3 ms·

I'm wondering if those still are the majority, worldwide. Smart-phones have done a lot to democratize computing power (now if only they weren't used to put >90%

I'm wondering if those still are the majority, worldwide. Smart-phones have done a lot to democratize computing power (now if only they weren't used to put >90% of their users in corporate controlled walled gardens...)

jstx1 4y ago
I bet they're still the majority - the people who only use their phone do it through apps, not through their mobile browser.
sidlls 4y ago
Smart phones didn’t change anything here: 99% of their users didn’t care about the “open” nature of desktops before they were a thing, too. A vanishingly small percentage of computer users care about tinkering and openness. It’s been decades since tinkerers and hackers were the majority of computer users.
- geraldhh 4y ago
  one could argue that the mobile era has put computers in the hands of the vast majority of people on the planet that couldn't even be bothered to operate a pc.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  That tipping point was probably 1995 at latest.
hilbert42 4y ago
That's the tragic outcome of that type of democratization and I'm not sure it can ever be fixed.
mlindner 4y ago
I don't actually believe smart-phones have done much to democratize computing power because phones don't give you much control over computing power. You can't develop software on a phone using a phone. And frankly the vast majority of phones have way more computing power than is actually used. On a related point, the push to the cloud is befuddling when everyone has a phone with "free" (from the developer's point of view) computing power sitting there unused. Everyone's wasting money on centralizing compute despite more distributed compute being available than ever before.