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I don't really see how some of his points support his position. e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption a

I don't really see how some of his points support his position. e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it's incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it's great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc. Sure you can hardly build software or write books on a smartphone in a practical way, but that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities. Web design is another one... Bad web designers have ruined web design, just like they were ruining web design before smartphones. Further it doesn't seem like a reason not to use a smartphone, either. I'm in total agreement with him on centralisation... it's a slippery slope, I think. For example I'm still playing games from 15 years ago, because I actually own the software. But many of today's games, even though they have no multiplayer component, would not run if in 15 years their servers shut down... because there's calculation or storage being done in the cloud that is essential to the game running. We don't physically own copies of our software anymore, but rather we own, in a way, a sort of thin client and some login details that we have to hope will last as long as we'd like to use them. This was always a problem, back in the day, too... but at least the software was available. Take any popular MMO, if the servers shut down, people have copies and can run their own servers. In future, this may not be possible anymore. Anyway games are just an example, but it's a trend that's a bit worrying. Although, it's not specific to or exclusively because of smartphones, it's a larger trend.

akashtndn 11y ago
The point about it being almost exclusively a consumption device might be, in a way, extreme but not at all silly. " It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it's great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc." Majority of what you are referring to as productive tasks are merely the users consuming various services on offer. Although they are useful devices, I agree with the opinion that any significant production work is rarely performed on them. If anything the we subject ourselves to unnecessary consumption more than increasing our productivity.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Majority of what you are referring to as productive tasks are merely the users consuming various services on offer. If we're going to reduce taking photos to a consumption of a service just because they go to Instagram or whatever, aren't we just consuming a service when we host an application we wrote on Heroku or AWS or DigitalOcean? Aren't we just consuming a service when we share code using Github or even when we send patches over an hosted email service? Where do you draw the line?
cableshaft 11y ago
Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server. I don't like it. I like having games from decades ago and still being able to play them long after the companies are dead and its employees working on other things. On my own time I try to come up with software that can run entirely without the need to communicate with servers, or even without internet access. The only problem with that is the software becomes that much easier to pirate, but oh well, I guess. I care more about the longevity of my work for my personal projects than whether or not I'm going to make the megabucks with them. And honestly, for a few games I've worked on for companies in the past, pirates are the only thing keeping those games accessible at all.
- jhasse 11y ago
  Hm ... Candy Crush Saga runs perfectly fine offline. So do SeriesGuide, MAPS.ME, and Podcast Addict to name a few apps on my phone. Can you show me an example of an app which is a thin client (and doesn't actually need Internet connection)?
  - mcphage 11y ago
    AlphaBear, which is a single-player word game. (This is in no way to support the original article's point, but it did really annoy me about AlphaBear)
- drcode 11y ago
  The "asymmetric" way that phones work have tangible drawbacks for consumers, even if they are not power users. However, since the competition in the space is so fierce, I feel confident that it's only a matter of time until the situation improves. I think in a few years phones will have significant "mesh-net" capabilities and will maintain significant amounts of distributed data using paxos and/or blockchain-style algorithms. It's only a matter of time before the "thin client" and server-driven software era will end.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  > Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server. This is not true of games. Can you name any? Yes, multiplayer games require a server component, but they're not thin clients. And games that are not multiplayer generally don't require a server at all except possibly for DRM. People don't like wasting their data plan unnecessarily and they like being able to play in subway tunnels. If you think about the economics of it, this makes sense. Margins are razor slim; you need to be able to profit off of whatever is left after the app store takes its cut of your $0.99-4.99 retail price. Having to run and maintain a fleet of servers to handle your games simply doesn't make sense. Better (and easier programmatically) to take advantage of the powerful processors on the devices themselves and have the games run locally. Think of something like Civilization, that has a mobile app; why on Earth would you want a central server that would have to run god knows how many millions of AIs when the phones could simply calculate that themselves?
nyan4 11y ago
> So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player Comparing a powerful, expensive, fully programmable computer provided with cameras, GPS, radios with a photoalbum/book/TV is silly. > They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors You could plug a Commodore 64 to a television and write software on it, even if its CPU was probably less powerful than the battery controller of my smartphone. It's obvious that smartphone OSes are designed to turn the device into an addictive toy. Your examples of not owning software and centralization goes on the same line.
- stepanhruda 11y ago
  Many TVs are more expensive than many smartphones.
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  Not all 7.4 billion people want to write software. Computational power got cheap enough to apply it everywhere. I am sure there were zealots decades before who said they need no pesky battery controllers in their devices.
ekianjo 11y ago
> because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. Because it could be something else than just a consumption device (unlike a book or a photo album), as it's technically a general purpose computer. His point makes perfect sense.
- bigtones 11y ago
  It's still a silly distinction and pedantic. A modern car is a consumption device, but it also contains several computers, input and output devices, and significant computing power. But everyone is fine with just driving around in them. A smart phone is way more of a production device with camera and video shooting and editing than a car.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    > It's still a silly distinction and pedantic. No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program. Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand. The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones". No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.
    - lmm 11y ago
      If the Java compiler doesn't run on android phones then it's only because no-one actually cares enough to make it do so. There's no reason you couldn't run a full IDE on an android device with a keyboard, mouse and big screen tethered to it and use it to work on programs for that device (including updates to the IDE itself), except that it would be dumb; nothing technically prevents you from doing that.
jdietrich 11y ago
>Sure you can hardly build software or write books on a smartphone in a practical way Novels written on mobile phones are a popular literary subculture in Japan. http://www.ualberta.ca/~berban/cell/cellwho.html http://www.ualberta.ca/~berban/cell/cellwho.html The Android SDK will run on Android, so apps can be written and built entirely on the device. Definitions of 'practical' vary, but I have done web development work on an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. I regularly use a terminal emulator on Android for quick server admin tasks. http://www.android-ide.com/ http://www.android-ide.com/
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  I loved the resistive screen of Neo Freerunner and Nokia N900, as it allowed me to write code on screen (surprisingly, the awful bezel around Freerunner screen actually worked great as a resting place for the finger, N900 while more comfortable in every other situation is more tiring when writing code). I've written quite a lot of Python on those phones in my life.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Google looked poised to take Android beyond consumption when they introduced 3.0. But then they did one misstep after another that effectively neutered it, and tried to pitch ChromeOS for office uses (watch them demo Citrix during the unveiling for example). Now they seem to be coming back around, but can't get their ducks in a row (shipping hardware before the software is ready etc).
- koffiezet 11y ago
  On iOS, I use Pythonista for running various python scripts. They also acts as an extension, on which you can run various python scripts. One of the examples provided is generating a QR code from an URL in Safari - but the sky is the limit. No idea how Apple ever allowed this on the AppStore, but it's there, and it's magnificent.
stepanhruda 11y ago
Great response, thanks.
petra 11y ago
Also, with regards to openness: First Android does have an option to sideload apps, and while Google can exercise control and limits on the OS, it usually only does so with regards to ad-blockers, and even that only partially. And are ROM's hard to install ? For the technical user ,No,At least for large enough variety of phones. And as for the non-technical users - they always needed to pay someone or ask a friend when they wanted an OS install, so nothing's different. And if look deeper, Android is open-source ,so it's undoubtedly offers much more freedom than windows.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  Generally, the reality is that while the Android is open, the devices that run Android usually aren't, so in the end it doesn't really matter. For very similar reason I wasn't crying after Firefox OS, even though it had some progress when it comes to platform openness in some other areas.
gambler 11y ago
> Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities. We're talking about multi-gigahertz quad-core devices with gigabytes or RAM, USB connectivity, Bluetooth, and a high-speed WiFi cards. The fact that they are designed in such a way that connecting them to a keyboard is seen as some kind of achievement is fucking ridiculous. That alone proves the author's point.
thebaer 11y ago
> it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly It's not just the fact that it's an underutilized general computing device; just look at the apps on your phone and tell me the percentage of them that open to a blank "canvas" rather than some kind of stream / feed. On the desktop, you have your text editors, word processors, photo editors, video editors, 3D modelers, IDEs, file sharing utilities, digital audio workstations, etc. On the phone, you have your camera app and maybe an audio recording app. Everywhere you want to produce something on the smartphone is generally tied to sharing it with others -- but then to share a photo, video, or thought, you're almost always coerced into consuming some information first. I think this is solvable, though, especially by this community. The mobile platform is still young, especially compared to the desktop world. There is time to create real tools that enable more people to create, and don't simply aim to hold users' stares and profit from their personal information.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > On the desktop, you have your text editors, word processors, photo editors, video editors, 3D modelers, IDEs, file sharing utilities, digital audio workstations, etc. Could have sworn i have seen examples of all but 3D modeling in the Android Play store. That said, some of those uses can be very RAM demanding, and phones do not have much to offer there compared to a desktop.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    And few professionals are going to be satisfied with a tiny screen, tiny processor and throttled connectivity. And no mouse or keyboard or Bamboo pad. Heck, I need three monitors to be most productive!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Chill dude, nobody is forcing you to replace your rig with a phone. But a little anecdote though. I seem to recall that the early Toshiba Android tablets were popular with photographs. This because their full size SD slot (and USB-A on the Thrive) allowed them to use the tablet as a on the go light table. Similarly, tablets seems to be getting more and more use as clipboard replacements for various tasks. This because they can handle all manner of forms and documents.
joshvm 11y ago
I don't think smartphones have ruined web design, it's actually forced people to develop responsive websites which work well on multiple screen sizes. Bootstrap makes this stupidly easy nowadays and probably would never have been created if it weren't for mobile.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Modern web sites look like crap and don't work. My banking website recently switched to a mobile first website ('responsive' is a lie). Now the UI is so giant that it cannot show a list of 6 account names with a balance next to it on a single desktop screen with a resolution of 3360 x 2100 pixels.
  - jstimpfle 11y ago
    > Now the UI is so giant that it cannot show a list of 6 account names with a balance next to it Yep."Our 2015 default theme is clean, blog-focused, and designed for clarity." https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/about-twenty-fifteen/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/about-twenty-fifteen... https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/image-alignment-and-styles/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/image-alignment-and-... "Ruined" is an understatement.
    - qb45 11y ago
      This doesn't look too bad, certainly not that kind of bad your parent complained about.
      - jstimpfle 11y ago
        Maybe you watched it on a huge screen, or on a mobile phone where responsive snaps. I'm on a 13" laptop, and in Firefox the title (2nd link I gave) begins at about 35% of my viewport measured from the top, and I have to fine-tune my scrolling for each next paragraph I want to read. I have previously been complaining about the spacing in GNOME/GTK but this is another level.
vlehto 11y ago
>I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. I owned a smart-phone for a year. I didn't replace photo-album, book, TV, Music player or camera with it. I only replaced a dumb phone. So I gave it away. I do enjoy many consumption devices, I don't need one more, if it just means consuming more. But I might adopt consumption device if it allowed me to consume better.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  It can be a great tool too. I think anyone who discounts smartphones as just another "consumption device" are missing part of the usefulness of the network. I use my phone in place of paper logs for calorie counting and training. It's definitely been a solid replacement. It's probably shaved an hour a day off the odious task of counting calories, and having internet access means that I'm only a few touches away from form pointers and useful advice. I could replace it all but I'd have to start carrying about 40 pounds of books around instead.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    I would not wan't to ban smartphones from people who find them useful. But personally I don't track calories or training. I would not even with smartphone. I'm just way too incoherent person for that.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Yeah but we're old guys. The young folks don't have old bought copies of things. I think its a losing battle, and pointless to proselytize to the young about things they cannot do or experience any more. But good points.
300bps 11y ago
e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. It's not actually silly because of the mindset some people have. I know many people who bought an iPad or an iPhone with the mindset of, "GREAT! Now I don't need a computer." They went into it thinking that an iPad or an iPhone was a replacement for a computer and then were basically transformed into someone who could easily produce content to someone who could only produce content with difficulty. Your argument from analogy is not apt because nobody buys a photoalbum thinking, "GREAT! Now I don't need a camera."
loup-vaillant 11y ago
> I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one A palmtop computer (I insist on this more accurate name) is even more than you say. It's something that you use to run arbitrary programs. Now I have a couple questions: why can't I tether my computer to a docking station with a big screen, a keyboard, and a mouse? Laptops can do that, why not palmtops? Why do I have to use a separate desktop computer to develops software for my palmtop? Why so many palmtop computers don't even let me have root access? Aren't they supposed to be mine? Why can't I use my computer as a freaking computer? Because my computer fits in the palm of my hand? Because my computer can talk to the phone network? Because my computer has a camera and a GPS sensor attached? The only way this is not utterly ridiculous is because we fail to call those devices properly. No one would ever restrict your "computer" thus (Just imagine Microsoft trying to enforce a "Windows store" in 2005). But a "smartphone"? Sure!
- jakobegger 11y ago
  You can connect a bluetooth keyboard to an iPhone, and attach an external display using an adapter, or even wirelessly by connecting to an Apple TV. Then you can use it like a desktop, for writing or coding or whatever. But people don't do that. Because the experience is shit. Smartphone apps are great because they are specifically made for a very specific use case (eg. passive browsing on a small touchscreeen, or messaging, etc). Nobody wants to do software development while waiting in line at the supermarket. So people use desktops or laptops for coding. You have a faster CPU, more battery, a real keyboard.... And phones aren't as locked down as you say. I can write any app I want for my iPhone, and I can share the source code with others, and they can then install it on their phones... Sure, all the code signing stuff is a nuisance, but it makes downloading apps safe for non-technical users.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    > Because the experience is shit. And whose fault is it exactly? Those things have more than enough power to run a full GNU/Linux distribution, complete with IDE and all. There are a few easy (yet deal-breaking) problems. We don't have docking stations like laptops do, and I bet the driver support for GNU/Linux is crap. Then there's the mismatch between desktop peripherals and a tiny touch screen. The hard problem is the weakness of the CPU. Right now, we're kinda set back 12 years. We could imagine the docking station providing some co-processor, even additional RAM, or something that gives the phone more processing power when docked. Solve that with a standard docking interface, and you just turned phones into ultra-portable desktop computers. (Oh, and don't forget to invent a virtual machine that can be efficiently implemented in hardware. Something like asm.js or SPIR-V might be a starting point.) > I can write any app I want for my iPhone, and I can share the source code with others, and they can then install it on their phones... Don't everyone is supposed to pay something like 99$ a year for the privilege?

akashtndn 11y ago

The point about it being almost exclusively a consumption device might be, in a way, extreme but not at all silly. " It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it's great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc." Majority of what you are referring to as productive tasks are merely the users consuming various services on offer. Although they are useful devices, I agree with the opinion that any significant production work is rarely performed on them. If anything the we subject ourselves to unnecessary consumption more than increasing our productivity.

icebraining 11y ago
Majority of what you are referring to as productive tasks are merely the users consuming various services on offer. If we're going to reduce taking photos to a consumption of a service just because they go to Instagram or whatever, aren't we just consuming a service when we host an application we wrote on Heroku or AWS or DigitalOcean? Aren't we just consuming a service when we share code using Github or even when we send patches over an hosted email service? Where do you draw the line?

cableshaft 11y ago

Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server. I don't like it. I like having games from decades ago and still being able to play them long after the companies are dead and its employees working on other things. On my own time I try to come up with software that can run entirely without the need to communicate with servers, or even without internet access. The only problem with that is the software becomes that much easier to pirate, but oh well, I guess. I care more about the longevity of my work for my personal projects than whether or not I'm going to make the megabucks with them. And honestly, for a few games I've worked on for companies in the past, pirates are the only thing keeping those games accessible at all.

jhasse 11y ago
Hm ... Candy Crush Saga runs perfectly fine offline. So do SeriesGuide, MAPS.ME, and Podcast Addict to name a few apps on my phone. Can you show me an example of an app which is a thin client (and doesn't actually need Internet connection)?
- mcphage 11y ago
  AlphaBear, which is a single-player word game. (This is in no way to support the original article's point, but it did really annoy me about AlphaBear)
drcode 11y ago
The "asymmetric" way that phones work have tangible drawbacks for consumers, even if they are not power users. However, since the competition in the space is so fierce, I feel confident that it's only a matter of time until the situation improves. I think in a few years phones will have significant "mesh-net" capabilities and will maintain significant amounts of distributed data using paxos and/or blockchain-style algorithms. It's only a matter of time before the "thin client" and server-driven software era will end.
CydeWeys 11y ago
> Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server. This is not true of games. Can you name any? Yes, multiplayer games require a server component, but they're not thin clients. And games that are not multiplayer generally don't require a server at all except possibly for DRM. People don't like wasting their data plan unnecessarily and they like being able to play in subway tunnels. If you think about the economics of it, this makes sense. Margins are razor slim; you need to be able to profit off of whatever is left after the app store takes its cut of your $0.99-4.99 retail price. Having to run and maintain a fleet of servers to handle your games simply doesn't make sense. Better (and easier programmatically) to take advantage of the powerful processors on the devices themselves and have the games run locally. Think of something like Civilization, that has a mobile app; why on Earth would you want a central server that would have to run god knows how many millions of AIs when the phones could simply calculate that themselves?

nyan4 11y ago

> So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player Comparing a powerful, expensive, fully programmable computer provided with cameras, GPS, radios with a photoalbum/book/TV is silly. > They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors You could plug a Commodore 64 to a television and write software on it, even if its CPU was probably less powerful than the battery controller of my smartphone. It's obvious that smartphone OSes are designed to turn the device into an addictive toy. Your examples of not owning software and centralization goes on the same line.

stepanhruda 11y ago
Many TVs are more expensive than many smartphones.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
Not all 7.4 billion people want to write software. Computational power got cheap enough to apply it everywhere. I am sure there were zealots decades before who said they need no pesky battery controllers in their devices.

ekianjo 11y ago

> because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. Because it could be something else than just a consumption device (unlike a book or a photo album), as it's technically a general purpose computer. His point makes perfect sense.

bigtones 11y ago
It's still a silly distinction and pedantic. A modern car is a consumption device, but it also contains several computers, input and output devices, and significant computing power. But everyone is fine with just driving around in them. A smart phone is way more of a production device with camera and video shooting and editing than a car.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  > It's still a silly distinction and pedantic. No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program. Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand. The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones". No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.
  - lmm 11y ago
    If the Java compiler doesn't run on android phones then it's only because no-one actually cares enough to make it do so. There's no reason you couldn't run a full IDE on an android device with a keyboard, mouse and big screen tethered to it and use it to work on programs for that device (including updates to the IDE itself), except that it would be dumb; nothing technically prevents you from doing that.

jdietrich 11y ago

>Sure you can hardly build software or write books on a smartphone in a practical way Novels written on mobile phones are a popular literary subculture in Japan. http://www.ualberta.ca/~berban/cell/cellwho.html http://www.ualberta.ca/~berban/cell/cellwho.html The Android SDK will run on Android, so apps can be written and built entirely on the device. Definitions of 'practical' vary, but I have done web development work on an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. I regularly use a terminal emulator on Android for quick server admin tasks. http://www.android-ide.com/ http://www.android-ide.com/

seba_dos1 11y ago
I loved the resistive screen of Neo Freerunner and Nokia N900, as it allowed me to write code on screen (surprisingly, the awful bezel around Freerunner screen actually worked great as a resting place for the finger, N900 while more comfortable in every other situation is more tiring when writing code). I've written quite a lot of Python on those phones in my life.
digi_owl 11y ago
Google looked poised to take Android beyond consumption when they introduced 3.0. But then they did one misstep after another that effectively neutered it, and tried to pitch ChromeOS for office uses (watch them demo Citrix during the unveiling for example). Now they seem to be coming back around, but can't get their ducks in a row (shipping hardware before the software is ready etc).
koffiezet 11y ago
On iOS, I use Pythonista for running various python scripts. They also acts as an extension, on which you can run various python scripts. One of the examples provided is generating a QR code from an URL in Safari - but the sky is the limit. No idea how Apple ever allowed this on the AppStore, but it's there, and it's magnificent.

stepanhruda 11y ago

Great response, thanks.

petra 11y ago

Also, with regards to openness: First Android does have an option to sideload apps, and while Google can exercise control and limits on the OS, it usually only does so with regards to ad-blockers, and even that only partially. And are ROM's hard to install ? For the technical user ,No,At least for large enough variety of phones. And as for the non-technical users - they always needed to pay someone or ask a friend when they wanted an OS install, so nothing's different. And if look deeper, Android is open-source ,so it's undoubtedly offers much more freedom than windows.

seba_dos1 11y ago
Generally, the reality is that while the Android is open, the devices that run Android usually aren't, so in the end it doesn't really matter. For very similar reason I wasn't crying after Firefox OS, even though it had some progress when it comes to platform openness in some other areas.

gambler 11y ago

> Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They're becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities. We're talking about multi-gigahertz quad-core devices with gigabytes or RAM, USB connectivity, Bluetooth, and a high-speed WiFi cards. The fact that they are designed in such a way that connecting them to a keyboard is seen as some kind of achievement is fucking ridiculous. That alone proves the author's point.

thebaer 11y ago

> it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly It's not just the fact that it's an underutilized general computing device; just look at the apps on your phone and tell me the percentage of them that open to a blank "canvas" rather than some kind of stream / feed. On the desktop, you have your text editors, word processors, photo editors, video editors, 3D modelers, IDEs, file sharing utilities, digital audio workstations, etc. On the phone, you have your camera app and maybe an audio recording app. Everywhere you want to produce something on the smartphone is generally tied to sharing it with others -- but then to share a photo, video, or thought, you're almost always coerced into consuming some information first. I think this is solvable, though, especially by this community. The mobile platform is still young, especially compared to the desktop world. There is time to create real tools that enable more people to create, and don't simply aim to hold users' stares and profit from their personal information.

digi_owl 11y ago
> On the desktop, you have your text editors, word processors, photo editors, video editors, 3D modelers, IDEs, file sharing utilities, digital audio workstations, etc. Could have sworn i have seen examples of all but 3D modeling in the Android Play store. That said, some of those uses can be very RAM demanding, and phones do not have much to offer there compared to a desktop.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  And few professionals are going to be satisfied with a tiny screen, tiny processor and throttled connectivity. And no mouse or keyboard or Bamboo pad. Heck, I need three monitors to be most productive!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Chill dude, nobody is forcing you to replace your rig with a phone. But a little anecdote though. I seem to recall that the early Toshiba Android tablets were popular with photographs. This because their full size SD slot (and USB-A on the Thrive) allowed them to use the tablet as a on the go light table. Similarly, tablets seems to be getting more and more use as clipboard replacements for various tasks. This because they can handle all manner of forms and documents.

joshvm 11y ago

I don't think smartphones have ruined web design, it's actually forced people to develop responsive websites which work well on multiple screen sizes. Bootstrap makes this stupidly easy nowadays and probably would never have been created if it weren't for mobile.

ant6n 11y ago
Modern web sites look like crap and don't work. My banking website recently switched to a mobile first website ('responsive' is a lie). Now the UI is so giant that it cannot show a list of 6 account names with a balance next to it on a single desktop screen with a resolution of 3360 x 2100 pixels.
- jstimpfle 11y ago
  > Now the UI is so giant that it cannot show a list of 6 account names with a balance next to it Yep."Our 2015 default theme is clean, blog-focused, and designed for clarity." https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/about-twenty-fifteen/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/about-twenty-fifteen... https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/image-alignment-and-styles/ https://twentyfifteendemo.wordpress.com/image-alignment-and-... "Ruined" is an understatement.
  - qb45 11y ago
    This doesn't look too bad, certainly not that kind of bad your parent complained about.
    - jstimpfle 11y ago
      Maybe you watched it on a huge screen, or on a mobile phone where responsive snaps. I'm on a 13" laptop, and in Firefox the title (2nd link I gave) begins at about 35% of my viewport measured from the top, and I have to fine-tune my scrolling for each next paragraph I want to read. I have previously been complaining about the spacing in GNOME/GTK but this is another level.

vlehto 11y ago

>I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. I owned a smart-phone for a year. I didn't replace photo-album, book, TV, Music player or camera with it. I only replaced a dumb phone. So I gave it away. I do enjoy many consumption devices, I don't need one more, if it just means consuming more. But I might adopt consumption device if it allowed me to consume better.

jschwartzi 11y ago
It can be a great tool too. I think anyone who discounts smartphones as just another "consumption device" are missing part of the usefulness of the network. I use my phone in place of paper logs for calorie counting and training. It's definitely been a solid replacement. It's probably shaved an hour a day off the odious task of counting calories, and having internet access means that I'm only a few touches away from form pointers and useful advice. I could replace it all but I'd have to start carrying about 40 pounds of books around instead.
- vlehto 11y ago
  I would not wan't to ban smartphones from people who find them useful. But personally I don't track calories or training. I would not even with smartphone. I'm just way too incoherent person for that.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Yeah but we're old guys. The young folks don't have old bought copies of things. I think its a losing battle, and pointless to proselytize to the young about things they cannot do or experience any more. But good points.

300bps 11y ago

e.g. I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. It's not actually silly because of the mindset some people have. I know many people who bought an iPad or an iPhone with the mindset of, "GREAT! Now I don't need a computer." They went into it thinking that an iPad or an iPhone was a replacement for a computer and then were basically transformed into someone who could easily produce content to someone who could only produce content with difficulty. Your argument from analogy is not apt because nobody buys a photoalbum thinking, "GREAT! Now I don't need a camera."

loup-vaillant 11y ago

> I don't own a smartphone, because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one A palmtop computer (I insist on this more accurate name) is even more than you say. It's something that you use to run arbitrary programs. Now I have a couple questions: why can't I tether my computer to a docking station with a big screen, a keyboard, and a mouse? Laptops can do that, why not palmtops? Why do I have to use a separate desktop computer to develops software for my palmtop? Why so many palmtop computers don't even let me have root access? Aren't they supposed to be mine? Why can't I use my computer as a freaking computer? Because my computer fits in the palm of my hand? Because my computer can talk to the phone network? Because my computer has a camera and a GPS sensor attached? The only way this is not utterly ridiculous is because we fail to call those devices properly. No one would ever restrict your "computer" thus (Just imagine Microsoft trying to enforce a "Windows store" in 2005). But a "smartphone"? Sure!

jakobegger 11y ago
You can connect a bluetooth keyboard to an iPhone, and attach an external display using an adapter, or even wirelessly by connecting to an Apple TV. Then you can use it like a desktop, for writing or coding or whatever. But people don't do that. Because the experience is shit. Smartphone apps are great because they are specifically made for a very specific use case (eg. passive browsing on a small touchscreeen, or messaging, etc). Nobody wants to do software development while waiting in line at the supermarket. So people use desktops or laptops for coding. You have a faster CPU, more battery, a real keyboard.... And phones aren't as locked down as you say. I can write any app I want for my iPhone, and I can share the source code with others, and they can then install it on their phones... Sure, all the code signing stuff is a nuisance, but it makes downloading apps safe for non-technical users.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  > Because the experience is shit. And whose fault is it exactly? Those things have more than enough power to run a full GNU/Linux distribution, complete with IDE and all. There are a few easy (yet deal-breaking) problems. We don't have docking stations like laptops do, and I bet the driver support for GNU/Linux is crap. Then there's the mismatch between desktop peripherals and a tiny touch screen. The hard problem is the weakness of the CPU. Right now, we're kinda set back 12 years. We could imagine the docking station providing some co-processor, even additional RAM, or something that gives the phone more processing power when docked. Solve that with a standard docking interface, and you just turned phones into ultra-portable desktop computers. (Oh, and don't forget to invent a virtual machine that can be efficiently implemented in hardware. Something like asm.js or SPIR-V might be a starting point.) > I can write any app I want for my iPhone, and I can share the source code with others, and they can then install it on their phones... Don't everyone is supposed to pay something like 99$ a year for the privilege?