Am I the only one that wonders how anyone can thinks of comparing a phone with to a high-end desktop system and claim they can fore fill the same need?
> It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.
Why do we keep pretending PCs are comparable with phones? They compute, that's the end of their similarities. They have completely different use cases and are needed for different reasons. Things that are good on a PC might not be good on a phone.
I don't think that the concept of a phone-trying-to-be-a-PC is limited by what CPU or RAM it has. You can run complete Linux and Windows CE desktops on devices with way less resources. Doesn't mean that it's the UX the world needs ;-) On the other hand, as long as you know what you want, and know what is available, then none of it really needs to be in competition.
On the other hand, although I love my phone's portability, there's no substituting a few hundred watts of processing power and a few terabytes of storage in a decent desktop.
I kept trying to convince myself to buy a desktop but the difference in performance from a laptop isn't so staggering to make up for the loss of convenience. It's easier to move a laptop and I can carry it to places where I don't have an external monitor.
Gotta have fantasies though. "When I'll have enough expendable money" I'll build myself some monster configuration. Which I'll probably use to run Geekbench (proving it's very powerful) and watch YouTube :P
This phenomenon is even more visible in smartphones. Desktop-level CPU performance and RAM / storage to do what? Browse Facebook and send pictures on WhatsApp. I could do that 10 years ago on a much more modest spec'd phone. Oh wait, I can still do that on the very same phone.
The idea that this can even be something you'd reasonably have a bet on demonstrates his point. It's not a surefire thing that this will be a better experience than just using a laptop or desktop for most people.
Going back to the original analogy, while you could argue about the iphone in terms of price maybe, it was undeniable that it was flat out better than a feature phone in every possible way.
I don't agree with this at all. The main points seem to boil down to: "I want my smartphone to be a desktop computer." If you try to use your smartphone for the same purposes as a laptop, yeah, then you'll probably hate it, but if you approach it as a different device and explore new and different uses, the phone becomes a lot more powerful.
Phones have highly integrated parts, lack of IO ports, toy operating systems, and other major trade-offs, for the sake of size and power usage, which would all be disadvantages or total non-starters in a desktop environment.
This situation hasn't changed in the slightest during the last 10 years. Is there any reason to think it will change during the next 10 years? Even if a future phone could be used in the place of a tower to run a set of desktop peripherals, how is that even useful?
My point is: Why should phones be any different to desktops with regards to OS availability/ease of installation? If we accept that a significant number of users do use that ability on desktops, why wouldn't they use it on phones?
And yet, for work I'd like to see something 10x as powerful as a phone still. The differences in performance between the two is quickly becoming less and nonexistent though.
I think this is a flawed way of looking at it. I can have a nice i7 w/ 32GB of RAM on my desktop, but it's a pretty terrible computer for writing documents, programming, media consumption compared to my phone because, well, it doesn't have a screen at all.
The computer and the screen are different things. There exists ways to use your phone on a larger screen, at which point the operating system becomes your sole bottleneck.
The reality is our phones are very powerful computers, intentionally limited to do things specific for mobile use. They could (and probably will) be opened up as time goes on to become more traditional computers as well. A few players toyed with the idea clumsily in the last few years, Motorola being the most noteworthy.
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