Speaking of which I don't believe in Continuum. It's an idea that's natural coming from a company that has a desktop OS and wants to leverage that in order to maybe win some market share on mobile. I first heard of the idea from Canonical with their Ubuntu phone, another company trying to leverage a desktop OS.

It's a cool idea for geeks, but made obsolete by cloud-enabled apps like Google Docs. Why would one need Continuum when the changes you make in Google Docs on your phone are reflected immediately on every device or PCs you have?

With the new Windows licensing Windows is the better alternative to ChromeOS - you can do more at the same price and you can lock it down if you need to a la ChromeOS. In some ways Google is stepping up the game - with Android you can do more.

Good point about Google Docs use case however that's very limited - If I carry the shared storage of my phone with me, if I can blow up the phone to use two monitors and still have my missed calls, SMSs etc in front of me - it enables a greater use case. There is definitely merit in that if continuum is done right.

On missed calls and SMSs, with my iOS device I get both SMS messages and phone calls through iMessage and Facetime on my MacBook. With my Android device I do the same for SMS messages, plus all the notifications I'm interested in with PushBullet.

The US Justice Department forced Microsoft to stop offering special deals on Windows so all the top suppliers paid the same price (1). I assume that's lifted now that Microsoft is no longer closely monitored by the DoJ. Anyone know?

(1) Which seemed to have the (presumably) unintended effect of pushing up the average price of Windows and increasing Microsoft's profits.

Most copies of Windows are configured, tested, pre-installed, locked to a single PC (not transferrable), and supported by PC manufacturers. They get it at discounted rates, which typically range from $0 to about $45. That's cheap if you think of it as $1 per month over 4 years.

PC manufacturers typically add "crapware" to consumer PCs. These are programs that they get paid to distribute (much like websites that collect $1 if they foist Chrome or the Google Toolbar on you). With luck, they can get the cost of Windows down to $0. They can also get extra discounts or even cash support for advertising from Microsoft and/or Intel for making certain statements, eg recommending Windows or playing Intel's bongs in a TV advert.

In some cases -- for example, if enough users subscribe to the bundled AV software -- the charge for Windows turns negative, ie they make a profit. With a really efficient OEM, the consumer may pay less than $0 for the pre-installed copy of Windows (other costs being hidden).

Since you can buy Windows laptops for £150/$199, the suppliers are clearly not paying $120 or more for Windows.

In my country (Romania) the laptops with Windows are easily $70 more expensive than those without Windows. I know this because every time I'm looking to buy a laptop I'm doing my research and end up amazed by the difference, given all the crapware they come with, which as you are saying, should subsidize the price.

But I would have thought Acer and Asus would be competitive, because they're global suppliers....

Windows 8.1 with Bing has been free on devices with smaller than 10-inch screens

The actual deal was not free: you paid $10 for it, and then Microsoft gave you $10 for setting the default search engine to Bing.

So, according to Microsoft, it was not "free" it was "zero paid".

They have a very low cost license for OEMs that sell cheap devices - those get upgraded to Windows 10 for free. I can't find a source for Win 10 licensing but I'd be surprised if they aren't continuing the zero dollar licensing for a subset of devices.

You're not thinking long-term enough. You should be asking, "why would one need a PC when you can just stick your phone in a dock?".

It's going to take a while for hardware to catch up, but in about a decade I think desktops will almost exclusively be used as high-end workstations for stuff like 3-D rendering, scientific number crunching, and maybe hardcore gaming, while anything with fewer demands will be satisfied by a phone using Continuum or something like it.

For one you're assuming that current computing capacity is enough for most people. However current computing capacity is enough only for current applications of it. In a decade from now however people are going to get interested in virtual reality and artificial intelligence. It's inevitable. Plus the gaming industry, just like the housing industry, has always sucked all surplus.

And there are hard limits to how small transistors can get, or to how fast wireless networks can be. But problematic are also the batteries, for which Moore's law never applied. Only 5 years ago I was using a phone whose battery lasted for at least 7 days. How about your current phone?

Another problem is that no matter how powerful a phone can be, it's still handicapped by its small screen real-estate. The form factor of a laptop is optimized for productivity work while remaining portable. A physical keyboard is more productive than typing things on a touch screen. A 13-inch screen is more comfortable than a 4.7 inch screen for doing any kind of productivity work. I can go to a coffee shop, pull out my 13-inch laptop and instantly be productive. And transporting around a dock, a keyboard and a monitor to plug-in your phone in case you need it would be more impractical and would defeat the purpose of that phone.

I concede that there will be people interested in using their phone as a general computing device. Those will be the same people that are doing that today, as in the people that lack the resources to buy multiple devices. A very important and probably big market, but still.

With Windows Continuum, you plug an external monitor and a keyboard into your Windows 10 Phone. You get a desktop style experience on the big screen but you can continue to do phone stuff on the phone.

BUILD 2015 Continuum session - Windows Phone as a PC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdzbXo38onQ

It becomes significantly interesting for the odd 4 billion people who will own a smartphone one day but may never own a laptop.

Toshiba tried something similar with a PocketPC (powered by Windows CE) a couple of decades ago, but it didn't work well enough to go anywhere.

I'm fairly sure most AI will be done in the cloud. We're already going in that direction, with stuff like Google Now.

VR is an interesting question... I'm really excited about the HoloLens, and I'm really curious to see where things go from there. Honestly, I think AR might become a big deal once we start getting wearables that aren't super clunky.

Actually, introducing wearables to the mix also introduces the idea of a personal cloud of devices. The concept of a PAN has been talked about for a while, but we haven't really seen it amount to much, unless you count things like Bluetooth headsets. Cheap, stylish wearables with phone-quality processors, however, can change all that (I don't think we're at either cheap enough or stylish enough yet... but that's a big "yet").

Think beyond smartwatches or googles, too. Imagine wearing a smartshirt and smartpants and smartshoes. Imagine if every single thing you wore on your body had a CPU in it. I think we'd avoid the problem of how small transistors can get just by sticking sources of computing power everywhere. Of course, this paragraph is all pie-in-the-sky far-future stuff. Prices will need to come down to the same range as normal articles of clothing, which will take a long time. And we'll have to have a seamless way to charge your clothes that won't add any more mental overhead. Nobody wants to say "sorry, I have to stay home, I forgot to charge my pants last night".

> But problematic are also the batteries, for which Moore's law never applied.

I think at some point there's going to be a backlash against thinness, and we'll start seeing bigger devices with thicker batteries. Wouldn't surprise me if portable power sources take off too (I'm already seeing external battery packs being sold at department stores, of all places), especially if inductive charging becomes a bit less clunky. Women might be a good driver of this technology: for example, I can see a system where you just drop your phone into your purse, and it magnetically attaches to a wireless charging mat plugged into a battery pack.

> Another problem is that no matter how powerful a phone can be, it's still handicapped by its small screen real-estate. The form factor of a laptop is optimized for productivity work while remaining portable. A physical keyboard is more productive than typing things on a touch screen. A 13-inch screen is more comfortable than a 4.7 inch screen for doing any kind of productivity work. I can go to a coffee shop, pull out my 13-inch laptop and instantly be productive. And transporting around a dock, a keyboard and a monitor to plug-in your phone in case you need it would be more impractical and would defeat the purpose of that phone.

Of course, you're assuming nobody will make a laptop-shaped dock that you can insert a phone into like a cartridge. Think something like the Asus PadFone [0], but with a laptop instead of a tablet. The only real barrier to that right now is that every shell has to be matched with specific models of phone, because every phone has a different size and shape, but I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing standardized form factors at some point in the near future.

Better yet, combine that with a setup like the Surface Book, and you'll have a phone that can dock into a tablet that can dock into a laptop.

[0] http://d5htu2v3nddyh.cloudfront.net/media/catalog/product/a/...

Instead, ask why you'll need a phone when UI devices become invisible, ubiquitous, and networked.

Eventually, our children (grandchildren?) will laugh at our phone obsession. I'm imagining a silent reel of a Charlie Chaplin figure repeatedly patting all his pockets searching for his phone, dropping it when he does find it, pecking the wrong portion of the screen, and then when he finally answers the call discovering that the battery is dead. In other words, me, every day.

But at the same time, how many devices will the average person use? More or fewer? If it's more, then no matter what -- even if we don't know what those devices will be -- you want it to be easy to switch between them, which is the problem Continuum is solving.

I think this is Google hedging its bets again and getting ready for whatever unpredictable thing happens next. They just assume it will include a proliferation of devices.

For that you need connectors, that are big, unsightly and brittle - or high bandwidth, ultra low latency wireless.

From the engineering point, it is much simpler just throw separate device into the mix. From the business point of view, more profitable too.

You know you can run Thunderbolt over USB-C, right? There's no reason that even five years from now, I shouldn't be able to plug my iPhone into my iMac in Target Display mode using the same cable I use to charge it.

However, I have been using a WiGig dock with 3 1080p displays attached for the past 6 months, and it has been trivial to set up, and nigh indistinguishable from a display connected over wires.

For the record, I used to play FPS games competitively, and I still find the input lag on many IPS monitors completely unbearable to this day. For my eyes, the WiGig dock adds no discernible input lag or compression artifacts to any of my 3 displays, except in games where some frame dropping can still be observed in exceptionally intense moments.

I honestly can't wait for the day when laptops with WiGig and Wireless Charging become mainstream.

May 2010: Om Malik "Android Has Won — Time for Chrome OS to Move Along?"