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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

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zelon88·

In a way most of these came true.

> Thin clients

The cloud.

> Palm pilots.

Cell phones.

> Windows, Mac, Linux

Windows is still for business/economy. Linux is still for neckbeards. Although Mac is bigger than it was, the same people are still waiting for Apple silicon to catch on.

> Keyboards and mice

Have largely been supplanted by touch or gesture and consumer VR is becoming more and more viable every day.

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Linux did eat the world, in the form of Android and all its variations. Every TV, most cellphones, many game consoles, and even your watch, are all probably running a Linux kernel.

(And there's also ChromeOS, eating the education sector.)

Linux in that case ate the embedded OS world. vxworks and so on. When trying to make a cheap device the OS can become the dominant cost. If it had not been linux it would have been one of the BSDs eventually. In those markets the margin is thin.

Keyboards and mice being supplanted by touch or gesture is only true for phones and tablets, which are new devices that really aren't equivalent to the general computing devices in the 90's: desktops and laptops. If anything, I'd say that tablets are just televisions that became small, light, and interactive, and smart phones are partly that and partly handheld gaming devices with multiplayer capability. Neither are equivalent to a computer (though they have computers built-in.)

Of course, as a software developer, I've always used computers differently than the masses. The computers I need are far more powerful than anything they need.

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