Mobile Theses | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Theses

ben-evans.com

62 pointsjdkanani35 comments

The number of people that are commenting 'I stopped reading after X' is appalling.

When you find something you disagree with coming from a reputable source, shouldn't you be insanely interested in reading it? Contrarian viewpoints are what teach you something you don't already know. Are people coming to HN everyday to get a pile of articles that affirm their world view?

My reaction to the article was a disappointment because most of these are regurgitations of his previous posts. It feels like he is beating a dead horse because to me all of these points are non-controversial. Apparently not.

I'm surprised so many at HN disagree. The mobile tech trends he describes are some of the biggest drivers of recent startups. I expected us to be more forward thinking.

I disagree because I see new tech trends forming. This is roughly what I would've believed around 2013.

I'm tempted to start a blog with a few of my more out-there predictions & observations - I've got a half dozen posts already written up and saved. But I want to put myself in a position where I can capitalize on the new trends first. Markets are fun because you can literally bet on your predictions of the future. :-)

It's a collection in one place of my previous posts - there is nothing at all new here ;)

What exactly is your definition of "mobile"? I usually find it helpful when an author sets up a definition of key terms at the outset of an argument.

> When we say 'mobile' we don't mean mobile, just as when we said 'PCs' we didn't mean ‘personal’. ‘Mobile’ isn't about the screen size or keyboard or location or use. Rather, the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android, with 10x the scale of ‘Wintel’, will become the new centre of gravity throughout computing. This means that ‘mobile’ devices will take over more and more of what we use ‘PCs’ for, gaining larger screens and keyboards, sometimes, and more and more powerful software, all driven by the irresistible force of a much larger ecosystem, which will suck in all of the investment and innovation.

So if I'm reading this correctly, "mobile" means devices running on simpler hardware and software than traditional desktops or laptops, but running increasingly powerful applications? Regardless of their size and mobility?

And the scale in terms of number of devices in the market will drain investment and innovation away from larger, more powerful hardware and operating systems?

Thanks for writing this up. Just trying to make sure I understand your theses.

"the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android"

Read point 3 and the link below.

TL;DR:

The number of cars on the road is growing much faster than trucks, and far more people drive them. Even most truck drivers also own cars and often drive their cars in preference to their trucks. Most ground-transportation-related investments revolve around cars and not trucks, and there are far more car-related products than truck-related products. Therefore trucks will soon be obsolete, and all cargo will be moved with cars.

He's not totally wrong. Mobile is the future. But desktop is also the future, and server, and IoT, and special purpose devices, and hacker devices like the Pi, and smart TVs, and smart cars, and smart appliances, and ...

... and and and and and ...

What's really happening is a great diversification of computing and a massive explosion in the amount of "silicon per capita." The part about "how many electric motors do you own?" is fairly spot on. But he falls down when he tries to push his argument too far and argue that mobile will eclipse desktop/laptop completely and we'll all be staring at 3.5" screens. I will say this until someone shows me a viable port of SolidWorks, Visual Studio, or Revit Architect that is usable on a smartphone. I'm not holding my breath for that.

The only way I see mobile replacing the laptop/PC is either some breakthrough in interaction metaphor (VR? AR that is really useful? brainwaves? who knows) or a mobile device that converts into a desktop when you plug a monitor into it and pair it with a keyboard. It would also have to be capable of being used with as much versatility as a PC, which would mean significant evolution of mobile OSes. Personally I doubt convergence... because why? Silicon is so cheap there is no economic driver for anyone to invest the development necessary for mobile to "swallow PC." It's cheaper and easier to just use two separate devices and let them deeply specialize and optimize for their respective roles. A car/truck convertible is possible too, but the result would probably be an oversized gas guzzler car with poor handling that converts into a shitty underpowered truck with poor capacity.

I also think he's wrong about mobile being the center of gravity. Mobile devices are dumb terminals for accessing the cloud. If there's an emerging new "sun" to replace the PC it's the cloud, not mobile. Increasingly I use both PCs with their big monitors and keyboards and mobile devices to access common cloud resources.

Couldn't agree more with all of your observations.

I agree that cloud is currently the center of the ecosystem, and will be over the short term. Data is the blood and the cloud is the heart that stores and pumps that blood. Will become increasingly important as silicon per capita ratio increases and people look to analyze data for optimization purposes.

As another poster commented, a paradigm shift in I/O (VR/AR?) will drive the next surge in productivity as new tech adopts to a better/faster way to get it to do what we want.

Tangential but:

As a cyberpunk hippie who thinks people should own their data and control their computers (personal comput-ing regardless of form factor), that's why I focus mostly on the transport and the cloud. The cloud is where your data mostly lives today and probably will live even more in the future, and having private transport envelopes to get that data to and from your multiple devices is key. In the long term I'm excited about personal cloud devices and homomorphic encryption, which would enable your own cloud resources to be hosted in commodity cloud data centers without compromising security. The next "PC" will really be a kind of amorphous blob of silicon orbiting cloud resources linked by an encrypted communication envelope.

You'll be able to access all that from a variety of different I/O devices: things with big monitors and keyboards, things with little screens and touch panels, refrigerators, cars, thermostats, etc.

Thing is, homomorphic encryption is expensive in terms of time and computing power. I can't see it being implemented for the majority of consumer grade data, which will probably continue to be mined by large corporations and governments in exchange for "free" hardware, software, apps, etc. Financial data, medical data, VIP data, crypto-junkie data - I think there's a strong use case there.

The guys developing enigma said they'd be putting out another paper at the end of the summer but I didn't see anything...any insights into what's going on over there?

I follow it a bit. Right now we know that it's theoretically possible but it's very slow, too slow for uses other than maybe very niche things.

In the next five years I fully expect to see an acceptably fast implementation that will broaden use to the application areas you mention: high security stuff and crypto junkies.

At that point is where things will get interesting. To make homomorphic crypto really fast will take custom silicon. As soon as I see acceptably fast software homomorphic, I expect to see either a startup or one or more projects inside big companies very quickly pop up with the goal of producing either homomorphic silicon to pair with an existing CPU or -- more interestingly -- a CPU that computes homomorphically as its native mode of operation. That could get interesting.

I predict that by 2030 you will be able to spin up a 100% "blind" sealed VM in the cloud for <$20/month that is fast enough to run what can run on an average cloud instance today.

All compute doesn't have to be homomorphic to get the benefits. You only really need it for encryption, decryption, key generation, authentication, and indexing of security critical data. Boilerplate stuff can be done in the clear. By 2030 standard cleartext compute will be so cheap I wonder if cloud providers will even bother charging for it below very large levels.

Edit: can't make this any deeper but to reply to your reply:

I'm not sure. I think that's up in the air. Right now you can do a whole lot with a small cloud instance with <1gb RAM and 20gb local storage. Software bloat seems to be increasing less rapidly than it was 10 years ago, and there are even movements toward more efficient languages today. So I just have to shrug on that one. We'll see.

Well the one thing I would push back on is...how useful will the computing power of the average cloud instance today be in 2030?

Read the whole thing. There are some well developed points near the end, but i feel many of these premises are fundamentally flawed. For example, that mobile devices will gain keyboards and become our primary computers.

Mobile is for content consumption, workstations are for content creation. Missing that key point leads many of the points here astray. Solving the disparity is one of the major open areas in HCI research.

i quit reading on topic two. that's just some uninformed musings of someone who probably call themselves "tweeters" (and here you saw some uninformed musings on the same level you'd find there. so meta)

Yeah this was what killed me after topic two:

> But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop, not ‘mobile’, and their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.

Smartphones are mostly used when I'm sitting next to a laptop... are they? Not in my experience.

The PC has the limited cut-down version of the internet? Again... complete opposite of every experience I've had.

Even if were true that people use their phone more at home than when they are out-and-about, I wonder how much those metrics are skewed by the restrictions of data plans. Companies gouge hard for data, and we've been conditioned to use wifi whenever possible, and avoid those data limits!

Yeah... to me, most websites on my phone feel so constrained and clunky where they feel smooth and effortless on my desktop. Even most native apps feel constrained and clunky, probably because a lot of companies take the easy way out and just... re-create their website as a native app. Facebook and Twitter sort of do it right, but even then when I run across a link that somebody has posted and it leads me to a website not optimized for mobile it totally breaks the whole experience.

I am about as partisan a supporter of desktop computing as anyone. I am utterly biased toward both consumption and creation using desktop-grade accouterments—very large screens, full size keyboards, mice, etc. To my mind, mobile devices are a stop-gap measure that suffice when I am indeed mobile. I don't (yet) expect my mobile device to project a 50 inch display and provide a solid tactile keyboard.

However, on that point made by the linked author, I do agree that mobile devices see far too much usage while situated in front of a desktop PC. In fact, I have ranted about this several times, addressing the specific matter in a blog entry from 2012 [1].

I feel there are two problems:

* Desktop computing has suffered from about a decade of lethargy and technological indolence. 4K monitors represent the first forward motion of note in a long time. For a non-trivial number of people, their desktop computing environment is inferior to their mobile device. Many people still aren't using 4K or better on the desktop; many people haven't upgraded their processor or their memory in a very long time; many people still use spinning hard drives.

* Today's common cloud model of computing leads to a disappointingly fractured multi-device lifestyle where we find ourselves drawn to interact with our mobile devices even when sitting at a desktop PC. Technologies such as Continuum and Handoff are a meager simulacrum of what we should have. I've been waiting for the advent of a computing model I call PAO, wherein applications are personal and where singular instances are made omnipresent across all of your devices. I believe we'll eventually get to something akin to that, though probably with a lot less control in the hands of the user than I'd like.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/i-see-the-problem

It's all about the I/O.

Mobile's Achilles' heel is that touchscreens can't be The One True Interface. Finger touches are too vague, involve covering up too much of the screen while you do it, and involve too much imprecision to be the only input. In a nutshell, despite what your initial analysis might indicate, a touchscreen interface is getting too many fewer bits than a conventional desktop, especially as conventional desktops and notebooks grow touchscreens. Voice still seems to be having a hard time covering the gap, making for good demos but definitely having a hard time breaking out in general (i.e., note how you still have to invoke voice on your phone, it is not fluent).

They especially can't be the One True Interface on a phone's screen.

Barring some breakthrough, I actually think what we have now is what we have for the next 5-10 years. Yes, there's a lot more mobile apps to be written, and the numbers for mobile are going to continue to climb, but I think they've largely done their damage to desktops and notebooks now. See how the luster of tablets has also faded.

(The next breakthrough will be phones being able to practically take over notebooks entirely, but despite the steady stream of prototypes we're not seeing any traction. It seems to be hard for a mobile OS to take over all duties of a desktop and it seems to be hard to jam a desktop OS on to a mobile. And it's not strictly speaking the OS, but the app model, security model, monetization model, etc. There's a lot of subtle conflicts between those two worlds right now. I think the instinctive closing of the ecosystems is a big problem here. Note how we're still klunking along with things like Chromecast, where in a truly open ecosystem we ought to simply have a generic display protocol that our phones could both produce AND consume. There's still this deeply foundational idea on all sides that they are the master. Why can't I use my phone or tablet as another laptop screen? Why can't I use my laptop screen as an adjunct to my phone? Why is all my IO hardware so, so very stuck to the hardware that happens to be in them? Is that not a step backwards from the desktop world itself? Answer: Nobody can make any money from standards open enough to solve this problem; if the hardware isn't the "master", it's not making money. The mobile world needs a heaping helping of free software, but it's not clear how to get it there.)

Did you read any of his linked articles? The smartphone use comment is backed by market research. And his PC internet comment is addressed in the same article, describing the additional capabilities of smartphone internet over PC internet.

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mob...

Can't speak for parent, but I didn't even realize those were links until someone else in this thread pointed it out to me. I'll try to avoid turning this into an aesthetics vs usability rant, but gray text on a gray background with no underlining doesn't seem like a great choice to me.

Incidentally, I have no trouble distinguishing the nice black underlined link in your post here on HN. =P

I hadn't read that. I was probably too dismissive of the claim and the distribution of phone usage was definitely not what I'd expected it'd be. Still I'd question the language of the original article. Saying that "smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop" isn't quite true to the data in that article. It suggests the person has equal access to a smartphone and a laptop but picks the smartphone because it's a strictly better experience. A lot of the at home phone use they're seeing in that study is coming from people who have just a smart phone. Which is really the beauty of smartphones, it covers all your basic needs in 1 device. But I'm not quite ready to believe that smart phones have some better version of the internet and that's why people like them.

This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to their laptop for a variety of reasons:

- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else

- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop

- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the weather

- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone

I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity / portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if you don't have wifi access.

There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this "reversed" review of the Macbook Pro: http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-re...

Casual gaming and internet banking work better on the smartphone for me, but that must be because we f-up somehow... :(

Mobile is not the future of the internet Ubiquity is; in a sense, internet is not mobility but stationary; people interact with the internet when they are mostly still in their bodies, sitting on the bus, driving their cars, not "mobile"; cell networks allow for talking and walking, but using the internet while walking or moving is generally handled not by the user but by the bots; that being said, I am being a creative dissenter, for the benefit of all beings and I <3 u

Good wishes

...their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.

I honestly can't think of a single way in which that's true, and he doesn't seem to provide any examples either.

Mobile has accurate location, your address book, accelerometer & other sensors, and above all: portability.

Yup. Mobile has a camera, video support, NFC, bluetooth. While these are technically usable on a laptop, they're not very useful since they're much less mobile.

Cell connectivity and the ability to access internet anytime, almost anywhere trumps the limitations of a smaller form factor. And mobile device browsing speed keeps increasing every generation.

He links to three articles with probably 15,000 words explaining that point, right under the paragraph.

Basically his point is that your phone comes with a camera, GPS, and persistent internet connection. Your desktop may have a webcam that is annoying to point around the room. The internet is fundamentally more useful when you have it all the time and the services you are using have an idea of where you are.

Hah, ok fair point about the articles. I had no idea those were even links. Grey text with no underline or mouseover so I scanned right past them.

Maybe I really am a relic of the desktop era...

Same here. I figured they were keywords or the kind of thought you jot down quickly to research more later.

I stopped reading at "Mobile is the future".

Everytime I hear this, its from a clueless manager that saw that most traffic comes from mobile so decided we should put more ads on mobile. They don't realize that the over all traffic is still the same.

Mobile is the future is what made every news outlet create their own app and force you to download on each page view.

> They don't realize that over all traffic is still the same.

They do, which means that mobile traffic is increasing while PC traffic is decreasing. i.e. Optimize for mobile.

Except that Benedict Evans is not a clueless manager, he's an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz. Everything he writes is worth a read, a lot of it is really insightful. Seems like it's your loss to stop after the first 3 sentences.

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