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Comment by msabalau | Hacker News Reader

Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer. Dismissing them as mere refinement of what went before is to ignore the scale of their impact on the world.

One may as well dismiss laptops with modems as "more fully featured telegraphs", or "smaller mainframes".

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Exactly because the smartphone will be the first computer for the next billion users, the points made by the linked article are important.

That argument is not as relevant as evidence of the importance of the invention of the smartphone vs the laptop with a modem.

> Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Nice strawman. This was not at all my point. It's not because something gets market recognition that it's fundamentally new in itself. Most of the time it's simply because the way it's packaged or marketed is more attractive.

> for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Smartphones will be their first and last computer. Laptops, let alone desktops, are being permanently bypassed.

Well, no. There are lots of situation where a tiny screen and no keyboard is laughably insufficient.

>Smartphones will be their first and last computer

No, unfortunately smartphones are toys at best. Nobody uses them for real work, just consumption and browsing facebook. When they go to work, they will use a real computer.

That's just... not accurate. I know lots of people who do real work on smartphones. Hell, I'd be dead a few times by now if I didn't use mine as a radar HUD while photographing tornadoes. (While also using it to report digitally directly to the weather service, and running a GPS tracker so that they both can see me on a map and so that I later can geotag photos taken on cameras that don't have integrated gps). To say nothing of how much I use my phone to take photographic and text notes. Don't make the tremendous mistake of assuming that just because you can't find a use for a smartphone in your line of work that nobody else can or does.

I use my iPhone to collect data for OpenStreetMap. If you ever find yourself in London using an OSM-based map, some chunk of it will likely have been created using my pointless silly Facebook twit-machine.

What defines the PC for ordinary consumers is not the big black box under the desk, though. It's the keyboard, the mouse, the displays.

The smartphone may replace the box, but it won't replace the peripherals. Those will continue to be extremely desireable features for many tasks, because they are far more ergonomic and speed up many types of work.

I predict a smartphone docking station on every desk within 5 years, both at home and at work. Maybe a docking station on every couch, too, tablet form-factor.

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