Comment by j1elo
5 days ago
I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.
I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference:
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
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For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.
I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered.
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
Use an iPhone or Macbook Pro, pay more.
Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them.
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
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This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!
It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.
Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
I hope you don't think booking travel ends with the flights. There's so much more to getting the most out of a trip than the flight, or the hotel.
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There's a book out there (I don't remember the author, title, or anything really) written by a guy who traveled around the world, over several years, in a VW bus(?). The thing that struck me is, he got home within a couple days of when he planned to, before he even took off. The entire trip was planned.
I find it so charming that people from the first world just assume that unplanned trips are the norm, and coming back as per expectation is can sometimes be surprising (even if it's a very long trip).
Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.
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Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don't do "research work". Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other "research" requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)
I feel exactly the same way. There are personal finance management softwares that are mobile exclusive.
Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?
I'm with you, but I guess users don't care (and I really don't get it).
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
The camera on the back of the phone actually helps quite a bit with said data entry.
I normally ingest csv files exported from my bank - then have to manually tag and relate them (like internal transfers).
I have a bunch of scripts to help and wrote a custom web scraper to pull the data, automating much of this, but much is still quite manual.
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The vast majority of people.
People use computers, just not Macs. Which is a shame because it feels like where Apple has the largest advantage compared to their competitors, being that high end Android phones are rather nice and the barrier to making a good tablet is quite low but a laptop is a whole different ball game, and Apple is far ahead of the rest.
Or rather not buying laptops as often as phone. 2015 Mac or other premium laptop is good enough for internet surfing.
I bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s not an uncommon pattern for non-programmers who aren’t gamers.
they will pry my 2014 MBP from my cold dead fingers
You don't really have to buy a new laptop every year though. If it wasn't for my work provided laptop I'd still use my 2015 mbp
I still use my thinkpad from 2012. It runs fine with Linux on it, i had to replace the hdd and some other parts but otherwise it’s holding up. Granted I only do very simple stuff on it, no dev work, video or gaming. Mostly browser, reading, writing, music and chatting
You don’t have to buy a phone every year either
Perhaps a lot of people use their "work computer".
Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?
You don't need a lot of space to see everything, because you can store information in your memory.
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I get the feeling that people don't do research work. They buy whatever is affordable that gets advertised to them first. They can't even tell the difference between ads and search results. Their devices are primarily for media consumption and they create little if anything. They have zero need for most of the computing power their devices offer, could get by just fine on a phone from 10 years ago if it were still being supported, and they really only want the latest models for social status reasons.
> I really don't get how people do research work … without a computer
People used to do it in their heads.
Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
That's an exceptionally high bar of talent and creativity. For the 99.999+% of us, the computer and the mobile has made completion of many tasks highly efficient. Like surfing HN on a lazy Saturday morning...
Socrates famously frowned upon the written medium and preferred his memories for storage
you mean very intelligent and very smart people used to do it in their head without computer or calculator
these days only idiots would do so on pen and paper only
I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer.
For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.
They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.
Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.
Yes exactly this. My time is more valuable than the research and headache.
I would understand if you saved $500 or more. If you are frequent flyer, that would add up.
Whenever I travel I'm also coordinating with at least 2 other people. That may include my wife/extended family, or friends. I may jump on my desktop for research, but ultimately I'm sending a browser tab to my phone to share via txt with others.
I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com). A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.
"I don't get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
> I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill
If you’re not getting paid to promote them, you’re not a shill. Honest recommendations are welcome!
> I don't understand why people don't use travel agents
I laughed. Just used a travel agent.
Shill it out my dude. I want to know where the good stuff is hiding.
My wife and I travel a lot, we aren’t that price sensitive. We are going to fly Delta where we both have status and stay in a Hyatt or Hilton brand hotel where I have status. It takes us less than 10 minutes to make travel plans on our phones.
Very few people do any research work. They usually click whatever platform they are already in (ie: mytrip.xxx) and just book the ticket there and probably pay using Apple Pay straight from their phone.
This.
Searching the internet on a phone feels like exploring the world through the eye of a needle.
People do research work without a mac. A Windows box or Chromebook to do the stuff you want is less than half the cost of an Air, and a MBP is priced out of everything but status-conscious executive (and para-executive) consumers and FAANG-adjacent tech folks.
Nah people just don’t do research work.
Maybe one in 100k does
I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.