"I am sure everyone on HN moved [from computers to smartphones] quickly"

I may be wrong, but I suspect you have that backwards. My guess is that at least older HNers were slower to shift from powerful but complex creation tools (computers) to easy consumption toys (smartphones) designed for consumers who found computers with files and folders just too darned complicated to use. Until good, portable mapping and good-enough cameras came along, I had no use for the "smart" features of a phone that were vastly inferior to the smart features of a real computer. For a long time, all I needed from a phone was the phone, which a small flip phone handled just fine. For anything "smart", I used the laptop & real camera in my backpack.

I suspect everyone is wrong, but we're all subject to an availability bias.

We assume that things we actively notice other people doing in public are representative of what everyone (or everyone in some category to which we've assigned that person) is doing. We don't notice all the people not engaging in that behavior because they're not noteworthy.

==We assume that things we actively notice other people doing in public are representative of what everyone (or everyone in some category to which we've assigned that person) is doing. We don't notice all the people not engaging in that behavior because they're not noteworthy.==

Doesn’t this comment include it’s own set of biases?

Such as?

I think that what they were getting at is that people noticing and commenting on things is more noticeable than people not doing so.

Which would imply that there's a tendency to notice the noticing more than the not noticing, and, as a consequence, over-estimate how often people do it.

It's a good point.

I really dislike the 'consumption device' label, to me it seems lazily dismissive and missing the point. Smartphones, like phones, are primarily communication devices and communication is an active process. Texting/chat, email, audio calls, Twitter, Slack, Teams, Reddit, facebook, Discord, snapchat, etc, etc are all interactive communications media people use to create content for as well as 'consume'. Yes of course they're also used to watch videos and memes, read web sites, listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Sure, but active engagement is the killer feature for these things.

Go to any commuter train on a Monday morning and look what every last one of those people seated in the car are doing.

They're consuming, not interacting. It is not lazy nor is it dismissive to suggest smartphones are largely devices that inspire consumption. It's just a proper observation.

> They're consuming, not interacting. It is not lazy nor is it dismissive to suggest smartphones are largely devices that inspire consumption.

This is also probably one of the reasons TikTok took off; it allows high quality content creation via smartphone that anyone can do.

Crashing before consuming is also why personal tech in the 80s and 90s had a very different kind of following.

If there billions of consumers and just 1 in 1000 creates something then we have millions of creators

That's neither relevant to the point under discussion (the primary function of the device), nor a valid defense of the smartphone (which should be judged on its intrinsic merits, not whether a tiny fraction of people manage to use it productively solely as a statistical consequence of Earth's vast population).

Of course they get used for that, but I think it's a mistake saying that because they are consumption devices therefore HN crowd would have limited use for them. That's not how that works. In two different people's hands the same device brings completely different value. I got an iPhone in 2008 and since then have used them heavily as communications devices and that's where the main value for me is.

The same goes for the comment about iPhones being 'designed for consumers'. They were designed to be easy to use, but that in no way means they were under powered or less capable because of those design considerations. Again, that's not how that works. Powerful or easy to use is a false dichotomy.

They're incredibly powerful tools and mistaking a major, even the major use case for being defining of the tool (therefore everyone uses it this way, or therefore that's where the main value lies, or therefore these people here wouldn't use them) is fallacious. There are 'influencers' who have built fortunes almost entirely on their phones.

> Smartphones, like phones, are primarily communication devices and communication is an active process.

Yeah… no. Maybe for some people, but I primarily use it as a consumption device. But then, I don’t use social media, I don’t answer my phone (I listen to voicemails once a day and choose whether I want to respond or not). I don’t use any work apps on my phone, like slack.

The real irony of the smartphone situation is that if you are older HNer, you will return to flip phone, real camera and laptop and never go any further, until proven FOSS solution is available on the market. Smartphones were designed from the get go as a surveillance economy devices, catered to minimal the computing needs of the mass audience.:)

Down-voting cannot remove the true of the statement.

Using corporate censored devices is not making you free or enlightened in any way. We are approaching real danger in the tech community where criticism and non-conforming to the gospel trends are becoming the norm.

You are very right.

Once you are used to the power/freedom available on a Laptop/Desktop Computer you could never get comfortable with the restrictions on a Smartphone. The latter is for less tech-savvy people and almost always used as a media consumption device.

> Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer".

I'm routinely in the same boat, though it's less about the computer and more about not fighting with a tiny monitor. Most things built for mobile are "light" versions, as easily exposing all the bells and whistles on a 6" monitor would be a UI nightmare.

Get a larger screen and a keyboard (bluetooth typically), and you'll still find you're fighting the platform.

- Memory management means that whatever application you're using at any given moment can vanish, with all its user state.

- Applications are crippled versions of full-desktop variants, where they exist at all. E.g., FennecFox vs. the Firefox browser. Support for user-empowering extensions is limited.

- You. Will. Not. Have. Root. Some devices are rootable. Many are not. This means that whole sections of the OS are not available to you.

- Information is siloed into applicationd databases (inaccessable on the device, since You. Will. Not. Have. Root. --- or worse, maintained on some distant cloud server.)

- The OS itself is not upgradable by you. Android device vendors often provide absolutely no post-purchase OS updates.

- Even power kits are very third-class citizens. Termux, The Only Android App That Does Not Precisely Suck[TM], is useful and powerful but its 1,400 packages are only a minuscule fraction of those available on a full Linux system (Debian contains over 60,000 packages), and are limited in functionality as You. Will. Not. Have. Root.

Numerous affordances and capabilities are simply missing or buggy as all hell.

Using an ebook reader, as an example, with an external keyboard, I cannot enter a space character into a search field as that scrolls the screen rather than editing the search dialogue. Just one of many, many, many cuts in a death by thousands.

Source: Have used Android for over a decade, tablets for over five years.

You think it's the tiny monitor, but it's really the primitive UI designed for caveman-style point-and-grunt. I've been using a GPD Micro PC extensively over the past few months, which is equipped with a 6" screen, but also - critically - a touchpad and physical thumb keyboard. Guess what, I can do programming, CAD, image editing, the works - everything you can do on a larger machine.

The Micro PC proves that we were sold a myth; that dumbed-down UIs were a necessary evil to enjoy computers in our pockets. They aren't. Pocket sized laptops work amazingly.

The apotheosis of the netbook? How does it perform with external keyboard, mouse and monitor?

Edit: I've been a fan of the netbook concept since well before the term was coined, when the Toshiba Portegé first came out. But my experiences with them, like everyone else, were disappointing. I'd love it if these new units had good performance.

I mean, it's a quad core mobile Intel with 8 gigabytes. It feels snappy. It runs KDE Plasma. Thermals aren't spectacular, and you won't be running any AAA games on it, but it's vastly more capable than the netbooks of yore. I tend to keep it throttled to 6 watts, which means I can keep the fan off all the time.

That's interesting to me because I've been seeing some people impatient for the PinePhone external keyboard, but I've felt strong doubts I'd use one much.

You might be right. Having also spent time with the Cosmo Communicator, I can vouch that a phone with a keyboard isn't the same thing as a phone-sized laptop. Apart from the hostile platform (which hopefully wouldn't be an issue on the PinePhone), two aspects that make the phone less practical for desktop software are the extremely high aspect ratio, and the lack of any sort of mouse input beyond poking at the screen. These things significantly compromise the desktop experience.

However, I will also say that a touch-type keyboard on a phone is still awesome, and I will certainly be buying a PinePhone+keyboard when it comes out. I live in forlorn hope for the day I can evict Android from my life entirely (the Micro PC does not, alas, make phone calls).

Thanks for spelling out some issues.

Yeah, the inherent fatness of fingers problem. And the lack of buttons on those fingers other-problem.

Looking at the resolutions, 1280x720 vs 1440x720, I would have just expected the phone experience not to feel terribly different. Of course it remains to be seen how much the PinePhone software adapts to landscape in wake of the keyboards coming.

Tiny monitor, obnoxious keyboard. I haven't enjoyed typing on a phone since I reluctantly (that word took me 5 tries) set down my Lumia 920 Windows phone.

Also my mouse is (insert big number) times more precise than my index finger.

I use a NexDock from time to time for this; some of my Galaxy S20's stock software scales pretty well to a full-size display as they expect you to use one.

I don't think I'd make my phone my primary machine despite this until Linux phones are daily-driver ready for me though. The mobile OS is still too limiting.

(That and while the NexDock is serviceable, its touchpad is awful. Good enough to use occasionally, but I wouldn't want to be stuck with it as my main machine.)

The existence of the tablet shows that it's not the device size but rather the app experience that's the limiting factor.

I've tried using an iPad but it's no match for the power, control and flexibility of a full desktop/laptop device, and the larger iPad has an even bigger screen than some smaller notebooks.

> Most things built for mobile are "light" versions.

The good sites are :)

The not so good ones "force" you to download an app with no alternative and require obtrusive permissions even though all you want to know is the answer to a quick question.

> I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly, but for the rest of the non-tech world I am sure they were doing just fine using their home computer for several more years.

A whole generation of people in India never used Computers as the western population did but large majority of same people directly moved to smartphones.

>Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer".

Of all the things that makes me prefer a proper computer, the shenanigans that devs do with various SDKs that are privacy invading pieces of shit have put me off of trusting any apps. Because of the all of the information that makes a mobile device so convenient to use is precisely the data that makes privacy invading data collection so desirable, it will be imposible to ever make it a serious compute platform for me.

For me, the mobile platform is primarily used as the Bar Bet Settler 5000(TM).

>We didn't all shift to to smartphones the instant they became available.

Oh, yes we did. Within 3 years (say 2007-2010) it was game over for feature-phones for the mass population, whereas the state of web APIs was still bad.

I feel you have this completely backwards. I think for the vast majority of non-tech users, the smartphone was their first everyday computer.

Anecdotally, that's not what I witnessed for family members 30+, but it has been the case for the younger generation (< 20).

A vast majority of young adults had their own everyday computers before smartphones. Today young adults gets smartphones instead, yes, but that didn't use to be true.

Kids use computers regularly at school from a very young age.

What transition? Mobile is the lite version.

This. I can even give a concrete example of it. I noticed a charge to my bank account from Amazon and knew I didn’t buy anything. I went to the Amazon app and saw there were no orders. I thought maybe my prime renewed today so o tried to find that on mobile. I could not find it easily so I immediately went to my laptop and found it in 2 clicks via the Amazon website. To me the web is really great when there is enough screen real estate to keep information out of nested menus.

> I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly

This is me. For years my employer offered to get me a phone, but I declined. Why would I want a mobile phone. I don’t want people to get ahold of me whenever they want. But, then that first iPhone came out that was actually a full-fledged computer with phone capabilities on the side. I immediately jumped on that.