Whilst it's relatively easy for a current product to be backwards compatible with older integration mechanisms (i.e. supporting IDE ports, or PCI slots), I haven't seen much in the way of current products allowing new integration mechanisms to be added.
I think that's Michael's point - eventually a new port or bus (e.g. USB v4 or PCIe v10) will come along. It will have different power requirements, or will have such bandwidth that it'll overwhelm the CPU/memory or other components of the system etc, so even if you could somehow retrofit the new bus (and thus get access to the new components attached to it), you'd need to replace your whole phone anyway. Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ben Scott Sent: Tuesday, 24 September 2013 10:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] OT: A completely modular phone On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Michael B. Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > However, let us remember, the original IBM PC. IBM published all the > info and there were many copies. However, the original BUS design was > crap. Eventually, that caused a re-design of the entire PC (leaving > out a lot of history there, but true nonetheless). Right, but some of the history you leave out is significant. During the times of transition, it was common to have more than one interface type in a system. ISA and EISA co-existed, ISA and VLB co-existed, ISA and PCI co-existed, PCI and PCIe co-existed. One saw PCI, ISA, and VLB on the same mobo. Checking now, I find boards with PCIe, PCI, and ISA slots.[1] At no point did everything need to be thrown away. There was no "flag day".[3] If we want to posit the modular phone, we might posit such an upgrade path there, too.[4] Now, durability of the interconnect, that might be a bigger problem. Phones get beat up a lot more than most modular connectors. Another technical issue is that antennas need to be of certain sizes and shapes to work properly. You can't just have a tiny block for an antenna and get good performance. -- Ben [1] Dang ISA just won't die.[2] [2] There's a reason for this beyond the usual legacy inertia. ISA is basically just most of the 8086 CPU pins brought to a card edge connector, which makes it cheap and easy to hook into, as long as you can live with the limitations. [3] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/flag-day.html [4] We have to speculate, as absolutely no technical information is provided on Phonebloks.[5] [5] I strongly suspect technical detail simply doesn't exist, and the whole thing was dreamed up by someone as a neat concept, but without much understanding of the engineering needed.
