from Hacker News

Mobile Theses

by jdkanani on 12/18/15, 3:19 PM with 35 comments

  • by krschultz on 12/18/15, 9:56 PM

    The number of people that are commenting 'I stopped reading after X' is appalling.

    When you find something you disagree with coming from a reputable source, shouldn't you be insanely interested in reading it? Contrarian viewpoints are what teach you something you don't already know. Are people coming to HN everyday to get a pile of articles that affirm their world view?

    My reaction to the article was a disappointment because most of these are regurgitations of his previous posts. It feels like he is beating a dead horse because to me all of these points are non-controversial. Apparently not.

  • by api on 12/18/15, 11:19 PM

    TL;DR:

    The number of cars on the road is growing much faster than trucks, and far more people drive them. Even most truck drivers also own cars and often drive their cars in preference to their trucks. Most ground-transportation-related investments revolve around cars and not trucks, and there are far more car-related products than truck-related products. Therefore trucks will soon be obsolete, and all cargo will be moved with cars.

    He's not totally wrong. Mobile is the future. But desktop is also the future, and server, and IoT, and special purpose devices, and hacker devices like the Pi, and smart TVs, and smart cars, and smart appliances, and ...

    ... and and and and and ...

    What's really happening is a great diversification of computing and a massive explosion in the amount of "silicon per capita." The part about "how many electric motors do you own?" is fairly spot on. But he falls down when he tries to push his argument too far and argue that mobile will eclipse desktop/laptop completely and we'll all be staring at 3.5" screens. I will say this until someone shows me a viable port of SolidWorks, Visual Studio, or Revit Architect that is usable on a smartphone. I'm not holding my breath for that.

    The only way I see mobile replacing the laptop/PC is either some breakthrough in interaction metaphor (VR? AR that is really useful? brainwaves? who knows) or a mobile device that converts into a desktop when you plug a monitor into it and pair it with a keyboard. It would also have to be capable of being used with as much versatility as a PC, which would mean significant evolution of mobile OSes. Personally I doubt convergence... because why? Silicon is so cheap there is no economic driver for anyone to invest the development necessary for mobile to "swallow PC." It's cheaper and easier to just use two separate devices and let them deeply specialize and optimize for their respective roles. A car/truck convertible is possible too, but the result would probably be an oversized gas guzzler car with poor handling that converts into a shitty underpowered truck with poor capacity.

    I also think he's wrong about mobile being the center of gravity. Mobile devices are dumb terminals for accessing the cloud. If there's an emerging new "sun" to replace the PC it's the cloud, not mobile. Increasingly I use both PCs with their big monitors and keyboards and mobile devices to access common cloud resources.

  • by pheo on 12/19/15, 4:48 PM

    Read the whole thing. There are some well developed points near the end, but i feel many of these premises are fundamentally flawed. For example, that mobile devices will gain keyboards and become our primary computers.

    Mobile is for content consumption, workstations are for content creation. Missing that key point leads many of the points here astray. Solving the disparity is one of the major open areas in HCI research.

  • by gcb0 on 12/18/15, 8:22 PM

    i quit reading on topic two. that's just some uninformed musings of someone who probably call themselves "tweeters" (and here you saw some uninformed musings on the same level you'd find there. so meta)

  • by ternbot on 12/18/15, 8:50 PM

    Mobile is not the future of the internet Ubiquity is; in a sense, internet is not mobility but stationary; people interact with the internet when they are mostly still in their bodies, sitting on the bus, driving their cars, not "mobile"; cell networks allow for talking and walking, but using the internet while walking or moving is generally handled not by the user but by the bots; that being said, I am being a creative dissenter, for the benefit of all beings and I <3 u

    Good wishes

  • by Jordrok on 12/18/15, 9:08 PM

    ...their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.

    I honestly can't think of a single way in which that's true, and he doesn't seem to provide any examples either.

  • by fffrad on 12/18/15, 9:38 PM

    I stopped reading at "Mobile is the future".

    Everytime I hear this, its from a clueless manager that saw that most traffic comes from mobile so decided we should put more ads on mobile. They don't realize that the over all traffic is still the same.

    Mobile is the future is what made every news outlet create their own app and force you to download on each page view.