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Which doesn't even make sense. Some smartphones have the same specs as laptops and you can do, essentially, everything you could on a laptop or desktop on your

Which doesn't even make sense. Some smartphones have the same specs as laptops and you can do, essentially, everything you could on a laptop or desktop on your smartphone. There's more reasons to include the smartphone in the category of computer than not to.

vlovich123 5y ago
Architecturally they’re still very different from traditional desktops/laptops. SoCs are a main distinguishing feature and that pervades a lot of the low-level SW design where you actually basically have a non-transferable OS installation hard coded to the device instead of a traditional HAL letting you easily swap out a processor without much difficulty. For a very long time the control model was flipped as well and your baseband (cellular modem) CPU was actually the primary CPU with the OS running on the more restricted “application processor” (I think most or all designs have corrected this error these days, but certainly this was true in 2013). These differences of course are superficial and your phone could be used as a computer. It’s an arbitrary category like most categorizations that we make. I think the important distinction is that smart devices are largely content consumption devices vs computers being relegated to content creation. For example, would you say that someone who’s used a SmartTV has used a computer just because the specs are largely the same? I think you should fully expect computer use to decline over time because most people consume rather than create content.
mcguire 5y ago
..except that no one uses a smartphone the way you (used to[1]) use a laptop or smartphone. [1] I find the overlap goes the other way: I'm using a laptop to write this, but I could have done so with my phone. Laptops and desktops are being used like smartphones.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  That's even more reason to not have separate categories from my perspective. Either way you're using the devices for the same tasks, there's no reason to separate them.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    One distinguishing feature is that a computer typically lets you install arbitrary software and you're the "administrator" of the machine. On a smartphone the administrator is the phone manufacturer. As I said, the categorization is completely arbitrary and depends on how you choose to draw the lines, but neither categorization is right/wrong.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Maybe when it comes to the baseband processor the user isn't the admin, I definitely would agree there. But on most android devices you can absolutely swap out the user space OS, I think this at least gives more control than the situation you describe, although from my understanding iOS is where the user isn't the admin. Android devices also let you install and run arbitrary software from what I'm aware
      - vlovich123 5y ago
        Cool. That’s still not functionality available out of the box (if I recall correctly that’s true for sideloading even on Android). You could try to tease that out but it’ll be low single digit percentage of Android users. In other words, nitpicking pedantry, but nothing that should meaningfully shift the overall numbers. Same reason that you wouldn’t expect to include SmartTVs on this even though they’re all running Android.

vlovich123 5y ago

Architecturally they’re still very different from traditional desktops/laptops. SoCs are a main distinguishing feature and that pervades a lot of the low-level SW design where you actually basically have a non-transferable OS installation hard coded to the device instead of a traditional HAL letting you easily swap out a processor without much difficulty. For a very long time the control model was flipped as well and your baseband (cellular modem) CPU was actually the primary CPU with the OS running on the more restricted “application processor” (I think most or all designs have corrected this error these days, but certainly this was true in 2013). These differences of course are superficial and your phone could be used as a computer. It’s an arbitrary category like most categorizations that we make. I think the important distinction is that smart devices are largely content consumption devices vs computers being relegated to content creation. For example, would you say that someone who’s used a SmartTV has used a computer just because the specs are largely the same? I think you should fully expect computer use to decline over time because most people consume rather than create content.

mcguire 5y ago

..except that no one uses a smartphone the way you (used to[1]) use a laptop or smartphone. [1] I find the overlap goes the other way: I'm using a laptop to write this, but I could have done so with my phone. Laptops and desktops are being used like smartphones.

netizen-936824 5y ago
That's even more reason to not have separate categories from my perspective. Either way you're using the devices for the same tasks, there's no reason to separate them.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  One distinguishing feature is that a computer typically lets you install arbitrary software and you're the "administrator" of the machine. On a smartphone the administrator is the phone manufacturer. As I said, the categorization is completely arbitrary and depends on how you choose to draw the lines, but neither categorization is right/wrong.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Maybe when it comes to the baseband processor the user isn't the admin, I definitely would agree there. But on most android devices you can absolutely swap out the user space OS, I think this at least gives more control than the situation you describe, although from my understanding iOS is where the user isn't the admin. Android devices also let you install and run arbitrary software from what I'm aware
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Cool. That’s still not functionality available out of the box (if I recall correctly that’s true for sideloading even on Android). You could try to tease that out but it’ll be low single digit percentage of Android users. In other words, nitpicking pedantry, but nothing that should meaningfully shift the overall numbers. Same reason that you wouldn’t expect to include SmartTVs on this even though they’re all running Android.