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The current state of the art in QC is more like Alan Kay's Dynabook paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

i.e. even the "very crude attempts" stage (your Newtons or Palm Pilots) is still science fiction.

> I recall that the iPhone/iPad were preceded by attempts at tablet computing that were very crude in comparison.

That's a very poor analogy. Here we are talking about stuff that is not even functional, technology wise.

Poor poor analogy, but at least you get the picture.

They are talking 15- and 17-qubit-capable processors today, but are looking at 50-qubit ones in a few years.

The key question is whether QC algorithms are scaling as predicted by QC theory, or at least better than classical algorithms for the same task. If the error correction is causing them to scale poorly, the design is probably infeasible for large-qubit calculations.

I expect it is scaling poorly, or IBM would have reported otherwise when moving from 5- to 16-qubit machines.

That sounds right, but also like an argument against commercial availability just yet in my ears.