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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

How wrong was Gates though? Maybe it's generational, but I wouldn't want to edit homework or a movie on the screen. I vastly prefer chatting and composing emails on desktop or a laptop. I primarily use my phone for exactly the 5 things he lists. I get the overall point, but he wasn't so wrong.

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But he also wasn’t entirely right.

Take Uber, before cell phones, you could never invent Uber. Sure taxis exist, but the idea that you can call a taxi to your physical body’s location without talking to anyone would be ridiculous. Oh and this payment is automatic, and the car has automatically been sent realtime turn by turn directions that update in real time due to traffic conditions or missed turns.

Jobs knew to shut up and let people invent. Gates said they know the “exact 5 things” people use.

Edit: not to mention all the associated tech like better traffic conditions due to the aggregation of every drivers location 24/7

Millions of people edit videos on tiktok and IG. It's the biggest video editing software in the world

I have a close friend, who's an Azure dev -- uses his MS laptop for work, his phone for everything else. And I do mean everything - taxes, trip planning, etc.

It's not just crazy kids who "know nothing but phones". Even engineers.

That said, phones operate too much like appliances. I will not give up my Mac.

It makes me very sad that this is true, simply due to the crippling limitations imposed by a cell phone and the implications of this trend gaining so much traction. I feel so claustrophobic and handicapped doing anything remotely complex on my iPhone. I would always rather wait until I can sit and pull my MacBook out of my backpack.

It's so depressingly hard though. I have a 65" screen mounted portrait to edit my TikToks, but the problem is that a lot of the features in editors these days, like CapCut, are only available in the mobile apps, so I have to sit there for the final step, with my phone, hacking away at the screen just to get the captions right.

A new high end cell phone is much faster and capable than the majority of computers I've owned, with a higher video resolution If I was really interested in doing more work on my cell I could get a keyboard for it and use the stylus I have in it even more.

I'm sure in the past people would have never expected a phone to be so powerful. And we should revere AI in the same way. Might not do much now, but that could/can change very rapidly.

He wasn't, but he didn't show Jobs' humility. Jobs could have given the same answer; he was no less visionary than Gates. This interview was from 2007. Apple started work on tablets (the Newton) in 1987, when they ran ads like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

Is that vid an example of his visionariness? Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985.

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