> In two months recently in the US, I never hailed a cab, but used an app to hail and track a car. I haven't hailed a cab in years -- rarely need a cab. If I

> In two months recently in the US, I never hailed a cab, but used an app to hail and track a car. I haven't hailed a cab in years -- rarely need a cab. If I needed a cab a lot, sure, maybe I'd get a cell phone. If some Uber app was a lot better, still, and I wanted to use Uber, then I'd get a smartphone. I live out in the 'burbs -- deer, ground hogs, etc. in the back yard -- where the cab service sucks. > I track site analytics and app sales on my phone The times I try to read graphs of data, usually I copy the file of the image to disk, read it with Microsoft's Picture and FAX Viewer, and zoom in a lot: Commonly people who draw graphs like the visual aspect but come close to just ignoring the axes and commonly have the text way, way, way too small -- I can't read the text at all without about 3X zoom. It'd be worse on a smaller screen. So, you are using a smartphone to read data and less to write it. To draw a graph, I use Excel and scream bloody murder until I get out my notes on what the heck hidden magic ways to left/right single/double click to get the standard things done, e.g., get the font sizes up about 4X, make as much as possible black and bold, etc. It turns out that, then, I usually, for the people I tend to show graphs to, print the graphs on paper. For photos, it turns out that I bought for about $2 a digital camera -- cute little thing, sold shrink wrapped on a card. Apparently it has the camera guts of a smartphone. It also has a USB socket. And, yes, Microsoft PhotoDraw will read an image from a USB port. So, I can take and print some images. But, soon, I saw that my sack of Nikon camera equipment, especially with my Honeywell smart flash, takes much better pictures. To develop the pictures, I just take the film to Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Sadly their scanning resolution is much lower than my pictures deserve, but otherwise I get good pictures. Sure, someday I will cough up $10,000 for a new bag of Nikon equipment but with CCDs instead of film. I'll get a copy of PhotoShop, a color printer, etc. No joke, smartphone cameras (with some interesting principles of optics on the advantages of such a small lens, short focal length, and number of pixels per inch in the detector) are no doubt now taking each year, maybe each month, more photos than were taken in all the history of film cameras. But the quality is like old snapshots. E-mail on a smartphone? I won't do it: To me e-mail is important; I have some good ways to handle it; and those ways make good use of my PC and its software and won't carry over to a smartphone. I won't put my e-mail in a smartphone silo but want to keep it on the same computer as all my other important data -- data to/from e-mail needs a big fraction of my collection of all my data. So, right, for some of the easier, read-only work on a PC can move to a smartphone. And a smartphone has some new hardware that permits some new uses. But, replace a PC? Not for any very serious PC user. But the A16Z piece kept comparing with PCs -- and that's about as relevant as comparing with lawn mowers. It was just such a really good story -- a PC is a computer, a smartphone is a computer, a lot more smartphones are being sold than PCs, some relatively light work done on PCs can be done on smartphones, a smartphone can also be used for some new work that needs the new hardware, ergo, now the newsies and A16Z have a story -- smartphones are changing everything, including PCs. Nonsense. It's just a tricky, deceptive story. And that's a lot of what the OP had to say: A lot of that data was interesting, but, net, smartphones are no more replacing PCs than, say, an electric bicycle can replace a car. A lot of tacos are being sold, more than PCs, but that doesn't mean that tacos are replacing PCs. My simplest point: Mobile is not replacing PCs. Some people don't like me to say this, but it's just dirt simple that I'm correct. That you like the big monitors on your PC is part of the best evidence -- until there are some suitably good special glasses those big monitors will remain a big reason mobile devices won't replace PCs. Then there's the mouse, the keyboard, the printers, the old software -- dirt simple argument.