> You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions. Outside of places li

> You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions. Outside of places like HN and similar you get blank stares if you ask the question of what people think about the closedneas or openness of their device. If you clarify that (say) they would perhaps like to use an app from a different source, it’s again blank stares. I of course wouldn’t actively mind if it was much easier to sideload an app on iOS, but if there was e.g some openness push that required multiple app stores to not just be available but also that all be equally prominent (like the browser or media player thing in Windows) then I’m completely convinced that it would be a disaster for users. More freedom, cheaper, but fractured and insecure. I’m not sure it’s a net positive. And I’m sure my dad would be more confused. > the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch. I believe this too. And while I don’t much like this future, I don’t really have a good answer. I don’t think the answer is to somehow require any appliance to be more open. It seems misdirected. That PCs will be expensive and niche is probably true. They’ll go back to where they started before the home computing revolution, to be professional tools for content creators, developers, scientists and similar. It’s not the PC that’s threatened, it’s the cheap home PC that’s threatened. Not the workstation or video editing rig. But the thing about the cheap home PC for web browsing, photo organization and light word processing is that it was never really a good tool for the job. It was a malware ridden crash prone slow machine that we (the HN people who now tell our relatives to get iPads or ChromeBooks for browsing) had to fix around the holidays.