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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

> He said PCs would still be there for work, but most consumers won't own one, just like all vehicles used to be trucks, until people moved to cities and switched to cars, and now some people use trucks but most people use cars.

And I'm thankful every day that he was so wrong. Even though there are bad faith actors encircling the world of electronics and software attempting to turn everything into a walled garden (and succeeding in many cases), the PC lives. Hurrah.

On top of that his analogy makes no sense. By no means were all early cars trucks. Automobiles in cities didn't even really exist in any considerable number until after WWII and the suburban housing boom enabled by exclusionary FHA housing subsidies.

Before cars we all rode the streetcar and train. Open systems that allowed mobility without placing a premium on using your own two feet.

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Is he wrong though? Any of us who operate websites know our traffic numbers. I'd say we have at least 80% of our traffic coming from mobile and tablet.

People are doing all kinds of things on their phones, including applying for jobs and getting government services.

The only thing I think Jobs might have been wrong on is the mix. The smartphone has become so powerful that the mix of smartphones to tablets is probably not what be predicted.

It's been interesting to me to see that despite staying at home all the time due to the corona virus, my smart phone usage hasn't really dropped off. I would have expected to be spending more time on my laptop, but it seems like there is something compelling about the medium.

I have a massive AppleTV about 10ft away from where I’m sitting. Just a few more feet away a kindle and an iPad, and just down the stairs my laptop and PC sitting on my desk. Yet I’ve been squinting at content on my phone the past hour or so. Is it just convenience/laziness?

It’s dopamine

My usage has increased so much I have considered getting a battery case!

I have two young kids at home, so I am doing stuff all the time on my phone. I can use my iPhone to check in on work while giving them a bath or watching them play outside and can give feedback to my team. Our mobile tools have become so powerful that you can get a lot done on them. I have a 5K iMac with 72 GB of ram, but I spend most of my days on a phone or a tablet.

There are roughly 1.5B PCs, half of those are business usage in Office.

There are now closing in to 4B Smartphone users, and about 1B Tablet users.

PC usage isn't really shrinking, Office, Gaming and Productivity are still holding up. But most "consumer" usage has definitely shifted to Post PC.

I remember one keynote where he was talking about slowing PC sales and a huge rise in iPad sales (tablets were relatively new back then). Yet he didn't credit the two most obvious reasons - market saturation (everyone already has a PC) and slowing upgrade cycles - today's PCs are "good enough" for many more years than they used to be, as hardware improvements have stagnated.

Years later, the same kind of slowdown happened with tablets (especially Android tablets which are basically dead, but iPad wasn't completely spared either), and will eventually happen with smartphones as well.

The "we are now in a post-PC era" hype of 2010 (after the iPad's release) has eventually led to many "tablets are dead" articles by 2016.

As a datapoint to support your argument: I bought a new PC in 2020, the one I bought prior to that was in 2013 and it still runs here at home only relegated to server duty as the HW is good enough for that but lags behind for gaming.

I don't know how long I'll be able to run that server for before needing to upgrade something, but I suspect its lifetime is until something catastrophically fails.

2013 PC?! That would be brand new for my folks back home which are using my old gaming PC from 2007 with a Core 2 Quad and 6GB of RAM.

For Web browsing and office work it works flawlessly. One day I'll throw in a cheap SATA SSD that I'll find on sale as the OS drive and it'll be good for even more years.

Oh it was absolutely fine for everyday desktop/office type stuff, if I weren't into gaming I wouldn't have upgraded it at all. It still worked for gaming, but newer games were taking their toll.

Interesting n choice of word. I would say that a smartphone is pretty nice to consume things, but the moment I need to create anything other than a short email it is worth using a real computer.

The only exception that I can come up with right away is drawing, but even taking pictures, well my phone doesn't hold a candle to my DLSR.

Interestingly, when he was asked about walled gardens, he stated his adamant support for full HTML5 capability that would be on par with the app store, so you would always have access to anything you want.

I guess it didn't quite work out that way.

It's funny because we all knew Flash was a scourge on the web and highly inefficient, and we swung so far around in the other direction that now Electron is a scourge on desktop and highly inefficient.

Price of progress I suppose.

Well, web apps are crap on Android too compared to actual native API apps...

And of course they're crap on PC (Electron).

I'd say he is not completely right, yet. Many of my students type up their thesis on their phone (totally crazy to me, but I'm 'old'), and only switch to a laptop to get it into shape/format to turn it in. Give it some time and maybe a household will only have 1 laptop for all inhabitants.

Yes the computer still has a purpose but in my opinion the view on this is a bit blurred when growing up in the western part of the world.

Just take a look at countries like Africa or Cambodia: Most of the people (if not all) own a smartphone and there is a lot of places where you will have a hard time finding a computer.

I tried to use a tablet for work when traveling but it did not take long to spot the drawbacks and buy a real computer to do serious work.

The mobile ecosystems force us to do this because they stop us from unleashing the full potential of these tiny computers.

Imagine something like an iPad that would allow the user to just install any software that this tiny computer can run. Also you should be able to copy and access files from/to any other location on the filesystem. I could use it for most of my daily tasks at work if iOS/iPadOS would not prevent me from using the tablet in that way.

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