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> Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers. I don't quite understand this point. PCs are inheren

> Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers. I don't quite understand this point. PCs are inherently upgradeable, but it seems like consumers would rather treat them as disposable electronic devices, judging by the success of barely-upgradeable Macs and other laptops. And I'm not sure I blame them either, it's not like it's easy for a consumer with no techy knowledge to know whether they should upgrade the RAM, or the SSD, or the GPU, and research which components are compatible, best bang for the buck, etc. You're making out upgradeability to be the reason why PCs won and are super successful, but it seems more because there were a whole bunch of PC-compatible clones that could all run the same software. The hardware/peripheral compatibility between PC clones was never very particularly good until well into the 90s, well after the PC standard had already 'won', and the computers they replaced were also upgradeable.

bluedino 10y ago
Exactly - and a bunch of companies built phones that can run Android, so Google has won, in a way
acchow 10y ago
> PCs are inherently upgradeable, but it seems like consumers would rather treat them as disposable electronic devices, judging by the success of barely-upgradeable Macs and other laptops. Disposability is a side-effect of non-upgradeability - consumers don't explicitly want either of those, they just want a good product. And a good product can't be upgradeable. See Daring Fireball's article on this: http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage The money shot is, "Apple offers far fewer configurations. Thus MacBooks are, to most minds, subjectively better-designed — but objectively, they’re more designed. Apple makes more of the choices than do PC makers."

bluedino 10y ago

Exactly - and a bunch of companies built phones that can run Android, so Google has won, in a way

acchow 10y ago

> PCs are inherently upgradeable, but it seems like consumers would rather treat them as disposable electronic devices, judging by the success of barely-upgradeable Macs and other laptops. Disposability is a side-effect of non-upgradeability - consumers don't explicitly want either of those, they just want a good product. And a good product can't be upgradeable. See Daring Fireball's article on this: http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage The money shot is, "Apple offers far fewer configurations. Thus MacBooks are, to most minds, subjectively better-designed — but objectively, they’re more designed. Apple makes more of the choices than do PC makers."