Asus tried making a phone-tablet convertible way back with their Transformer series, Windows Phone had a feature where you could plug into a dock and use it as a full-Windows workstation (kind of), and in 2018, Razer showed off their concept for a phone-laptop convertible. As far as I know, Asus gave up due to poor reception and poor sales, Windows Phone went the way of... Windows Phone, and Razer never made a mass market device from their venture. Even now, Pine64's PinePhone has an upgraded convergence edition, continuing the concept of a universal Linux distro for phones, tablets, and desktops that Ubuntu started.
There are a lot of benefits to this, one is that assuming you had a phone, laptop and desktop as separate devices, this can save a lot of hardware, especially since in most cases, you're only using one device at a time. Lots of people already use their laptops as desktop replacements, so if a phone-laptop convertible can match that, then it can easily become someone's only device. There's an environmental benefit too, phones are much more power efficient per unit computation power, and since you don't need to upgrade the laptop chassis or your desktop peripherals nearly as often as the active compute hardware, you'd be producing less e-waste. I personally also really like the idea of having one computing device to rule them all.
Do you think this concept is straight up dead in the water, or, as phones become more powerful (especially since laptop chips like the Qualcomm SQ1, Apple M1, and the upcoming Intel Lakefield can already be passively cooled and still be quite powerful), operating systems improve to support seamless transition between device modes (Some Linux distros are working hard on this, and Google's Fuschia OS is planned to replace both Chrome OS and Android in the future), and with the USB C and Thunderbolt standards offering fast I/O, it will actually gain the mass adoption in the future that it isn't able to achieve right now?
Yeah, although the dev channel version broke the convergence feature a few times and my main phone with UT (OnePlus3) doesn't have a video out, so basically it doesn't work for me specifically right now ;)
Looking at the PinePhone and Phosh, I seriously doubt that running old desktop first software (like GIMP) will ever really be a thing. Sure it is nice to be able to fire it up if you can in desktop mode, but for the majority of apps the reverse seems more promising, e.g. writing a mobile app with convergence in mind like KDE Plasma does.
I feel like there will always be professional apps that require you to go into desktop mode. GIMP or professional photo editing is one example, IDEs for programming is another. But as long as the processor in the phone can handle them (we're seriously getting there or already there depending on the application), most professionals would have no problems with only running them in laptop or desktop mode, since good luck editing photos or programming in any sort of professional context from a 6-inch touchscreen with no keyboard or cursor.
Hmm, I guess beefy workstations for video editing etc. will still have their place, but photo-editing and painting is actually better on a Wacom like device with a larger screen and a stylus.
A bit outside the convergence idea, but related: the idea of plug in VR headsets that connect to your phone is really starting to take off in current prototypes it seems. These together with hand-tracking can be actually used quite well for virtual desktop like stuff, including programming and other things traditionally reserved to desktop PCs.
Or a tablet convertible powered by your phone wink wink