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Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storag

Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees. Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms. Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.

zozbot234 7y ago
> Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.
- jacobush 7y ago
  What I think is interesting is how the data that matters is on the server. Besides, if you think about it, you make my argument for me - “they” have the power budget, the mobile device has not. Think holistically.
giantrobot 7y ago
So a smartphone is like a web appliance because Google and Netflix run data centers? That doesn't make any damn sense. Consumer devices, PCs included, have always been outstripped in power and storage by data centers. That does not make them de facto thin clients. Smartphones conserving power doesn't make them thin clients either. It just turns out that modern smartphone SoCs are vastly overpowered for many computing tasks. They scale core clocks very quickly and even have multiple execution cores tasked with different execution needs (BIG.little co figurations). Smartphones also have limitations larger systems don't have like lacking memory swap space and tight thermal envelopes. A modern smartphone is a minor miracle of computing for the amount of shit packed into a pocket sized device that runs all day on an internal battery. Most mobile applications tether to some cloud component for synchronization. It's rarely because they can't do the work locally. Your camera app is doing tons of processing on the device to deliver decent pictures from very constrained optics and sensors. Google and Apple both do lots of ML on device and have dedicated co-processors for that task, iOS more so than Android. Games obviously do all their work locally. The bloated bullshit that is modern JavaScript web apps is all run locally even if data comes from a network. Many smartphones can record 4K 60fps video! Have you used a smartphone in the past decade? No aspect of smartphones makes them any more thin clients than a full PC. They certainly don't resemble the 90s thin client/web appliance. These could do virtually no work locally and had no local persistent storage. They were slightly upscaled X terminals. The web appliance concept would run a web browser little more capable than early Netscape browsers. What JavaScript found would be using "document.write" statements to do trivial client side things like display the current time or do image rollovers. There was very little CSS, no AJAX, no tabs, few even allowed multiple windows, no plugins, and no video. Most didn't even support frames so you couldn't do frame/iframe reloading tricks to get new data from the server. It was all full page reloads with either GET or POST requests. The original WebTV box was pretty much the expression of web appliance talked about in the article. It had a 100MHz RISC CPU with 2MB of RAM and 2MB of ROM. It had a tiny amount of Flash memory (1MB IIRC) to store downloaded e-mail and TV schedules. That was a fraction of the power of the typical PC of the same vintage and the gap only widened as the 90s went on. So just because Google runs data centers doesn't mean an iPhone is a thin client terminal. Just because a device can browse the web does not make it equivalent to an old WebTV box.

zozbot234 7y ago

> Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.

jacobush 7y ago
What I think is interesting is how the data that matters is on the server. Besides, if you think about it, you make my argument for me - “they” have the power budget, the mobile device has not. Think holistically.

giantrobot 7y ago

So a smartphone is like a web appliance because Google and Netflix run data centers? That doesn't make any damn sense. Consumer devices, PCs included, have always been outstripped in power and storage by data centers. That does not make them de facto thin clients. Smartphones conserving power doesn't make them thin clients either. It just turns out that modern smartphone SoCs are vastly overpowered for many computing tasks. They scale core clocks very quickly and even have multiple execution cores tasked with different execution needs (BIG.little co figurations). Smartphones also have limitations larger systems don't have like lacking memory swap space and tight thermal envelopes. A modern smartphone is a minor miracle of computing for the amount of shit packed into a pocket sized device that runs all day on an internal battery. Most mobile applications tether to some cloud component for synchronization. It's rarely because they can't do the work locally. Your camera app is doing tons of processing on the device to deliver decent pictures from very constrained optics and sensors. Google and Apple both do lots of ML on device and have dedicated co-processors for that task, iOS more so than Android. Games obviously do all their work locally. The bloated bullshit that is modern JavaScript web apps is all run locally even if data comes from a network. Many smartphones can record 4K 60fps video! Have you used a smartphone in the past decade? No aspect of smartphones makes them any more thin clients than a full PC. They certainly don't resemble the 90s thin client/web appliance. These could do virtually no work locally and had no local persistent storage. They were slightly upscaled X terminals. The web appliance concept would run a web browser little more capable than early Netscape browsers. What JavaScript found would be using "document.write" statements to do trivial client side things like display the current time or do image rollovers. There was very little CSS, no AJAX, no tabs, few even allowed multiple windows, no plugins, and no video. Most didn't even support frames so you couldn't do frame/iframe reloading tricks to get new data from the server. It was all full page reloads with either GET or POST requests. The original WebTV box was pretty much the expression of web appliance talked about in the article. It had a 100MHz RISC CPU with 2MB of RAM and 2MB of ROM. It had a tiny amount of Flash memory (1MB IIRC) to store downloaded e-mail and TV schedules. That was a fraction of the power of the typical PC of the same vintage and the gap only widened as the 90s went on. So just because Google runs data centers doesn't mean an iPhone is a thin client terminal. Just because a device can browse the web does not make it equivalent to an old WebTV box.