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Comment by 8ytecoder | Hacker News Reader

Funny you would pick this analogy. I feel like we’re back in the mainframe era. A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection. Even if in practice they execute some of the code on your device, a lot of the data and the heavyweight processing is already happening on the server. Even basic services designed from the ground up to be distributed and local first - like email (“downloading”) - are used in this fashion - like gmail. Maps apps added offline support years after they launched and still cripple the search. Even git has GitHub sitting in the middle and most people don’t or can’t use git any other way. SaaS, Electron, …etc. have brought us back to the mainframe era.

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It's always struck me as living in some sort of bizaro world. We now have these super powerful personal computers, both handheld (phones) and laptops (My M4 Pro smokes even some desktop class processors) and yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...be a dumb terminal to someone else's computer.

I had always hoped we'd do more locally on-device (and with native apps, not running 100 instances of chromium for various electron apps). But, it's hard to extract rent that way I suppose.

I don't even understand why computer and phone manufacturers even try to make their devices faster anymore, since for most computing tasks, the bottleneck is all the data that needs to be transferred to and from the modern version of the mainframe.

Consumers care about battery life.

And providers count their capacity in Giga-watts.

Also when a remote service struggle I can switch to do something else. When a local software struggles it brings my whole device to its knees and I can't do anything.

Yet manufacturers give us thinner and thinner phones every year (instead of using that space for the battery), and make it difficult to swap out batteries which have degraded.

> make it difficult to swap out batteries which have degraded.

That's the part that pisses me off the most. They all claim it's for the IP68, but that's bullshit. There's plenty of devices with removable backs & batteries that are IP68.

My BlackBerry bold 9xxx was 10mm thin. the iPhone 17 Pro Max is 8.75. You aren't going to notice the 1.3mm of difference, and my BlackBerry had a user replaceable battery, no tools required just pop off the back cover.

The BlackBerry was also about 100 grams lighter.

The non-user removable batteries and unibody designs are purely for planned obsolescence, nothing else.

There are often activities that do require compute though. My last phone upgrade was so Pokemon Go would work again, my friend upgrades for the latest 4k video or similar.

What's truly wild when you think about it, is that the computer on the other end is often less powerful than your personal laptop.

I access websites on a 64gb, 16 core device. I deploy them to a 16gb, 4 core server.

Yes, but your computer relies on dozens (hundreds?) of servers at any given time.

yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...animate liquid glass

I think people have been finding more compelling use cases for the fact that information systems can be multi-player now than for marginal FLOPS. Client-server is just a very effective way of organizing multi-player information systems.

> A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection

Or even physical things like mattresses, according to discussions around the recent AWS issues.

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