zlacker

> I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor.

Still in the "smart" era, but the Motorola Atrix allowed that, but with its own laptop form factor dock.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-does-the-motorola-atrix-4g-...

>>danans+(OP)
I had an Atrix 2 that I was excited could work with a laptop-form dock. I never bothered to actually get the dock, though.

>>danans+(OP)
I had one of these Atrix and laptop docks. It was really good, but sadly way ahead of its time. The desktop was a Debian-based Linux desktop and you could install various ARM packages. Unfortunately, the phone just wasn't powerful enough at the time. The touchpad was also not brilliant compared to Macs (probably better than Windows touchpads of the time). I sold it on ebay to a guy who plugged his Raspberry Pi into it, since the Atrix dock used mini HDMI and microUSB connectors. This has obviously been replaced in the modern age with USB-C.

I am pretty sure that modern phones are more than powerful enough! My wife's iPhone 16 Pro Max would be amazingly useful if not limited by iOS (which always feels like it's hiding true capabilities behind an Etch-A-Sketch interface to me). If you could plug the iPhone in and run a macOS desktop (which hasn't really changed for 15+ years), that'd be great. Thanks in advance.

I have a POCO F7 Ultra which is powerful enough to run LLMs via PocketPal and could easily replace my daily laptop or PC for work if it wasn't scuppered by USB2 on the USB-C port. If I could easily run ollama on the phone via a web interface I would because it's faster than my main PC for LLMs I think!

On Android you can go into Developer settings and force enable the ability to use desktop mode but sadly I can't without proper display support on the USB C.