Re:Ask HN: What do you think of modular smart phones?
by jotux on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:39PM
(#10082681)
And the PCB is compact because there are tons of high-speed and/or noise-sensitive signals that need to be carefully routed. If you make components modular you now need to run them over (typically fewer conductor) buses. The buses will be slower than direct hardware connections and now when you want to upgrade your 1080p camera to 4k you're still limited by the bus speed of the base phone.
Re:Ask HN: What do you think of modular smart phones?
by hanniabu on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @01:57PM
(#10080899)
I definitely see it beneficial for upgrade reasons though. I know a lot of people upgrade their phone now because their camera isn't as good as other options out there. Their phone will be working perfectly, but they'll swap out phones for that sole reason. In a case like that, one could simply upgrade their camera component. Same goes with the other components as well, very similar to custom built deskop towers. You have the freedom of taking your time with upgrading components on an as-need basis and on top of that you're able to decide how much of an upgrade you want. Top of the line? Just slightly better than what you have now?
There's also a lot of possibilities with unusual add-on for scientific measurements, add-ons for employees in service industries, add-ons for hacking(think of repurposing your phone as a microcontroller similar to RPi), etc. There's a very wide and diverse market waiting to explode from the possibilities.
1) hardware engineering: there is no dead space in a phone, every single square inch is used by something. The PCB is as compact as possible. If you design a modular phone (like project Ara), you easily double the space required. Instant losing proposition: less efficient, more bulky.
2) market: even if you offered a wonderful selection of decent modules, market reality means that 90% of your customers would use no more than 2 or 3 different configurations, at most. If that's the case, forget about modularity, just build those 3 configs and optimize them to death.