A lot of lower income people might only have a cheap android phone.

It's more than enough to handle paying bills, applying for jobs, etc. Hell, a Bluetooth keyboard and a bit of grit + GitHub CodeSpaces and you can write develop applications.

You can also cast your screen to a TV or on a handful of phones use USB c to HDMI.

A large plurality of young people rarely use a laptop if they’re not so called knowledge workers, most everything can be done by phone. Maybe clubhouse style group audio chats will make a comeback and people will jump on the ambient computing trend as clearly better than interacting with screens all day

The screen itself isn't really the problem people are talking about when they refer to "too much screen time". Suddenly having the screen be your entire field of vision sounds like an even worse situation for the average person's attention.

Totally agree as far as AR goggles but the meta glasses have no screen, they’re just a voice in your ear

It always seems insane to me when people book plane tickets, do taxes, banking, writing email and stuff like that on a phone. That's big screen tasks, you can't do those on your phone, not enough space to navigate safely.

All of this will be done by AI soon.

Yes, I’m sure you’ll be able to blame AI when you are prosecuted for tax fraud because your return was full of hallucinations and lies.

Not just young people, I see a lot of elderly adults using tablets and phones as their primary computing device. They're cheaper and more user-friendly if you don't care about performance or multitasking. At the same price, a tablet is a far better choice than a laptop.

If you are afraid of technology, Android or iPadOS is lightyears ahead of Windows or MacOS.

I’m not sure how to respond to your post, because it seems to ignore the vast majority of mine, including the parts that look at pretty similar ideas to what you’ve brought up.

Well, I wasn't sure how to respond to yours missing the entire conceit of the post before it, so I guess we're even.

I don’t think I missed anything. Maybe if I’d only posted the bit you quoted that would make sense.

But I also don’t think either of us is gaining anything through this interaction, so... shrug

You're missing the fact that the original comparison with laptops was a bit tongue in cheek

I don’t think I missed anything. But maybe my post was not very clear?

The post I was responding to clearly meant “like smartphones replaced […] laptops,” which is to say, they don’t think AR glasses will replace smartphones (because smartphones didn’t completely replace laptops). I get that.

Then I pointed out that smartphones did more-or-less replace a number of other electronic devices. And there are some reasons they didn’t fully replace laptops. Then I went on to think about the niches that could exist should AR glasses become a major thing.

> which is to say, they don’t think AR glasses will replace smartphones (because smartphones didn’t completely replace laptops). I get that.

I actually read it as "it will be a replacement in some ways, but also very much not be a replacement in many other ways"