It's still cheaper to build a $450 real desktop computer (that lasts decades+) than it is to buy a $800 4 year life gimped smart phone that can't do any productive work any isn't in my control.

(And my $20 nokia dumb phone has worked perfectly since 2006 for phone calls/text.)

We're talking about the person in small-town India who has a Micromax Black Q385 spark 3, 8GB store, 1GB ram, 5.5" screen, which they bought for $50. They also get their Internet access through the cellular equivalent of a drinking straw.

(Even still, my personal guess is that this URL bar change isn't about them; it's about the desktop experience).

Also, "use a real computer" is a pretty elitist attitude that misses Google's goals overall. Google is not targeting exclusively users that have desktop machines with multiple cores and graphics accelerator cards. They want to provide internet services and internet access to people whose only portal to the web is a mobile device.

Are you seriously claiming you need all (or even just more than like 10%) of your 1920+ pixels of screen width for your Chrome extensions?

Oh, I'm not missing that. Google's software offerings are now primarily designed for bad computers with bad UI, bad network, and bad energy storage. Because people love those crappy devices and most use them primarily. We both agree.

>A shorter URL bar in the desktop allows for to take up less horizontal space,

Which really doesn't matter if you're on a desktop computer with an actual monitor. The only reason to do this is more "convergence" BS and thinking phone crutches are required on desktop.