Phones are doomed by their UI restrictions to be primarily consumption devices. The primary restriction in computers has always been in how well they communicate with the user. Smartphone screens are limited to what will fit in our pocket so the bandwidth to the user is limited by that and halves once the on screen keyboard pops up. The situation is actually worse for user to computer bandwidth. You cannot do proper multi-finger touch typing on a smartphone. Your finger just can't approach the resolution of a mouse. Also you don't have multiple buttons like a mouse, the only action is touch. So the machine is stuck trying to separate a touch, swipe, and potentially a long touch. That's error prone so phones are often doing things people don't want them to.
That's not to say smart phones suck. I love mine. All the disadvantages have to be weighed against the value of having a network connected computer in your pocket wherever you go. There is quite a bit of latency involved in sitting down at computer compared with pulling a smartphone out of one's pocket.
Smartphones are a really limited input device in a way that desktops are not. IMO it doesn't make a ton of sense to mobile-ize all desktop UX to the minimum smartphones are capable of.
What is limiting is, to rely on a smart phone to do computing. A vast majority of the phones is locked down and steering people away from general computing ability. Can you do whatever you want on your phone? No. Not with the usual OS on them. Need to root it, jailbreak it, whatever. Then you have a phone with a bad input device. Yes you can improve it with something like hacker keyboard and whatever, but it is far far from being productive like a normal computer.
I am aware more and more people only use smart phones and don't own a general computer any longer, but that is a really sad development. A smart phone will usually not encourage experimentation and getting into general computing. It is a dumbed down device.
Yes, one should be able to use a phone for computing, but generally that's not available out of the box and it takes effort to make it somewhat OK to use it for computing.
There's huge amounts of work that can only be done on desktop or on laptops, and not on smartphones, simply because of form factor. Unless we're imagining a future where people plug their phones and tablets into monitor-keyboard setups and type away, all the time.
I could see someone who gets a lot of use out of a smartphone feeling that normal computers are more limiting.
After all, my computer can't call a rideshare, it can't navigate, it can't call my mom, it can't connect to the Internet outside my home or a coffee shop, it can't take photos and videos, it can't fit in my pocket, it can't pay for things in a store, it can't deposit checks, it can't measure objects in my house, it doesn't know where north, south, east, west, up, or down are, and it can't stay in a useful standby mode all day without draining out the battery, it can't get wet without damaging it, it can't play music for me while I'm outside exercising, it can't scan QR codes, it can't be used as a boarding pass or show ticket, it can't tell my security system when I've left the house...
I'm convinced that mobile devices are useless for anything but the most trivial usages. Just last night I sat and watched my mother-in-law flail for the better part of two hours trying to look up and then purchase some replacement filters for her vacuum cleaner. What should have been relatively simple on a real computer was torturous on a smartphone. Between the tiny display, awful on-screen keyboard that is flaky and obscures most of what you are looking at, clunky apps and busted mobile websites, it's just a rage-inducing disaster.
Not to mention that if you are not on absolutely perfect WiFi, everything is so slow and janky to load. It's just not acceptable that the bar is so low for usability; I'm convinced that we've gone backwards to a significant degree, and I'd much rather go back to the web that we had in 2008 than the one we have in 2018.
Smartphones doesn't replace computers though, every office worker needs to know how to use a computer since computers has an inherently more powerful UX. Smartphones has simpler UX, but computers has a more powerful UX.
Applications being able to assume that you have a keyboard, mouse and big screen really allows them to create way more powerful interactions while any tool made for a smartphone will be severely hampered by its UI limitations.
It is a terrible idea. No matter their popularity phones have tiny screens and limited, slow input methods compared to desktop PCs. And mobile OSes have to be provided with special workarounds to deal with the absolutely terrible mobile IP networking that cannot even keep a TCP session open reliably.
Convergence to a user interface that provides the crutches for these limits of mobile platforms neccessarily gimps the desktop UI too.
People who use phones instead of PC are handicapped on ways they may not even notice. People who have PCs notice the plunge in personal productivity when they try to do all their activities with a 5% size screen and typing with 20% of their fingers
Smartphones were designed to do the opposite, they will never do that. The worst thing is that desktop development has been influenced by mobile and become just as restrictive.
Mobile devices are very constrained. The OSes are locked down, the screens are small, high CPU apps are out, and input is slow and cumbersome.
After trying a lot of apps I have found that a smart phone has only a few functions:
1. Talking and texting.
2. Taking pictures and video.
3. Maps and directions.
4. Music, movies, ebooks.
5. Brief interactions with services like Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Los Angeles metro, etc.
6. Casual web browsing. (I want a bigger screen and a keyboard for anything in depth.)
7. edit: Casual gaming.
Looking at how most other people use phones I don't think I am alone.
These devices are limited and I don't think it took us long to exhaust their potential. There just isn't much else a phone can do well (and that locked down vendor fiefdoms will allow).
The PC era on the other hand gave us a long, wide, and deep trench of innovation that is still not exhausted. PCs are more open, more extensible, and have a much wider IO path to the human in the chair. The breadth of what a PC can do is incredible.
(The main problem with PCs is antiquated, insecure, bloated operating systems. Fix that and I think you'd see even more innovation.)
Of course I have been a mobile skeptic since the iPhone. I just saw the next incarnation of the feature phone. Since it was still locked down by carriers and vendors and since its bandwidth to the user is poor I knew it would not deliver lasting innovation.
When I had a Google Nexus and I used Google Voice as my phone number, most of the things I could do in my phone I could do in my computer as well. Recently I had my phone stolen and I decided to try the iPhone, mostly because the latest Nexus is way too big for my pocket, and it turns out that I can do way less things in my computer than I could with the Nexus. That said, still there are a few apps that I can only use from a phone which is very annoying. I look forward to the first phone or laptop that solves that problem. To me a phone is a poor man's computer that you have to use when you are on the road, but if you are in front of your desk, there is no reason you should be forced to use an inferior input interface to interact with your accounts when you have a keyboard and a trackpad in front of you.
You can use a keyboard and mouse on recent iOS versions as well (and it works very comfortably on iPadOS). You can also connect an adapter to use a big screen.
I disagree with your argument that smartphones should be general-purpose computers. I don't think that having a smartphone be a general-purpose computer provides a significantly improved amount of control for 99.9% of the population.
GUI computers still lets you do all of that though. The main damage the switch to smartphones has is that they severely limit what you are allowed to do with your computer, you cannot properly tinker with them even if you want to.
I feel phones are an inferior input device and their broad adoption at the expense of full computers (with keyboard/mouse) is a shame.
Phones "just work" but phone screens are too small and touch keyboards too imprecise to do any long-form typing on it. I think the adoption of the phone as the most popular interface for the web has made the quality of software interfaces decline, and has made things like forums less mainstream, both of which are a shame.
Smartphone are really bad for power users. Android is good, but to me it doesn't allow users to really do what they want with it.
It works well, but if you look at its software design, it's miles away from what you could do with linux.
I just WISH there was some code editor designed for a touchscreen. I have this idea of a graphical code editor like scratch.mit.edu, except the editor already has this code hierarchy, and it shows text directly. This would be perfect for a touchscreen.
Smartphones are easier to use. One only has to remember how to scroll and how to use an app store. Compared to them, PCs are much more difficult to use: they have windows, taskbars, file browsers, right and double clicks, and often don't have a sane browser preinstalled. Installing software on a PC is complicated and it is easy to download a virus instead of Flash Player. Often external devices don't work without drivers. As desktop OS don't have proper process isolation, one usually has to use an antivirus.
Also, smartphones have physical volume keys and sleep/wakeup much faster than PC.
And PCs still don't have dedicated keys to switch input languages.
But typing on a smartphone is a hell. I always make mistakes and hit the wrong button.
If you are on HN, you likely use a computer a lot. But 15 years ago, a switch occurred, and nowaday, there are way more people using a phone that don't have a computer at home, or use it rarely.
This means for the vast majority of people today, and hence customers, the phone IS the computer. It's the entry point for everything.
They consume content, shop and even work on that.
But phones have terrible ergonomics. Their productivity sucks.
One of the reason is the limited screen space.
For someone using a phone, mostly as a communication device, while doing important things on a computer, a small phone makes sense. I'm this kind of person. My phone is too big for my taste. Anything complicated, I reach for my laptop: it's more efficient. Phones are terrible at multitasking, and constraint myself to 2 finger typings, tabs that open in several steps and a viewport of the size of 2 credit cards?
But we are not the target.
For the target, a big screen is the mandatory crunch they need because they watch a lot videos, do banking, read pdf and even type work stuff on their phone. This tiny, constrained square they have to make do with for everything.
It makes small screen a hard sell. The iphone mini was not a great success if we compare it to other phones, despite everybody claiming we would all love it.
Smartphones have been an important counterweight to exponential growth in system requirements. They (especially Android phones) have slow CPUs, slower and metered Internet connections, and limited storage. I attribute the shift to "flat" user interfaces to popular adoption of mobile devices. Some people use them as their only computer.
Even above average workstations still have constraints. Those above average specs will eventually be adopted by the masses and a chat app will only function on a system with 16GB of RAM.
Yeah, it's terrible what smart phones have done to computing. They're such incapable, weak computers with such bad networking and user interface that all software is being dumbed down and gimped to act as a crutch for their users.
Random round trip time combined with the energy storage limitations of the radio modem mean tcp back-off and inability to actually hold open a port (if they even have a routable ipv4!). But somehow that's everyone else's problem, not the smart phone's.
That's not to say smart phones suck. I love mine. All the disadvantages have to be weighed against the value of having a network connected computer in your pocket wherever you go. There is quite a bit of latency involved in sitting down at computer compared with pulling a smartphone out of one's pocket.
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