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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> any proof that they are indeed bleeding users more than what is deemed normal?

They are, but not to other OSes. More and more people associate computers with something you use for work (and work provides) or for school (and school provides). All personal computing happens on a phone.

My partner, for example, uses her personal laptop about once a year to do taxes. Otherwise it sits in the closet.

Even I use an iPad for most personal work these days. Laptop is mostly for personal coding projects for which I have less and less time as life adultifies.

I know a lot of people who don’t even have a personal computer anymore and just use the work laptop the few times their phone isn’t good enough.

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> All personal computing happens on a phone

This makes me sad, and is scary, etc. However, putting emotions aside, can we extrapolate from this? Could the next "killer app" actually be an even tinier device? A smartwatch? Or have we reached a local extremum (phones)? And what does that say about attempts to regress towards larger screens (AR/VR headsets)?

Phones dominate not because of screen size but because the operating systems they run are fundamentally more user friendly. iOS/Android were the first time experienced OS engineers were able to go back to the drawing board and rethink the whole stack from scratch. They learned a lot of lessons from what worked and what didn't on generalized desktop computers and were able to build something people prefer using.

That's a rare opportunity. I hope someone gets a chance to do it for professional workstation computing one day. The Windows codebase has IMHO reached end-of-life. The Linux community isn't going to stray far outside the bounds of the 1970s era UNIX design. Apple does OK but they can't/won't change the macOS UI in any meaningful way and not enough people write native Mac apps to justify trying to do anything interesting there. ChromeOS is basically just a large screen smartphone OS experience with some Linux virtualization on the side. We're caught in a local minima.

It's mostly screen size... Life happens, and of the two, the phone is the one with you. Wherever I go, i carry my phone, but not my laptop. I take pictures with it, so they're stored there. I take screenshots, and share stuff with friends, gets saved on my phone. I browse on the phone on the bus/subway wherever. Browser history gets saved there, opened tabs, etc.

Bringing photos, saved stuff to computer all takes an extra step. For most of the time I need a digital device, the phone is good enough, and most importantly - it's with me. Not just when i get home.

When high productivity is needed, then yes, laptop is king. But if somehow we could have the same productivity on a device, 10x smaller that I can carry with me, why wouldn't I start doing everything on that device? That's why smartphone is king.

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