-turn, which I had on my HTC Harrier in 2004. I think we overestimate how badly we need our phones to be hot shit because the software bloats and bloats and bloats and bloats to the point where you need a 2GHz processor just to answer a goddamn phone call. iOS 5 was 750MB. Fuckin' iOS 7 is 3GB. Tomb Raider for the PS3 is 4. I really think we could get by with less.
You'd make a good Google (Bloogle? sounds like an alcoholic drink to me). I really like this approach. Especially if anyone with Google and a toolbox can fix their phone. It's weird, now that you've put it like this, that they want to go completely modular and not just in a more modular direction. Currently you need an expert to pull apart something as sophisticated as the latest iPhone. So in response these guys want to go overboard and use something like Lego. People just want to be able to pull apart their devices (and replace them), is that too much to ask? You'd still have the same benefits but less of the my-phone-mighy-fall-apart-when-I-drop-it stuff.I'm not Google though.
Then I'd come out with a chassis that doesn't go together like legos, but can be upgraded in fifteen minutes by a semi-skilled technician with a satchel full of tools.
Well, watchmaker's tools. Or the equivalent. You need semi-specialized tools to work on anything small and technical, but they're pretty easy to get on the Internet. But yeah - I'd open up the ecosystem to anyone willing to kill a couple hours on an online certification and let anybody who'd done a hands-on under supervision play "authorized service center." I think it's okay to have modular stuff that you can take apart and put together with anything this side of a SMT rework station. Makes the hackers feel more 1337 and allows you to make the thing feel "real" to people who can't be sussed to whip out a jeweler's Torx. And hey - that way developers who aren't too savvy on having their product skunked in the reviews because it's fiddly to install are still able to sell stuff. Some things just aren't that modular and shouldn't be.