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Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

There is one hole in this line of thought. All of those mobile devices, all of the "social spaces": where do they get planned, designed, and programmed? On desktops.

Until we have a mobile device powerful enough that you could use it to build applications for itself, we're not going to see the full feedback loop of better tools leading to better apps leading to better tools.

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> where do they get planned, designed, and programmed?

In 2000 or so, I was developing things with Zope. Most of what we did was through the web and it was quite a shocking experience to have almost nothing on my desktop. While Zope development has shifted to filesystem, there are other platforms that took the through-the-web idea and ran with it.

And, BTW, if you give me a terminal, I can run Emacs just about everywhere. Version 22 even runs on VMS.

Why is this a "hole"? One could argue that while such a feedback loop was necessary when computers first appeared, it may not be necessary in a world where computers are ubiquitous.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that PCs will vanish. Mainframes, after all, are certainly beyond their golden age yet they are still in use today.

Moreover, the penetration of PCs does not need to decrease in order for them to be eclipsed by something else.

Is anyone saying that PCs are going to disappear? This seems to be a common response to this sort of article. I think instead more and more people will rely on their mobile devices, while plenty will still use PCs.

Most of the mobile devices are, in fact, powerful enough to develop for themselves, what they lack is mostly decent input ergonomics and redesigned UIs for the tools. (And in Apple's and a few other companies' cases, they have an excess of lockdown.), but that's not really the point.

I'll be using my laptops for the foreseeable future (seriously, people still use desktops?), but the IBM guy's point is that the mass market is moving on from what we consider "PCs". Geeks will absolutely still have them, other people not so much.

> seriously, people still use desktops?

Hell yes -- my desktop system is orders of magnitude faster than your laptop for development.

What kind of development is that, exactly? I bet your IDE runs just as well on my laptop as on your desktop. Does your company not have a build farm? Why not?

Orders of magnitude? I can believe your desktop is faster than a laptop, but 100x faster seems a stretch. Still, I think there are valid reasons for preferring a desktop. Besides it being faster, you can have bigger screens etc.

I never understood that line of thinking. I have an wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to my MacBook. When I hook up my external monitor I now have two screens, giving me more dekstop area than a single desktop. I don't see why anyone would want a desktop unless they have serious horsepower requirements.

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