I love the power consumption charts with no numbers, not units and basically not information whatsoever. Gem of marketing, really.
Also, I don't really think this is a good idea. Phones have different power and thermal envelopes, so even with Moore's Law, dedicated desktop is always going to be more powerful than laptop, and laptop is going to be more powerful than this. Same goes for storage, memory, graphics and everything.
And one more thing, after playing one of the games in lastest Humble Bundle that was originally released for iOS, I am of the opinion that touch and mouse/trackpad interfaces are incompatible in both ways, that using mouse or trackpad with touch apps is as impractical as using touch interface with traditional desktop apps.
The thing is most people who have a need for a laptop, don't have a need for a beefy laptop. Its the form factor they care the most about. Sure you and me need something more beefy. I have emulators, and simulation programs, and virtual machines running. My brother on the other hand has 3 spreadsheets, a word doc, and about 5 tabs open in chrome. A smart phone could probably handle his workload. I would take a guess that the average computer user has more in common with my brother then myself. To them there's probably a lot of value in having this all on one device.
A smartphone probably could handle his workload, but a CPU/motherboard design that was less constricted by size would be able to do it faster.
Also would your brother want to dock/undock his phone with his laptop all the time? I generally just leave my phone in my jacket pocket most of the time so if I want to go out of the door I don't have to hunt it down. Under this system your going to have to go find your laptop and unplug it before you can leave.
Under this logic it would have made sense for Apple to launch the iPad as simply a "big screen" dock for the iPhone. Instead they launched it as a separate device with faster hardware.
I predict that tablets will start to become far more powerful than smartphones in the long run as demand for high end graphics will increase whereas smartphones will become more optimized to reduce power usage.
You are trying to shove the future into a present-day sized box.
If things were working correctly, there wouldn't be any need to take your phone out of your pocket to have it drive the laptop.
And the laptop needn't be useless if the phone isn't around, it should just be able to advertise its screen and keyboard to the phone, so that a user that wants to push text at the phone can use the laptop to do it (without messing around with much of anything).
It really depends who far into the future we are thinking. If we have the technology to reliably stream high resolution video (of the desktop/UI) through the air with no noticeable latency at 120fps then all bets are basically off.
... so even with Moore's Law, dedicated desktop is always going to be more powerful than laptop, and laptop is going to be more powerful than this.
I agree, but I think it's a matter of what's acceptably powerful enough. At the risk of holding up anecdotes as data, I know some people who pretty much just use their phones and iPads (v2); maybe we've hit a point where these devices are powerful enough for a non-trivial segment of the market?
I'd say there's no maybe about it, in terms of raw power. A half-decent phone is more powerful than my high-end laptop of six or seven years ago, which is itself still fairly usable by most people's standards.
The only thing I see even remotely challenging to these devices is the fact that laying out a web page is a legitimately complicated algorithm, which we've secretly been pouring more and more processing power into over the years. Other than that these things have more than enough power for anything most people want today. There's a class of applications coming in the augmented reality domain and such that people will want more power for tomorrow, but they can buy that power tomorrow at tomorrow's price's.
But eventually the new technology becomes "good enough", and that's what matters to most people. That's why laptops have already surpassed PC sales years ago, and that's why people are buying more and more tablets, while being satisfied with their performance. So the "X will always be better than Y" argument is almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, when it comes to the mass market.
Do you believe in statistics? Honestly, its not so difficult to make one. Lets appreciate them for not coming up with bogus stats, like many other do.
Actually if you think about it, its not really a marketing gem, when compared to what Apple does for its technically inferior Mac book Air line-ups. (Hint: Google for Mac vs Pc on Youtube)
Also, I don't really think this is a good idea. Phones have different power and thermal envelopes, so even with Moore's Law, dedicated desktop is always going to be more powerful than laptop, and laptop is going to be more powerful than this. Same goes for storage, memory, graphics and everything.
And one more thing, after playing one of the games in lastest Humble Bundle that was originally released for iOS, I am of the opinion that touch and mouse/trackpad interfaces are incompatible in both ways, that using mouse or trackpad with touch apps is as impractical as using touch interface with traditional desktop apps.