For me these efforts feel like a solution to a problem very few people have. People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops. The people who want a portable computer, which needs access to a screen, keyboard, mouse and desk, just seems like a very small niche. Even when you get that computer set up, you end up with something quite slow with limited RAM and storage, unless you've bought a real flagship phone which is more expensive than a good laptop anyway.
I tried this with DeX, it's cool, but it's just really hard to see where I'd use it. Some sort of trip where for some reason I can't bring my laptop, but I do have access to the various peripherals required to make a desktop setup.
> People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops
Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life.
I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too high at this point).
But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.
Just a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group.
If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.
The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.
Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.
I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.
I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).
Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.
iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306
Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.
> The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.
The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).
I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.
Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.
I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.
I sometimes use a VR headset instead of a monitor but I do end up using a laptop because of the keyboard and touchpad.
I can conceive of using maybe a phone, an ultra light headset and a compact keyboard and TouchPad combined?
I'm usually connecting to a real computer over remote desktop however!
My workplace forces me to use a virtual windows VM atm, which I'm usually connecting from an MacBook Pro.
I recently wanted to try using such an XR glasses (viture) and just use a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connect from my phone. It would make teethering unnecessary as an additional plus.
While it worked, it was super janky because mobile devices are still not optimized for desktop use... The VM screen was effectively limited by the phone resolution which was mirrored by the glasses. Couldn't get it to work without the mirroring...
If it was less janky I would definitely use that for some business trips. Currently? Nope.
On the contrary, I think that this problem has such a simple and obvious solution that you even have to wonder why it hasn't been solved yet.
In essence, the hardware completely allows you to have a device that can connect to a monitor via USB, connect to a keyboard via Bluetooth and function as a full-fledged computer.
DeX is perfect for certain business settings (mostly sales, but many management functions also) where you home-base out of a desk, then hit the road during the day.
When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.
When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.
I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.
Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.
> a problem very few people have
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727972