Comment by Fokamul
2 months ago
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
> Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
Sad, but true. Recent batch of new hires where I work, same age range - mid-late 20's, none of them have computers at home except their work issued laptop. They are by far the biggest source of help desk tickets for us, and same story as you, using phone & iPad for everything at home.
Honestly concerns me for talent recruitment in the future, if AI isn't doing everything tech when that time comes - kids only tech experiences now are fully locked down walled gardens, takes away both the ability and incentive to tinker, explore, or even troubleshoot. Whole generation of new workers coming in without even the most basic of troubleshooting/problem solving skills. Have a few at my work where even just reading an error message on the screen seems overwhelming to them.
I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.
Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.
My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.
Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.
Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.
Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.
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>That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Whoa interesting, so everyone is using 3rd party company service, is it paid service or free, I've checked their website and cannot understand if it's free or not for this basic level you've mentioned.
In my country, if this was a thing, that you must pay some company to file your taxes, it would probably cause public meltdown and end of any current government :)
Here, basic level taxes are done by your employer for you, by law, for free. Because actually they don't do taxes, but they only report amount of tax advances, social security, healthcare paid by your employer, to state, (all 3 is required by law to be paid and you or your employer have big legal problems if not). And also variables for tax deduction and then "something like IRS" will just send you tax return into your account.
And for any other cases(if you have more sources of income, eg.: salary + self-employed / rent) you must do taxes yourself, website for helping you to file taxes, is managed by state agency, for free.
Or you pay some money to "tax specialist" to file your taxes for you and liability to file it right goes after them (something like accountant, but hired only for this one task)
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> But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
Well no, the UI on a phone is severely dumbed down because it has to work with a smaller screen and touch input. You can do the same stuff, sometimes, but with more effort.
Like, I could program on my phone, if I wanted. But that would suck major ass. It has the same capabilities, but certainly nowhere near the convenience. Even just running two things at once. It's... possible... on an iPhone. But it's not a desktop with split screen. And, if it can do split screen, I really have to squint, right?
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Personally if I am going to spend more than $100 I am going to comparison shop and I like having multiple windows open to do it in.
Opening a specific airline's app and just getting whatever they have on offer is completely foreign to me. I would think I am getting cheated.
Also, federal taxes may be easy but the only way to free-file the state tax is to do it directly with the state and that means filling out a form myself.
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> 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Why even pay TurboTax if you're just taking the standard deduction and have only W2 income? Might as well just paper file for free. Anything more complex than that, and having a desktop monitor and full size keyboard is very useful. I can imagine even filling out 5 stock trades in TurboTax on a phone would be quite painful.
> Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
This one bit me recently as I did some traveling. None of the major airline apps even work on my phone anymore. Their developers all just up and decided to block use of their app on older phones with full-screen modals preventing the software from working. My only choice is to buy a new phone or do my flight booking on a desktop. Mobile apps are an absolute shit show unless you have a <= 5 year old phone.
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Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Yes, top of the list, it shows :)
Latops and desktops, it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though. Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Linux is used only by IT people, friends cannot switch because they play MP games with invasive Anticheat running on kernel.
Personally, I'm only switching people to Linux if they cannot afford new PC because of Win11 upgrade. Zorin OS usually.
Wild. I had no idea you can do this in continental Europe. I found this map on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11qkksb/concealed_c...
are you talking about Czech Republic ?
College students will have laptops or a laptop-like device.
I’m curious to know the country, if you don’t mind sharing. I thought these EU letters of happiness are a real deal.