Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.
Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.
No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?
Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone doesn't support it.
A cheap notebook is also a much lower barrier to entry - in order to have your own droplet, you need to know how to set up a cloud machine and connect to it properly. That's not trivial knowledge to a newbie (nor is it relevent, unless they're coding for servers), even though us old hands can do it in our sleep. Similarly, you need a way to pay for for the online subscription.
Mind you, I learnt to program BASIC before I had reliable access to a computer too, so I programmed on paper. I wouldn't reccomend it for any but the most determined student.
For the foreseeable future, the guy with the laptop and phone will be able to do more than the guy with just the phone.
And any person with six monitors stacked, a nice keyboard, a mouse, an office chair, large desk, dedicated office phone, large screen TV, new gaming console, cup full of pens and a pad of paper (all these are technologies) plus a laptop and a smart phone will probably tell you the people in developing countries are missing out if they want to experience what he experiences, let alone compete with him. This is why all that stuff is still on the market, and people are really pessimistic and fearful about whatever weird plans Apple has for an iOS/OSX merger.
With that said, I'd argue that selling at these (absurdly) low prices is creating a new market segment. I guess I wanted to express my concern at dismissing the part of the population that "don't use more than a smart phone". They exist!
But will that always be the case, especially when the "next Netflix" comes around?
I'm in the same boat as you, everyone I know has both a laptop and/or desktop as well as a smartphone and possibly tablet.
However, less and less of these people I know are buying new laptops/PCs because for the average person... why do they need those?
I said "What do you mean?"
"Computers, I didn't know anyone used computers anymore."
I also believe the market for content producers that need general purpose computing devices is bigger than ever, and growing. It's just that it's being eclipsed by the market of content consumers. Plus upgrade cycles have gotten much longer, 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine. And speaking of phones, dumb phones are dead, the smartphone is the new norm, yet how many smartphone users are heavy Internet and apps users? I bet it's not that many.
Especially content producers can easily use up all hardware enhancements for rendering and such, so they do appreciate a newer machine.
Producing content doesn't necessarily mean 3D rendering. It can mean just writing Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents.
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