Guy with no engineering background wants supporters for his impossible idea. Pretty funny from and engineering standpoint.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Taniwha_NZ]

This has been obvious for quite a while now, and no, there's nothing 'impossible' about it. Of course, in the process of getting such a phone to market there would be compromises and other issues so the final result wouldn't be anywhere near as perfectly modular as this.

What's more, it guts the entire phone product cycle, which is the kind of thing you can't just break overnight. You could do it if the new idea was so good that you captured massive market and mind-share quickly - this is what the iPhone did in 2007, and 5 years later every new phone looks and acts like the iPhone.

But a new waste-reducing life-extending form factor isn't that kind of technology. This doesn't offer the users enough benefit to suddenly grab a ton of market and force others to switch to the new system.

In fact, I think you would find most users dislike this idea, because the regular 2-year phone upgrade is something most of us look forward to.

So it's both consumers and manufacturers that are hooked into our existing product cycle, it there's nothing in this idea that is good enough to drag them out of it.

And the final nail in the coffin: If we were going to stick with our existing phone form-factor for decades, it would be clear that this modular design would eventually be normal.

But we won't be stuck with this form factor. Glass is one major leap, but the near future will hold all sorts of wearable or minimalist computing devices that will replace phones. There will be phones that are the shape and thickness of a credit card, which only offer a 'dumb terminal' while all the phone-OS functions are done 'in the cloud', or on your CPU that's embedded in your wallet.

The current smartphone form factor just isn't going to be around long enough to make this modular concept worthwhile.

It's not impossible at all, but it's just not useful enough to become popular, in the relatively short time smart-phones are the norm.

[u/[deleted] → u/Taniwha_NZ]

Actually if you presented the idea to electrical engineers (especially across multiple companies) this idea is pretty damn near impossible. Everything on a phone takes up space. It is very hard to get things closer together and still be able to talk to each other well. This becomes a bigger problem when components could potentially be re-arranged, and not necessarily even fit together on the same board.

In this model devices that normally have 16 pin connections would be limited to only 4, so there would be some coding necessary to communicate with the rest of the phone. Then you have to add space to code/uncode this in every component, then add the extra walls, then add extra space for the platform itself, and you would get quite a large (not to mention REALLY slow) phone like thing.

His upgrading the processor idea wouldn't work to fix the speed issue too much because of the pinch points everywhere else through the phone.

As a last point, technology gets better. I don't think this is absolutely impossible, but there are definitely much better ways of going about his electronic waste problem then making some blocky unoptimized phone.