Desktops don't mean any of those things, crappy old computers with none of your characteristics are very common.

Technology has improved significantly in the 3 - 4 years since Motorola made theirs, and Ubuntu's failed as a crowdsourcing campaign. Nothing has been proven.

I interpreted Ubuntu's failure more a statement of lack of confidence in the ability of Ubuntu to execute on this idea than as a statement against the idea's ultimate potential.

Samsung, Google, Apple, or Nokisoft (MS+Nokia) could do it.

I think Microsoft could be in a position to do this with Windows 10. It certainly seems to me like it would be the next logical step after the Surface Pro.

And phones in nearly all cases are limited by thermal profile. That's what keeps you from running at full tilt on a mobile device even when plugged in.

I like the basic idea of it, but I think their implementations were too soon. We aren't too far off now from where the only way high-end phone CPUs are behind low-end laptop CPUs is power consumption and heat dissipation.

Maybe in another 5 years, it'll only be a mobile CPU because the power consumption is ramped so far down. Then you could plug in a big cable and get enough power to run full speed, plus your gigabit connection, massive drives, multiple monitors, mouse, keyboard, etc. Heat might be a tougher one to solve though.

Or maybe we'll stick to syncing the data over the cloud instead and keeping the two platforms separate.