Their iPads may have limits on their functionality, but as a result of their simplicity, they enable my parents to control a lot more of their computing experience.

They rent movies, read books, use RSS (!) via Flipboard, edit photos, install apps (previously they would never install software) and - most importantly - they experiment with new things. Unlike the old PCs, which they'd become more fearful of with every inevitable fault or virus, with their iPads they can just hit the home button.

For you and I, you're right - mobile can be limiting. But don't underestimate the power of mobile for those previously intimidated by computers.

There is some theoretical sense in which a user of free software has a lot of control, including the power to change it. Software being free can have a lot of indirect benefits to the user, but ultimately practical "power" is a function of what you can practically do with it, and that is very different from what the thing can theoretically do.

Apple probably has motives for the app store other than making user experiences simple. But, they also really have the goal (and the effect) of making the user experience easier, which puts more real power into real hands. If the below median user can install a photo sharing app to see her nieces photo collage, that's real power in users hands.

Also, I think being strict and abstract about "exclusively to advance the interests of its owner" is losing a lot of important texture. First, very few technological benefits go exclusively to anyone. They go to users, vendors, various other users and vendors. A lot of them get released into the ether as externality vapors, like productivity or ideas for new technology.

The reality of the current state of computing is interesting, but it's very hairy and hard to grasp and boil down to simple abstractions. When we use our phones, we are interacting with other people, generating data/content on other people's phones, in various databases to the benefit of a bunch of people/companies. When you are using your navigation app, generating data about traffic, you are benefiting the app, other osiers. Possibly future users. Possibly that data will be sued in other ways. Maybe a construction company will buys it to plan new roads (and win a contract) which will benefit the city… Maybe someone's girlfriend will one day have it beamed to her implant to estimate when Brian will arrive.

Is this bad because it's not to the exclusive benefit of the user? The benefit to the user would not even be possible with this mesh of stuff.

You are right that people don't care about control as much as an idea of it. And you are also right that giving control to someone else who can get a value out of you might result in you being able to do more, but at some point having no control over ones life will bite people in the ass. And that's what the control topic is about.

In a simple example Apple can decide to not show the books to your parents any more. There is nothing they can do about it. Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but then it's much less likely that a software can delete your data or if they delete it you are more likely to have a backup because you put sweat into configuring your system that way.

It doesn't just take more time; once something is sufficiently difficult, it goes from incrementally time-consuming to insurmountable (for most people) -- it might as well not exist.

They still won't have ultimate control, but you will. This is certainly a tradeoff (a personal relationship has more motives for violating trust), but depending on your relationship it can be a great way to distribute control away from ApplNSAoogle.

On the other hand, it gives us things like AWD, so people don't need to be afraid of when they should use 4WD or when doing so might damage their car. It's automatic. It allows people with disabilities to operate a car, since they don't need to shift or use both feet on the pedals. It's automatic. You can hook up your iPhone and play music from it without touching the phone. It's automatic. And even slippery weather isn't as deadly anymore with automatic traction control.

So no, I can't rip my car down to the chassis and count every bolt. But I can drive a car in a far more safe manner, a car with far more power and far more convenience. There's two types of "control" at play. One is a mechanical control where I could tear down my Toyota 4Runner SUV with 180hp (a small amount of power) and put it back together as a Tacoma pickup. The other is the knowledge that if I hit a slippery patch in my Nissan Murano with 260hp (a huge amount of power), I will continue on just fine even with more power under the hood while the Tacoma driver is in the ditch wishing he had known to engage 4WD at that second. The news will report that the Tacoma driver "lost control" of his car, whereas the Murano driver "stayed in control".

Now that's a bleak picture, sure. I'm just using it to illustrate a point. There are two types of control. You'd never give root access to an average user. So does the Linux computer actually give them any more control? Or are you just giving them a Tacoma and locking it in 4WD for their own safety? If you give them a Corvette and then tell them to be careful or they will spin out and die, they will never let the RPMs go above 2k.

Facebooks also works that way, now that I think about it. It takes control away over your data, but it enables you to interact with more people, which may improve your control over your connections.

Could we agree on that?

For the record, I use a Linux laptop at work. When I get home, I enjoy sitting down with an iPad and an Xbox for entertainment. I have a 16 year old truck for the weekends and a brand new Fiat for my daily driver. I understand both sides of the argument, and they're both valid.

That said, I don't mind consuming digital volatile goods - there are very few books I re-read and I usually acquire paper copy of those.

Depending on what kinds of books his parents read those might result in more control too. Even if we account for a loss of control from the computer to the iPad (and I am not entirely convinced that a practical loss happens, given that they can barely use the computer) it isn't possible that the total amount of control, for his parents, go back up.

As a naif and something of a technophobe, she definitely did benefit from moving from Windows to OSX (back in the late XP days), but iOS left her cold.

I think historically user has lost once, seriously Linux never delivered the promised land for more mass users. I would be more interested if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations. Unless there is an alternative, I hardly doubt there will be any change in status quo.

I use open office, and it's a good example I think. If we didn't have MS office, would we have open office? would it be as good?

If Firefox OS succeeds, would it ever have been made without the smartphone market having already been defined?

This is impossible. All co-operation has biases, for profit or for another reason, everything comes with "strategy-taxes".

http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children? "

After 7 years, we know clearly now tablets/phones and mobile apps are the answers for that question for the present.

So yeah, mobile is limiting but it doesn't have to be. Once you venture outside of Apple's cold embrace, many things are possible.

However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.

Some of it is there- for example, I wrote an app that performs geodetic math that was supercomputer-only in the 60's- but in general, folding proteins and simulating physics in your pocket is not useful to Joe Smartphone.

When the economic model is advertising and data tracking, the types of apps/services that are available are the ones that work best with advertising and data tracking. And it turns out that consumer-oriented social sharing services fit that model pretty well. So that's mostly what we have.

Those services do have value. But I think it's limited. When I walk into a cafe with a beautiful view and everyone is on their phones, or when people awkwardly scroll through Twitter at a group event instead of enjoying the world around them or interacting with strangers....I dont see people gaining value. Especially when it's children doing it. I see compulsive addictive behaviour that erodes human value for the benefit of advertising companies.

If people would pay for value, startups would spring up to capture that. That's actually what we see in the SaaS business. Consumer entertainment has always been a hard sell, which is why the radio and TV businesses were also ad-supported.

One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies. So in a sense this do fit the theme OP raised.

BTW, with connectivity - the distinction between smartphone and server is little. Even weak phones have supercomputers at their disposal.

Really? Is there any large discussion forum that doesn't have ads? Reddit, SomethingAwful, they all make their income slapping ads near discussions.

Information isn't being hoovered up at the cost of billions of dollars without a very good reason for doing so.

Still, it seems a matter imagination. If our personal computers have tremendous (and accelerating) power, there's few actual limits to where we can take them. The deck even has a slide that talks about pulling components off the shelf and playing lego with them.

I think it's prudent to consider whether the average person is, all things considered, empowered by our Internet-connected computers. If so, great. If not, or not enough, then how?

Receiving information seems much more valuable than giving it. After all, information has a price. If giving is not so great, shouldn't we be a little concerned about the consequences of trading away so much of it? Information asymmetry strikes me as the root of many power imbalances.

So, if we want more _value_ out of our "pocket supercomputers", it seems we have to consider the overall value proposition. Then perhaps we can figure out how to do better.

The problem with information is that it's only valuable in context. Scientific computing has given us wonderful breakthroughs, but it needs lab equipment, it needs data collection, it needs trained scientists, it needs theories and hypotheses to test. Computing was developed to break Nazi codes; the Enigma machine may have been the star of the show, but it also depended upon radio intercepts, field operatives, dispatch runners, generals, soldiers in the trenches, people who built fighter planes, etc. - and it obviously wouldn't have been useful had we not been at war. Similarly, most of the consumer data that's vacuumed up is only useful in the context of a task that millions of consumers want to do.

You're right that there's a power imbalance in the distribution of this information. The problem is that this power imbalance doesn't exist because of the information, it exists because of the context in which the information is collected and applied. Find a context where information can let you deliver a better product than competitors, and it's easily worth billions of dollars. But the information on its own - minus the product design, minus everybody else's information, minus the brand name and distribution channel and user adoption - is worth zero. It's already possible to siphon off and redirect all data that is being sent to Facebook & Google's servers on your behalf and save it to use on your own personal behalf. The problem is - it's useless. Without everyone else's data, there's nothing you can do with it.

I'd say the ability to make relevant predictions is a form of power.

Why is it a forgone impossibility for an individual to possess tools to capture similar value from their own information? Does self-knowledge hold no value? In my experience, changes in behavior (such as to better align with your own goals/interests) are often triggered by a clear and quantified message from a trusted source. Why not make this source your own information and your own computer?

Sure, what Facebook has is lower quality and harder to process than we might prefer, but there's nothing stopping us from collecting and structuring our own information in more appropriate ways, then layering on interfaces and algorithms, and then simply doing better than anyone else can. Because it's ours.

So the We is We hackers, who can design and build new information-contexts with different value propositions and power dynamics. And it's also We thinkers who can put together the reasoning behind such efforts. And We as regular people, who want more joy and less pain, with less effort.

Their existing roles have value! But there is a sense of leaving something untapped, when you use them only as dumb terminals. A sense of, what am I missing?

It does make sense to carry the things that comprise a "smart phone" (as above, +powerful cpu that can scale down to conserve power, gpu, screen/hud/display, camera(s), low-power local-area digital radio (eg: bluetooth), touchscreen (or drawing surface/digitizer), text-input (keyboard), gps, interface for connecting 4k+ display, possibly direct-attached storage), along with a headset, preferably wireless.

I just don't see why this should all be forced into one unit. I'm not sure how much power miracast would require -- but could it really be more than what the led-lit touch-screen uses? Because surely it'd be easier to have big battery+wlan/miracast/bluetooth/cpu stuffed in your pocket, and a small display+touch+bluetooth device on your wrist, with the option to pull out a phablet-sized hi-res touch-screen with it's own battery, but only miracast+bluetooth (maybe a gpu)?

The "smart stick" (the smarphone less the camera/screen/mic) could probably be made to fit more nicely in a pocket if there was no need for a display.

Shape it like a rod, add a powerful vibrator and the thing would even be dual-use ;-) (seriously, though - if it's intended to be kept in a pocket, a vibrator might make sense, as well as a couple of status leds).

The screen is going to be a bit clunky anyway (unless it folds/rolls up) - so no real issue to add a dedicated battery for it.

Maybe I should file a patent for "smart rod".

But how come heads-up displays have never come to market in a serious way? I'm not counting Glass, by the way, given the focus on sharing rather than using.

I recall one pioneer from MIT bashed glass, pointing to his experience with having a single image in a different focus area/off-center as being uncomfortable for prolonged used (or maybe even harmful).

So that might be one reason (similar to how everyone realized in the 90s that VR made people throw up -- no market).

As for a smart-rod -- I really liked Canonical's push towards a viable use-as-phone-use-as-computer OS. It's an obvious idea that I think is already "proven" by stick-pcs and chromebooks. The cpu of a previous-generation smart-phone is enough for many tasks.

Another "proof" is what's happening with Samsung's Gear VR IMNHO, eg: http://vrjam.challengepost.com/updates/3462-meet-your-mobile...

Not sure if VR might not actually be an area where going wireless might break down though -- Oculus has spent a lot of effort getting the latency down. Still it seems it should be possible to do a lot of the 3d stuff along with head tracking in the head-set, and do more complicated physics modelling on a more powerful device.

Either way, I'm hopeful that we'll see more meaningful separation of devices as bluetooth (as I understand it) keeps getting support for lower power in one end, and higher bandwidth in the other.

So no, I don't see that as ever being a desirable model for mobile computing. Maybe for some specialised tasks, but for general pocket computing, the power is better placed locally, not remotely.

No. You and I might want a long battery life, but 'the market' has decided that battery life is way down the list, below 'look like an latest iphone'.

The market has standardized on shiny glass brick, as thick as a pancake, and tiny batteries to match. Batteries that are less than 3,000 mAh and that barely last a day, two days, tops.

If the market thought an excellent battery life were important, there would be phones an inch thick, with a 10,000 mAh battery that lasted a week instead of the latest generation featuring 8-core, 64-bit, gigahertz+ processors.

Economics always wins. Unfortunately, economics is not always on your side.

I'm sure that lots of cool distributed computing stuff is doable. But I'm not much interested until it's securable.

For those who think I'm crazy, consider what company would accept smartphone-like security for its servers. And OK, upon reflection, some apparently do. But my point stands.

Also does the app rely on a server to do the processing? As many F2P and online games do.

Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology.

The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a payphone (and pay a fortune if you were out of the area). Good luck if you blew a tire. But back then, more people were inclined to stop off and help because of this very problem. Again, society was very different back then.

People take for granted the fact that you now have all the world's information and entertainment at your fingertips. I know because I take it for granted myself and I know what the world was like before our current technology. I'm in my late 30s. If I take it for granted from time to time, how can someone who never knew a life without internet & cell phones appreciate what they have?

I know this sounds a bit preachy, and I didn't really mean for it to come across that way, but I find myself echoing Louis CK sentiment on technology and today's youth. His bit here really struck a chord with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

Removing compilers - and indeed, software tools in general - from the requirements for a base operating system is the reason we have these disproportionate power cycles in our computing world. The compiler is the single most important application an Operating System can run - yet it is is denied first-class membership in the system image these days.

Alas, this circumstance came about in order to create an artificial scarcity of people who can make computers do things. If the compiler is onboard - anyone can learn to use it and then use it, and they don't "need developers". Removing the most powerful tool in an Operating System in order to create this condition, has crippled forward progress.

If this ever changes, I expect to be seeing a lot better software out there. But as it stands right now, developers of platforms don't want broadly-accessible and easy to use developer tools to be available to all and sundry.

This omission is really just a class battle in disguise.

Bring back the compiler as a first-class tool!

Our current systems are simply not designed to be extended and modified by non-experts. Even in a system like Smalltalk, where that was one of the explicit goals, it doesn't really seem to have worked out. Having the compiler and software tools accessible is only small part of the solution.

Yes, that is exactly the point - and it is by design, not nature.

>anyone can learn to use it and then use it

Well, this has been the case so far - or were those of us fortunate enough to have become software developers only able to attain such lofty states by chance, luck and/or good breeding? Because if that is your position: bollocks. Anyone can learn to read, and write, computer code. All it takes is the intention on the part of the learner to do so .. however when that option is denied them, because OS vendors do everything they can to profit from separated Developer tools, then it is a matter of one intention being greater than the other.

Certainly, anyone who wants to learn to write software, can. But don't kid yourself that there haven't been huge stumbling blocks put in their way in order to make the whole subject more specialized. That is a matter of economic reality at this point.

I agree that most motivated learners could pick up some very basic software skills, and those would be beneficial to them. In a utopian world basic programming skills would be treated the same as basic literacy and numeracy. However, at this point in time, it seems to me that most users don't care (maybe because they don't know what they're missing). As an analogy, most people could learn basic knife skills in a couple of hours and be much more productive in the kitchen with a chef's knife than they are now with the huge array of inferior point tools (cheap dull knives, garlic slicer, chopper, egg slicer, etc.). However there is obviously a big market for the latter. Similarly, I'm not sure extensible and modifiable systems have enough attraction to the average user.

Another reason for closed systems, one which I think is more important than the profit motive, is that designing extensible and modifiable systems is really hard and comes with trade-offs. E.g. Squeak (a Smalltalk dialect) allows you to inspect and modify almost everything in the system while it runs, but that also means that is really easy to screw up the system behind repair (e.g. you can switch every boolean in the running system by evaluating 'true become: false') and that supporting users of such systems becomes much harder. I am not aware of any system that has a solution to this.

There are also plenty of WebIDEs nowadays that people can use out of the box - we are not in the 90s anymore, when all software had to be "installed" to be readily available.

I don't believe you can acquire a C compiler for the iPad without buying an actual computer. At which point, why get the iPad again?

With just JS, it's a toy. A powerful toy, yes, but it's a small subset of what's possible with a computer, and one that leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.

You can even run Debian -with plenty of its software, like Apache, Nginx and MySQL- on (some) Android devices.

It's not enough to have a compiler, we need a simpler scripting language as well so anyone can create throwaway web apps. We need a Tcl or Perl for Android and iOS.

http://www.androwish.org

I have a feeling that the utility of the fast CPU is limited to providing responsive reactions to a moving finger. A bit disappointing really.

I shoot, edit, and uploaded video at least 100x faster than when I got started with Premiere and a $8000 PC. It's amazing!

One exciting technology I hope more app developers take advantage of is remoteStorage.

https://remotestorage.io/

It's basically an open spec for something similar to the Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, with open-source implementations that anyone can host. The official client library has some fairly robust offline-first sync'ing capabilities, and also happens to be relatively backend agnostic, being able to act as an interface for either the remoteStorage API itself, or the actual Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, as well as the Google Drive equivalents (although the latter two are under heavy development and probably not production-ready). This allows your users to choose the storage service they want to use for your app without you having to implement all 3 interfaces (and if they choose remoteStorage, be able to host their own storage instance or use one hosted by someone they trust).

I'm prototyping a distributed app right now that uses remoteStorage to enable multi-client sync and simultaneous logins. I believe this approach strikes a fairly good balance, giving users the privacy and service mobility offered by distributed software, as well as the usability and convenience offered by centralized software.

The only thing I feel they're sorely missing is a transparent encryption layer on top of the Datastore API (and possibly for Files too, though I'm not sure how feasible this is). I ended up implementing this part myself for the app I'm working on, but I feel it's unreasonable to expect every developer to reimplement something as essential and error-prone as cryptography.

However, decentralized systems are also much more complex to build. So far, decentralized approaches in most use cases provide too little value for most users to really make sense economically. Privacy, fault-tolerance are certainly very important aspects. Unfortunately, in general most people couldn't care less. Despite some public outrage the NSA, GCHQ and the BND are still very much in business and doing as fine as ever.

Are there any applications particularly amenable to a decentralized approach? Quite likely. Is a decentralization a generally applicable model of the way we do our networking? I'm not so sure about that. Having a decentralized social network for instance would be some achievement but what benefit would it provide to the not-so-privacy-minded?

The FreeNet model is just ahead of its time: fully encrypted and fully decentralized using separate apps/plugins on the client-side to make sure it's always decentralized.

One issue with client-side decentralization has been how to pass things around to other clients when your main machine/box/mobile device is off. So you need carriers/exchanges that pass them around; in SaaS the client and data are stored on one server; with decentralization the data is stored on the client and on an exchange. Instead of being a server provider, you'll be a client provider coupled with a data host and you can just outsource that to S3 or some other data host provider.

I think both are interesting, but I don't see them forming a global interconnected network capable of delivering symmetric gigabit to 10 billion people (not that the Internet of today does that either -- yet).

I suppose local 802.11-whatever community networks might be connected in metro-/internets with high-bandwidth point-to-point links -- but it seems likely that they'd end up connected to the Internet -- perhaps on the ipv6 Internet.

Either way, hopefully internet access will continue to evolve like a utility, like electricity and water.

Why? any specific reason?

Still we have uber capable thingies doing nothing. We don't need faster, we need to teach what they can do to people and let them have it their way.

And if not, why?

My guess is that it would cost too much, without the commodification of our private information. Just like the web.

    >My guess is that it would cost too much, without the commodification of our private information.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/22/uber-ftc-p...

If our smartphones worked like this, and we'd benefit more from better information, then we'd also have a pretty good reason to develop advanced information-centric UIs and focus a bit more on security and trust.

However, I am encouraged by the fact that people paid many thousands of dollars in the '80's and 90's to purchase PC's. They were much harder to use, much less powerful, and yet because these PC's represented either a competitive advantage or a novelty, the price was paid. No Internet, but a heckuva lot more control and trust than now.

If a similar value proposition pops up again, somehow de-commodifying or replacing the standard PC design (smartphone or otherwise), I suspect we'll see a similar willingness to pay a premium.

Perhaps a more appropriate question is not so much if anyone is building a smartphone (from a hardware definition) so much as is anyone building an operating system which runs on commonly available smartphone devices which does not employ these tactics?

> And if not, why?

I'm certain there are efforts in motion which seek to establish a viable choice for many smartphone owners in what their devices run.

As to "the commodification of our private information", well, I have to ask: why accept this in the first place?

The baseband is a huge security hole. The provider in large part owns the device, regardless of what software it's running.

> ... so much as is anyone building an operating system which runs on commonly available smartphone devices which does not employ these tactics?

I can live with Linux ;)

It will be possible to run with completely FLOSS software (including drivers) and it even solves the problem of the baseband modem having full control over the main CPU/memory.

[1] http://neo900.org/

Now if they accepted Bitcoins ...

But hey, I'll ask.

In the US at least, this is not the case:

https://www.fcc.gov/device-unlocking-faq

The cellular provider no more "owns the device" than the cable company "owns your TV."

> I can live with Linux ;)

But you are not living with Linux. You are living with Android ;-).

I'm not living with Android. I'm waiting for Linux.

Edit: I don't mean "own" literally, financially. I mean "own" in the sense of access and control. So yes, I can root "my" device, but I can't root the baseband radio.

http://kali4hackers.blogspot.com/2013/09/install-kali-linux-...

And yes, one can run Linux. But you're still running the Android kernel :(

If that couldn't crank up our creativity, nothing could.

I'm up for learning though :-).

Inputs would be the actions you take in life (choices you've made) and how they relate to your goals (which depend on actions). Output would be an interactive visualization of past actions. The purpose would be to help improve the quality of your choices (actions you take) to better achieve your goals. Algorithms would work with the accumulated information to pull out correlations, patterns, and in general accelerate the process.

No Internet required, and so much greater security, privacy, and trust than usual. Which is freeing in many ways.

Smartphones aren't going anywhere, but their value proposition is not the only one available. If we were to jump-start our creativity through tight constraints like the X-prize idea, I expect that we'd end up combining the best of our current technology with the best of the new. Or maybe the worst of both...

Yes, there are some benefits to all of those "features", but it seems prudent to consider and expose their risks as fervently as we're promoting the rewards. Perhaps the current balance isn't ideal over the long term, and we'll only see improvement by actively exploring the whole picture (whatever it is).

+it's usually connected to the hive aka Internet so you essentially carry lots of information with you at all times. I'd argue that instant access to information (prices etc.) can be more enabling than pure access to the underlying computer. +some other gizzmos like an always available camera/voice recorder/music player

[don't get me wrong, I'm fully aboard the more free systems NOW train]

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

They're somewhat behind schedule, but there have been some news reports of a release this year of a fully convergent phone:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/06/first-ubuntu-phone-with-c...

Ubuntu phone already comes with a terminal, however using currently for apt-get requires disabling OTA updates.

* simulate nuclear explosions

* model the internet [1]

[1] http://phys.org/news/2009-09-scientists-successfully-boot-mi...

Neither of which, nor similar activities, I need to do on the train.

What sort of example might benefit you as an individual?

I don't need a render farm, I don't have complicated delivery schedules to calculate, I don't even want to use a spreadsheet solver very often away from my desk - and I study computational logistics.

* search/compare/cross-correlate DNA data

* simulate chemical reactions, folding of proteins, ...

* simulate materials, crystals, etc.

But again it only reinforces that I don't want to be doing those things in my pocket.

The "supercomputer in your pocket" discussion is somewhat disingenuous - an iPhone6 from 2014 wouldn't even have made the top 10 in 1993 over 20 years earlier. A million-fold increase in transistor density and it still wouldn't rank as a supercomputer.

There are a lot of fascinating things you can do with more computing power, but it's not really clear that doing so on a power- and heat-constrained mobile device brings a competitive advantage in a highly-connected environment.

One can not compare smart-phones power to modern supercomputer ! And like you say you can not do all the useful things that are possible with supercomputer and PCs !

Smart-phones for me is a looked consumer gadget.

An objective analysis of the two predominate smartphone OS's would suggest that we have never had control over the devices we wield.

> With so much information about each of us being siphoned off through the Internet, it's easy to wonder whose interest they serve.

See statement above.

> With all of the advances in computing power, you'd think we'd put a bit more imagination into capturing more value for each individual smart-phone user ...

I'm pretty sure this is the case, with Apple having a market cap of $735,165,038,300[1] and Google having one of $367,770,688,769[2].

1 - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl

2 - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog

Right, that's the state now. Back when blackberry and nokia were rocking things, it wasn't so grim.

>I'm pretty sure this is the case,

No, you're stock quotes prove that they are capturing the value of the user, it doesn't say how effective they are at capturing the value for the user. All they need to do is keep people interested in the phone to accomplish the former. That doesn't mean anything about actually providing the best for them.

It's gratifying to know I can convey significant meaning in the form of prose ;-).

> All they need to do is keep people interested in the phone to accomplish the former.

Excellent observation, IMHO.

> That doesn't mean anything about actually providing the best for them.

Unfortunately, this is generally not a concern for a 10-K[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-K

Who knew that could happen here on HN?