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What if our information stayed private and we used our "supercomputers" to do all sorts of data-mining, or AI, or data-science on it? Same stuff the big guys are doing, but for ourselves. Smaller, higher quality datasets.

If our smartphones worked like this, and we'd benefit more from better information, then we'd also have a pretty good reason to develop advanced information-centric UIs and focus a bit more on security and trust.

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That would be wonderful. But I doubt that providers would ever bundle them. So most people would consider them to be too expensive. And so they would die, like Blackberry has.

Smartphones and security don't really go hand-in-hand anyway.

However, I am encouraged by the fact that people paid many thousands of dollars in the '80's and 90's to purchase PC's. They were much harder to use, much less powerful, and yet because these PC's represented either a competitive advantage or a novelty, the price was paid. No Internet, but a heckuva lot more control and trust than now.

If a similar value proposition pops up again, somehow de-commodifying or replacing the standard PC design (smartphone or otherwise), I suspect we'll see a similar willingness to pay a premium.

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