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Comment by izolate | Hacker News Reader

Desktop is dead? I'm not surprised a "mobile software consultant" would say something so ridiculous.

I visited a place with a "desktop is dead" / "mobile is the next everything" message a while back. Couldn't help but notice all the desktops. Nobody was doing their work on a mobile device.

The boat people are totally missing is this: sure, mobile is growing like crazy, but what we're seeing isn't the death of PC. What we're seeing is the filling out and explosive diversification of the computing ecosystem. The future isn't a "next platform," it's a whole ecosystem of devices serving specialized functions or function domains. For PC that's "personal computing" -- doing "big" stuff and "real work." For mobile that's mostly communications along with navigation, etc., the sort of thing you want an ultraportable micro-communicator for.

I own a tablet, a smart phone, and a laptop, and of the three the tablet is probably the one I could do without. The smart phone and the laptop are used constantly. But the tablet is nice for reading and note taking.

This is exactly my feeling as well. I would take a huge productivity hit without a phone, or without a laptop. I would mostly miss my tablet on plane rides. I would love to see more data on this though, because I wonder if most non-HNers feel the same way.

I'd say of the three losing the laptop would be the worst. I would be unable to do any of my work at all, and the comm functions of the phone could technically be made up by the laptop and a dumb phone.

Laptop: essential like indoor plumbing

Phone: very useful, major time-saver, but could live without

Tablet: nice for reading but dispensable

Tablets are the only endangered class that I see. They occupy an uncanny valley: too small and restrictive for what you do on laptops, too big to be as portable as a smart phone.

Yes, there are certain work products (code, for example) that still can only reasonably be done on desktop/laptop computers. But the list of work products that require a desktop/laptop are dwindling, not growing.

Printers are a good analogy. Look around most any office and note that the number of printers has drastically decreased. This is a sign of work products changing - i.e., people don't need to print out as much stuff on paper to get our jobs done. The same is happening with desktop/laptops now. It's industry specific currently but the trend is clear.

Web browsing outside of tech circles us predominately a phone-based activity or on the verge of becoming one (it depends on whether you consider app interaction like facebook to be a web browsing style activity or not). The point of the article is that you have to build for your market, and for most web designers that means not just mobile, but phone.

Hi! I'm the post author. Desktop is dead in the way TV and newspapers are dead. Yes, they're still around but there's no growth. They certainly shouldn't be the main focus for a web developer building a personal site from scratch.

I think that's a poor analogy. Desktop isn't dead at all. It's very much live in the way farming and electricity generation are alive -- very important and critical but not growing rapidly. It's a "mature" market.

Part of why "desktop is dead" is a big meme in the valley comes from the fact that the valley is dominated by big-money venture capital. To VC, anything not growing at double digit rates simply does not exist.

BTW... I do wonder if we'll see another leg of desktop growth at some point in the future as the developing world becomes more developed and starts wanting to do more of the things people do on desktops...? We might indeed be in an era when "mobile first" describes the order of computing device adoption by a culture.

Really? Considering Apple sold 5.5 million Macs last quarter, I'm not sure your claim that there's no growth holds water. If anything, the trend seems to be people using laptops (which are desktops) and smartphones, while tablets are stagnating. The advice to not focus on the desktop is just bad. You need to build for both.

What I said in the article was that most devs should have had time to do both, BUT if they really had to pick one, pick mobile. I'm not saying ignore desktop - I'm saying it's the #2 priority.

I would argue that it depends heavily on what is being built. Building a nice informational site with simple actions? Mobile first makes sense. Building a very complicated enterprise management tool? Your target audience is going to overwhelmingly be on laptops/desktops. yes, optimize for your audience, but that audience isn't necessarily mobile.

How well does the "mobile-first" solution work on a Nokia N95 browser? (let's not forget that not everyone visiting a webapp is doing so from latest version of Chrome, FF, Safari, Opera, etc.).

While I understand your concern, it feels misplaced given the context (Rails Rumble). Of course. Unless it is a front-end heavy hackathon, it is only natural that the business problem being solved has more weight that whether or not the site is functional on mobile.

I do agree with the general sentiment that we should consider mobile. But desktop isn't dead. (I assume you probably didn't write your submission on your phone).

Maybe not for a personal site, but for an web application, definitely. I mean, just look at your own site. It was made "mobile first" and as a result, looks like a blown-up mobile site on desktop. Now imagine how horrid a fully-fledged web application would look if it followed similar design principles.

Now imagine how horrid a fully-fledged web application would look if it followed similar design principles.

You mean it would have large, clear text, with links that are easy to click because they're not this >< close to the link next to them? Perish the thought!

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