And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or desktop hardware for when you need the extra power. The body may also have additional processing power like a GPU, additional cores, etc, to turn it into a higher-class machine.

Due to the mobile form factor there are certain use cases that it simply can not fit while still being a "phone". This is not because the phone will lack processing power, it's literally because the form factor just can't have enough input & output options. Barring major battery upgrades, it also literally lacks the power to solve all problems. The extra hardware will also have laptop- or desktop-class heat dissipation capabilities, which a smart phone simply can not solve without, again, being something other than a phone when it's being a phone.

That is all to say, there are real and specific reasons that phones can't eat all the use cases the way minicomputers ate mainframes and desktops ate minicomputers. The only way for phones to eat all the use cases is to hybridize "back" a step and also become the things it is replacing again.

We've seen some abortive attempts at this. I find myself wondering if the fundamentally closed nature of the major phone operating systems is inhibiting the creation of this stuff, because the requisite OS changes to make this work are too hard. While I don't own one I still find myself rooting for the Firefox phone or the Ubuntu phone... they've still got a chance to beat the other guys to this market. And I for one would hate to sacrifice the openness of my entire computing stack because "the phone", which at this point will be little more than "one particular app", is closed. That's an awful lot to sacrifice to an increasingly minor use case.

> And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or desktop hardware for when you need the extra power

And, funnily enough, Windows tablets can do that today, and the phones get it with Windows 10.

And you can find a few other things that go back three or four years; Acer had one, for instance. None of them seem to have quite stuck the landing yet. But I don't say this because I lack faith in the idea; I think it's inevitable. It's just that these things all seem to be ahead of the market. Now we just have to wait for the market to realize it wants this.

(It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.)

Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.

> They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.

Supporting older hardware, too. The fact every Windows 8 Nokia is getting a Win 8 upgrade contrasts pretty well with the way my Android 5 device won't be getting a patch for a critical security vulnerability.

Right now we call a tablet "mobile," but it seems to be to be more PC-like in function than mobile-phone-like (although more phone-like in form). There truly will be a blurring of the lines. It'll all just be some device that has computing power.

Laptops are a subclass of PCs. The microcomputer is by far the longest living of all generations, having survived through three decades.

Rob Landley once keenly noted the signature event that must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting, i.e. it must be able to compile itself. I cannot currently compile Android on Android or iOS on iOS.

> I cannot currently compile Android on Android or iOS on iOS.

You actually could, hypothetically, compile Android on Android, in a sense, by chrooting into a Debian environment and compiling from there. I've done at least the chroot part (I had a Debian chroot environment with Xfce installed on my Galaxy Tab 2 for quite a while, though it was really slow and limited by the tablet's measly RAM).

The idea of running a GNU/Linux-like system on Android (reusing the device's kernel in a chroot or a similar setup) is basically the idea behind the Ubuntu for Android concept that fizzled away as Ubuntu's mobile version started to be developed: plug your phone into a dock, and the Ubuntu chroot takes over the peripheral devices and presents a desktop.

That's cheating. I mean actually using vanilla Android as your host. Yours amounts to using a chrooted debootstrap for cross-compiling to an Android target.

Some call it "cheating", I call it "bending the rules".

The reality is that it's running on the Android device itself, using the device's own kernel. I personally think that qualifies in a technical sense.

> must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting

This is for completely superseding the previous generation. When the level of functionality of the new platform surpasses the needs of a all pure consumers, a general purpose computer will become a niche item, much like a Sony or Nintendo development system.