The new iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max all support DisplayPort for up to 4K HDR video mirroring and video output to...
I had this dream in 2010 (not literally a dream, just a notion) that someday, we'd replace desktops with phones... like, sit down at a desk, attach it to a dock, it would connect to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and you could use it like a desktop PC. I suppose we could already do that, other than that the software would still be phone apps not made to be used with a mouse or for the most part a landscape screen.
I had high hopes for Dex when it was first announced and I was on android for my phone, but dragging around a monitor was more work than just bringing my laptop. I got a 12.9" iPad a couple years ago as a portable library, then last year thought I might replace my (Windows) laptop by adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad so I wouldn't have to take both into the field for minor work. I've also got a Samsung S7 so I tested it out as well. The capability/usability gap between the full desktop version of Word and the mobile versions made me give up. Understand I have a dozen templates, from simple to complex, in Word, and around 20 calculation or tracking Excel sheets - so transitioning to Pages/Docs and Sheets/Numbers would cost me about $20k in productivity time. And I still wouldn't have my CAD, finite element analysis, or industry-specific utilities with me.
I don't think we'll see it for a few years, but I feel like Apple has laid out their plans for this when they announced the VisionPro. It runs iPhone and iPad apps in Stage Manager. So does the iPad Pro. And I can definitely see that it's a possibility for the phones in the future.
Now the chips in the phones aren't M-series, so it might be a while until we've got the horsepower, and I'm sure there's some developer-changes necessary as well, but it doesn't seem out of the question.
The A17 Pro is pretty close to the M1 in benchmarks, and that's more than enough for most users. Presumably it'd still be iOS, so existing knowledge and experience would apply, they're just need to design and test their UIs for larger landscape screens, which they may already be doing for iPads.
I had a phone in 2011 called the Motorola Atrix 4G that did this. It didn't do this particularly well, but it had a dock with HDMI and USB ports and such. There was also a laptop-shaped dock that had a built-in monitor, keyboard, and trackpad.
I once torrented a movie on the phone, plugged it into the dock, and watched it on the TV. I controlled it with a Bluetooth mouse. It worked fine.
I do this with my iPad a lot, though obviously not a full “desktop experience.” It’s close enough for normal stuff.
I wonder how much different ios is versus iPadOS in terms of allowing for something like stage manager to work on the phone if it’s plugged in. I imagine it may be non trivial right now. But obviously they could always make changes.
This only encourages my theory that apple is going to release their own game console (or beefed up microconsole Apple TV refresh?) and mobile is the first step to test interest
They wouldn’t be going so hard with AAA publishers and pursuing graphical fidelity (ray tracing) if they weren’t
Only way Apple would do it is buying up studios like Microsoft, and that truly would be a hellscape of those are the only two companies left. Neither have any taste in the industry.
I can already remote play games on Xbox and ps5 with my iPhone. With a Bluetooth paired controller and display port output wouldn’t the essentially be 95% of the way to a cool steam-link type device?
Those aren't contradictory. DP is via connection to GPU using the high speed lanes and the 2.0 USB is from the A16 chip, which was designed with USB2.0 over lightning in mind from my understanding.
For people who don’t know, a “lane” in this case is a literal wire on the cable. You can have multiple lanes that have separate protocols, e.g. a lane for audio, a lane for DP, a lane for USB 3.
IIRC there are always lanes for USB 2, and USB 3 speeds are achieved on separate lanes. Thats why all USB-C cables and devices must support USB 2.0.
You said something I didn’t even think about: The a16 in the iPhone 15 is last year’s chip. Of course it doesn’t have usb 3.0 or anything else, just the 2.0 speeds it was designed for.
I do wonder, however, if the A17 will retain the new updated usb feature that the A17 Pro has (clearly they’re binning something or other)