Obsolete is a bit of an exaggeration. As far as I know, almost all programming (including for mobile devices) is still done with a keyboard and a mouse, and I honestly don't see this changing anytime soon (the only way I personally can see changing this is if voice recognition combined with enough AI to make dictating instructions to a computer a reality... or if a visual programming environment actually succeeds, despite its historically lousy track record except for certain niches).

This is also as far as I know still true for a lot of other productivity-type uses of computers -- even though mobile and tablets are also used in some of this space, they often seem more auxiliary. Most of the serious professional tools for, say, business (eg spreadsheets, accounting, inventory, etc.) or even artistic uses (music, photo editing, etc.) also are primarily keyboard / mouse oriented. Tablet oriented tools definitely exist (especially in the art space), but a lot of times its not a primary use case, except perhaps in communication tools.

Mobile space is a walled garden, designed more simply for limited real estate and touch, with more difficulty to poke around (there is no real equivalent in the mobile world to open a web site, hit F12, and poke around). That's fine -- PCs / laptops haven't disappeared, and if a kid showed an interest in programming, you'd get them one. :)

Now, the original poster may have been referring to the new world of social. I did more enjoy the long form of social (eg blogs) that popped up in the 00s. Versus the current social world, dominated by only a few firms that are highly motivated to manipulate your feed, tweak your emotions, and optimize the dispersion of ads (and other low-quality tabloid junk). It's my "old man yells at cloud" pet peeve, I suppose. Not exactly a mobile device problem, though.

Development (in basically every variety) has always been a niche use of computers. It's the niche that produces all the software that everyone else uses, of course, but most people aren't going to program a computer, outside of (perhaps) some school class that'll touch on it.

Productivity's less niche, but it's becoming more and more realistic to imagine someone using a tablet with attached keyboard as their sole computing device (besides the omnipresent smart phone, I mean).

I'd say that the input method doesn't matter so much, although it's interesting to talk about how the commonly used devices are shifting. I'm more worried about native software development sliding into impossibility and content-creation becoming an afterthought.

> Obsolete is a bit of an exaggeration. As far as I know, almost all programming (including for mobile devices) is still done with a keyboard and a mouse, and I honestly don't see this changing anytime soon...

How many programmers and developers are there vs consumers? The traditional keyboard and mouse interface is dying in consumer space. Sure it will live on in business and content creation, but the majority of development going forward is pushing people onto mobile reinforcing it as the standard for interfacing to a computer.

I think there are quite a bit more consumers than is obvious at first glance. I am currently surrounded by a hundred or so non-technical people typing away at their work computers. Not sure if those will be replaced by touch interfaces anytime soon.

When a new interface comes on the scene, and assuming that people won't add more hours to their computer time, it can't help but cannibalize time spent on other interfaces. Halfway through that process it's really easy to project that line until it is 100% of all interface usage anywhere.

But here in 2018, we really ought to all have a pretty clear idea of why touch screens are in no danger of displacing mice and keyboards 100%. It's pretty obviously not going to happen, and not particularly mysterious why.

In other news, phone-based gaming is also obviously not going to kill dedicated consoles anytime soon.

In other, other news, see also why touch screens need not fear being entirely replaced by voice-based computer usage. In much the same way that touch screens didn't, can't, and won't completely replace other higher-bandwidth ways of interacting with computers, voice has those same problems w.r.t. touchscreens even more so. You can get a nice boost on the bandwidth in the computer input direction, but you get annihilated on the bandwidth coming back out compared to a screen. There is no other computer IO mechanism that so thoroughly lacks bandwidth back to the human as a voice interface, short of a plain flashing light on a physical console. (Which, actually, if the human knows Morse code or something, could damn near keep up with the voice interface on the bandwidth front. That's how bad voice interfaces are on the output bandwidth.)

As long as they don't totally lock computing down with Trusted Platform Modules and walled gardens and touch-only input, as long as we can still write Turing-complete code, we'll be the old men and women still being much faster and better at traversing the Internet clouds than the regular population.

We'll be the last guerillas in the long-lost War on General Purpose Computing.

TPM isn’t about locking down machines - they’re about enabling the user (who is always in control) to establish a trust chain for software on the machine - and to serve as a secure store for cryptographic secrets so they become inaccessible from the rest of the system.

You can have lock-out without the TPM anyway - like the pre-Fingerprint reader iPhones.

TPM technically isn't about locking users out, but will be (is) used this way - between enterprise customers and MAFIAA's desire for DRM, it's pretty much a given. It's a tool in the War on General Purpose Computing. Alone not enough to win it, and sure, theoretically useful for both sides, but for the enemies of general purpose computing it's an important cog in their war machine.

QubesOS uses this tool to give users and device owners (not vendors) control, e.g. Anti Evil Maid.