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I think John Gruber over at Daring Fireball said it best: "I remain highly skeptical that a modular design can compete in a product category where size, weight

• higherpurpose 12y ago
  He doesn't see any advantage to a modular phone? Then I don't think he's looking hard enough. I stand by my belief that Gruber has backed himself into a corner where he now needs to defend anything Apple does, and attack just about anything the competition does that is at least seen by others as a threat to Apple, if not by him.
  • supercoder 12y ago
    He's not suggesting there a no advantages , just that the ones that it does provide won't be enough to compete against non modular phones.
  • skywhopper 12y ago
    You've misread his statement. He sees the benefit, but points out that the tradeoffs will be the main areas of competition among smartphones: size, weight, battery life. All three will be worse in a modular phone. You'll also get less for your money overall. Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want. Sure, there's a market for a modular phone, but it's not going to seriously compete against the Galaxy or the iPhone in the mass market.
    • zheshishei 12y ago
      >Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want. I think consumers actually like a little choice in their products now. I mean, take a look at the apple laptop website. Also, I could imagine vendors offering different phone presets (e.g. battery life, photo-taking, media consumption) and then letting the customer further customize it if they want.
    • smackfu 12y ago
      The same arguments can be used against a removable battery, but the flagship Samsung has one.
      • sjwright 12y ago
        And yet, probably 99% of their owners will never purchase a replacement battery. For a given sized phone, a replaceable battery is necessarily smaller capacity than a fixed equivalent, due to space wasted on additional housings, clips and connectors.
    • joezydeco 12y ago
      As a phone owner with kids, I just don't see this happening in my household. Modules getting dropped/lost (especially the critical one that makes the others go), connectors wearing out from constant playing around or, even worse, smeared with food and crammed with junk. I have a hard time keeping unified units intact and working, much less letting my family near a Lego kit that needs to be 100% assembled to work properly...
  • CHY872 12y ago
    Well, the problem's just (obviously) that if you ever open up an iPhone (or I suspect any competing phone), every cubic millimetre of it is filled with things that do stuff. To add all the panels that bridge components, the connecting hardware etc can only add weight and space. It'll be interesting to see if Google can make it work, but you can't say that it's not unjustified skepticism. In terms of 'any advantage', I interpreted it as 'any overall advantage', and I think I probably agree with him.
  • jacquesm 12y ago
    No, Gruber has it exactly right, see my comments below on how an older modular phone fared.
  • bane 12y ago
    As a result Gruber has made himself almost entirely irrelevant. I almost can't wait to watch him twist himself into knots when Apple releases a larger phone.
• josefresco 12y ago
  Size matters? My Android friends have huge phones (and cases) - Clearly they don't mind a phone being big and if the phone had cheap replaceable parts, that giant "life proof" case wouldn't be needed. Weight matters? I have never heard "I wish my phone was lighter" from anyone, anywhere. In fact I've heard from several who think a heavier phone means it's "better made". Battery life - Again my Android friends (and a few 5c friends) suffer from poor battery life - How would a phone where you could easily swap for a new/better battery be inferior? Gruber should remind himself of the first generation of pretty much any tech product. Bulky, ugly, and clumsy could describe a lot of projects that push technology to it's limits.
  • jan_g 12y ago
    It does matter when comparing with alternatives. Modular phone with comparable specs to other phones (screen size, cpu, camera, etc) would probably be bigger, thicker, heavier and uglier. In other words, even when a customer is buying a big 5"+ phone, then I think he/she will probably not choose the modular one.
    • mhurron 12y ago
      > heavier and uglier I can give you bigger and thicker since I would expect those too. Neither is really a problem though. One of the benefits of the otterbox case for my Galaxy G3 is that it made the phone thicker, and it's already on the big side. Heavier though will probably depend on the modules you choose, and ugly, well I thought what they were showing looked kind of good. Personally, a lack of a SD card is one of the reasons I didn't get the Nexus or an iPhone. There are people that want these types of features and they win when comparing with alternatives.
      • jan_g 12y ago
        Yes, there are people whose needs are different. And I am much in favor of modular design (at least replaceable battery, SD card and USB OTG, but project Ara goes much further), but that does not seem to be the case with mainstream consumer.
      • 12y ago
• jan_g 12y ago
  I tend to agree with Gruber on this one. Modular phone might be perfect for me (will see when and if it gets released), but I am not sure it can attract the masses as well as polished, high-end phones from Apple, Samsung, Nokia, etc. Size, weight and appearance do matter a lot to average customer.
  • venomsnake 12y ago
    I suppose someone has said that about the PC clones in the middle of the 1980s in some hardware vendor central. If it is properly though out and with the ability to get high end performance on BOM + change prices ... they may have a winner.
  • anigbrowl 12y ago
    But so what? It's perfectly OK for a product to appeal to a small niche as long as it breaks even. I am so tired of the conceit (mostly put about by lazy journalists) that there must be only one best product in any category. That just leads to lowest-common-denominator approaches in which quality is judged on popularity alone.
  • personZ 12y ago
    It's worth noting that Gruber was among the chorus that were outright mocking the Samsung Note.
• jeez444 12y ago
  Agreed. This is yet another product that will appeal to techies and first adopters only. For instance, people could -- in theory -- build their own computers with a bunch of modular components, but instead a lot of them buy a Mac or some other variation of all-in-one solution.
  • venomsnake 12y ago
    And gamers ... http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/ and with the influx of new people in PC gaming with self build rigs - the custom PC market is quite healthy right now.
    • dlp211 12y ago
      And it is also very niche. The custom PC market has been, and will continue to be a "healthy" market, but it is by no means a growing market. The difference between a custom built PC, and a modular designed phone, is that for the most part, a static device, that is, it doesn't go anywhere, versus a phone, which will be abused just by the nature of the fact that it is a mobile phone (I mean the presentation is proof of this, the phone broke the day before). Now am I saying that there is no market for this, absolutely not, but this in no way will become the standard for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one to me, is time. I used to build all my PC's, taking the time to compare parts, read reviews, check out overclockability, and look for deals and get the best bang for my buck, but as I have gotten older, I just want a machine that works, my disdain for everything Apple, has completely turned around, I absolutely love my Macs now, not because I think Apple and Steve are gods gift to computing, but because they work, they maintain resale value, and compared to PC hardware, they are superior.
  • leoc 12y ago
    Than again, a lot of them do self-build. Even if this system is only good enough to attract techies and enthusiasts, that might be enough to give it a viable market.
  • DCKing 12y ago
    It's different. With computers, you pick your own motherboard, CPU, GPU, memory config and so on. These things look funny and technical and most people don't even touch them. But even casual users regularly replace/expand their displays, storage (I'm counting external hard drives) and laptop batteries. With this project, your SoC - which is your CPU, motherboard, networking, memory and baseband chip all in one - is still just one package. Yet you can easily supplement other varieties of packages for displays, storage, batteries, cameras. Each of these things are quite well understood by many casual users.
• phaer 12y ago
  Well, it has some other benefits which might outweigh those points. Beside the added flexibility in general, ecological benefits might be one of those because you can avoid highly toxic and expensive-to-recycle waste if you can replace parts of your phone and escape the "I need to replace my phone every two years because one small part is now outdated or broken"-cycle.
  • acjohnson55 12y ago
    I'm not sure it's any better to have to manufacture and dispose of dozens of little modules. In fact, I think it's probably worse.
• ama729 12y ago
  Except the important thing is "how much", nobody care if it's 1mm thicker or 20g heavier, especially for someone who would value modularity.
• deleted 12y ago
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• return0 12y ago
  I don't think Google expects this to be a massive consumer product, but it sounds like it can be great fun for techies. In this case, Gruber's opinion hardly matters.
• gbog 12y ago
  This is not a phone, as someone noted in another comment. It is a good old pocket computer, and it is modular, and mine may (or may not) have a telephony module. I have a Galaxy Note, I think I use it as a phone twice a week on average. I use it as a HN browser, a camera, a podcast downloader and listener, a navigation, a game console, an e-reader, a translator, for contacts and calendar, and phone calls. Having a big screen is helpful in 9 of these 10 activities. Being big is annoying in 1 of them. Moreover a big device has a much bigger battery, thus a somewhat better battery life (only somewhat because the screen is bigger too, and you use it more.)
  • ctdonath 12y ago
    Indeed, the classic definition of "phone" hardly applies to these devices anymore. They're Cray 2 supercomputers (well, "super" back in the day) shrunk into a matchbox and include, as one tiny program making use of the mic/speaker/radio, a "telephone"-like capability.
• jareds 12y ago
  Although I am blind I still consider myself a "normal" person. This could be the answer to my very specific requirements though. I'd love to build a phone with the lowest quality screen I can, no camera, as big a battery as I can get, and possibly a keyboard. For obvious reasons something like this will never be produced by any company.
• jff 12y ago
  The Gruber flowchart: New idea -----> Is Apple doing it yet? -----Yes----> Brilliant! | | +----No----> So stupid, who would want this? See: big phones, small tablets, etc.
• anigbrowl 12y ago
  Why offer electronics components to the general public? After all, most people don't want to create their own electronic devices, therefore making such things available in retail channels is a complete waste of time. I'm not too sure about screwdrivers either. I can't believe people are giving Gruber's arguments the time of day on a news site for hackers.