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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with someone solidly in Gen X that described their desire to write out longer form documents by hand on paper rather than typing them up. The process of typing helped them work through the content better than typing.

In an analogous way, I feel like I'm in that part of the millennial generation that is more comfortable doing things on a PC than on a phone. Sure I can informally browse airline tickets and cars on my phone, or upload some docs for my , but when things get serious, I'm switching to a PC to complete it.

There's something about doing things on a phone that just does not feel... robust? Maybe I am just too accustomed to the phone experience being minimal, or minimized in some way compared to the desktop experience.

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I don't think it's generational at all, doing things on a phone is pretty objectively less comfortable.

It's generational in the sense that younger generations are far more accustomed to using phones than computers. They might not even be exposed to a computer until they need to use one for school. It's objectively less comfortable for them to use a computer when they never (or barely) used a mouse, physical keyboard, or any of that software before.

You can even see the same with games. All these kids growing up playing games on their iPads are really good at using those crappy touchscreen controls to play. Do you think they'd find using a physical controller comfortable? Maybe after a lot of practice, but why switch if you're already good at using the touch controls?

If true, then it's just unfamiliarity, not comfort. A bigger screen and bigger buttons are a pretty objective upgrade. "Why switch if you're already good at using touch controls" - because you assume it could be better? It not obstructing vision and being more precise is a good enough argument to try it out.

Although personally still not used to controllers. I mostly play FPS so that's only KB+M.

> It not obstructing vision and being more precise is a good enough argument to try it out.

An iPad has a big enough screen to not really obstruct anything important. It should be no less precise than a controller since it typically mimics the same joystick and buttons you'd have on a controller.

Having to carry a controller around is going to have a big impact on comfort.

First - why are you singling out Apple devices? Most kids who do have tablets are probably using something cheaper, it's not like a tween can be trusted with a device this expensive. And second - a lot more kids have phones than tablets, so the difference for a lot of people is still there.

My daughter didn't really grow up using a desktop computer, though she would see my wife and I do that often enough.

She prefers a phone, but has difficulty even doing most of the things you or I would want to accomplish. It is mysterious to her, because the phone makes it difficult and sometimes even nearly impossible, and so she acts like that is impossible. When the google screen only shows you two results, you give up if there's no clear answer in two results. When the phone screen shows 20 words on it, you think reading 1500 words is an ordeal. Cluttered pages not quite fixed with adblock can have the clutter ignored on a large monitor, but when there is no adblock and the screen is 3 inches wide, the clutter drowns out the signal completely.

Phones may be an entire computer, but they are a deliberately crippled computer that makes reading text input difficult, writing text input even more difficult, and makes thinking most difficult of all.

Phones are to computers what Twitter was to blogs.

My friend wrote her bachelor’s thesis on her iPhone. There’s an entire generation of ‘digital natives’ that are computer illiterate.

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