Comment by dzdt
1 year ago
The future of personal computing is being dictated by the economics of it, which are that the optimal route to extract value from consumers is to have walled-garden software systems gated by per-month subscription access and/or massive forced advertising. This leads to everything being in the cloud and only fairly thin clients running on user hardware. That gives the most control to the system owners and the least control to the user.
Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.
I've heard so many "The future of personal computing" statements that haven't come true, so I don't take much stock in them.
I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)
> Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.
IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.
> we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)
We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
> Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time
I would say most kinds of work.
Even if you're just on teams discussions - a real keyboard is much more productive than messing around on a touchscreen. Same with just reading. Sometimes I read a forum thread on my phone and then when I get back to the real computer I'm surprised how little I read and how much it felt like.
The only thing where I don't see this being the case is creative work like drawing where a tablet is really perfect, much better than a wacom or something.
Well, the MacBook Air is pretty much an iPad that swapped its touchscreen for a keyboard (and trackpad).
> I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".
I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.
I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet.
The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with.
(Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)
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> (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)
I think that's to generative AI, I would expect people to gradually replace manually creating a spreadsheet with 'vibecoding' it.
> IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.
ChromeOS already works like that, when you log in on different devices, without having to physically lug one device around that you plug into different shells.
I know many people where that is exactly the case, not everyone is doing spreadsheets or coding.
Also I haven't owned a desktop since 2003, and my last one at work was in 2006, although we may debate laptops with docking station are also desktops.
In software development, "desktop" is synonymous with laptop.
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> (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)
Desktop LibreOffice works fine on my Librem 5 phone.
I think this is a really good take - Apple especially (but Google too) aren't gonna naturally invest time and resources into software that'll make you less likely to buy more of their hardware.
That said, market incentives can and do change pretty fast. Especially with climate change, and current tension in global supply chains, we could see a shift away from hardware caused by taxes or pirce hikes (I'm not saying we will though).
That'd be a game changer for how much companies might invest in changing what computing looks like.