One contributing factor to that statistic it that the phone lifecycle is a lot shorter than the desktop/laptop lifecycle. Also desktops and laptops are more likely to be shared between family members. The point is people still have access to and use traditional computers.

While this must be true for a sizeable part of the population, more and more people also don’t ever touch a desktop/laptop or only use the one at work.

Unsurprisingly, the latter case gets truer for low computer litteracy adults for who investing in a decent smartphone has a better ROI than buying a meh phone with a cheap laptop.

Anecdotally we bought our aging parents each an ipad two years ago.

They were decent but not that proficient at Windows, but got comfortable very fast at viewing/saving photos, printing, email/messaging and browsing on the ipad.

From there they gave up on their budget “my carrier gave it for free” phone to move to the iphone Xr and started doing all of the above on their phones most of the time. The laptop is now a third rank device they use to check their savings once a month.

In your anecdote, your parents weren't really using their PC before they got the iPad. I think this is true of a lot of people who are smartphone-only today. Android and iOS are expanding to a market that PCs never really got to.

They were using their PC. But begrudginly, getting annoyed by the updates, virus warnings, us perstering them to switch browsers etc.

For most of their lifes PC were the only way to do some tasks, including photo management (and we were sharing them tons and tons of photo, they also filled SD card fter SD cards in the summer), and it’s only recently (basically the ipad Pro) that looking at us they though they could give it a try.

> While this must be true for a sizeable part of the population, more and more people also don’t ever touch a desktop/laptop or only use the one at work.

I have a hard time believing this, do you have any studies to back this up?

OTOH considering Termux popularity, you may say that general purpose computing on Android is growing rapidly.

I still spend 80% of my workday on a PC running windows. So not sure I agree.

Oh well, if YOU spend 80% of your workday on a PC then it must be true for everyone.

Please don't be snarky here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So does every office worker.

Most office workers could get away with a Chromebook, I'm surprised this hasn't caught on in offices yet.

Might be different in the US given popularity of Apple software, but in the rest of the world, Microsoft Office suite is a fundamental tool in almost every office. I don't think it'll run on a Chromebook.

(And I mean the desktop version. O365 is dumbed down half-way to Google's Office Suite level - which is cool for an occasional document or spreadsheet, but is lacking both features and efficiency for professional use.)

Depends on the use case. I work for a MSP and I do almost all my office work in GSuite on the web. The only thing I fire up LibreOffice for is dealing with CSV files which are a pain in GSuite.

99% of my job requires nothing more than a web browser and a terminal with a SSH client. The remainder is mostly Wireshark.

> Depends on the use case.

Indeed it does. At her last-1 job, my wife could probably do most of the spreadsheet-related stuff in GSuite, except for that one spreadsheet that brought desktop Excel to its knees, and would totally explode the browser if you've ever tried it.

My experience from watching other people and occasional summer jobs is mixed. Some of the stuff you technically could manage on GSuite. Others you wouldn't, not because the files were too big/complex, but because the office computers were underpowered.

Oh well if office workers in YOUR company get away with using a chromebook then it must be true for everyone.

Considering the majority of work computing is done on desktops I'm not sure it will be replaced by iOS or Android any time soon.

We need a proper keyboard, and a bigger screen, at a bigger distance. I can't look at my phone too long. My eyes start to tear up and the pain is horrible. A tablet won't be much better if you hold it in your hand - same distance as the phone. I can understand that many people use a tablet for work, but not for 6-8 hours a day.

And just as the Mac Mini is a laptop without screen and keyboard, the latest Macbooks are more and more iPads with a good keyboard. Well, good keyboards is questionable even these days...

iOS doesn't use Linux and on Android userspace doesn't actually see it.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

So it is meaningless.

There's more than one Android userspace.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/packag...

Which isn't fully POSIX, breaks down with every Android release that clamps down security, and most of it is just plain ISO C, ISO C++ and OpenGL, hardly Linux specific.

True for iOS that it isn’t based on Linux. But iOS is based on MacOS and MacOS is real certified Unix.

None of them have anything to do with Linux, given that I was replying about "Linux desktop" here.

Second, iOS being based on UNIX hardly matters, no one is doing shell scripts and writing UNIX daemons on it.

Thirdly, no one was talking about macOS on that comment,.

Finally, even if you want to bring macOS into the picture, while macOS is a proper UNIX, what matters for Apple community developers lives in C++, Objective-C and Swift libraries, hardly POSIX related.