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What happened to mobile as a platform? (A Rant)
Following up on Steph's post from the end of 2022: I've had similar sorts of thoughts, that this pocket computer gets used for very little actual computing. Things I regularly use on my Pixel:
And sometimes:
For anything actually serious, I use my laptop. And even for some of the things I regularly use my phone for, it's frustrating. I remember chatting on my desktop in the 90s and early 00s, and no amount of acrobatics will convince me that a phone keyboard is in any way better, that switching back and forth between conversations on the same screen is Great, Actually.
All my coding's via my laptop: Visual Studio, emacs/fish via VM, that sort of thing. And at the end of the day, my phone's often nearly at full charge.
Crazy when you think about it. These things cost as much as actual computers and for a certain segment (me, and I suspect a lot of tech-types), their main use is as a general distraction device.
I grew up at a very particular time and so while I'm delighted that I have Penny's computer book from Inspector Gadget in my pocket, I'm a bit sad that its design is disempowering. Want to load your own apps? No real way on iPhones, though it's doable on Android. Want to do real work? You'll want an external keyboard, a dock, a...
Sure, it can be done. But it's not streamlined, nor will it ever be. It's difficult, so nobody does it. The desktop and the laptop are now specialist hardware, the phone generalist. A lot of people will never push beyond its borders. And I think that's a little sad.