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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing that, and yet everyone I know despises creating anything on a mobile device, and everyone I know still owns a PC as well as a mobile device. Mobile device sales are massive because you need a new one every 2 years, because the old one sucks so horribly. I can still run Windows 10 on my 7+ year old computer and it works just fine if I'm not playing games or doing video editing.

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That only proves the point of the article: Mobile is still bad and has fundamental barriers to overcome. In the 1980's, the "obsolete the moment you buy it" and "expensive paperweight" jokes were commonly encountered for PC's.

The nature of what will cross those barriers is still up in the air, though: It could be plugging the phone into a dock to access the traditional peripherals; it could be used in tandem with a novel display technology like a VR headset, and likewise use novel interaction methods. The market hasn't started proposing serious solutions yet.

He's more interested in being exciting and controversial than being accurate. However, it's not a bad broad-brush picture if you don't look to hard at the details.

The thing is, it really is hard to predict the future. For example, when the microprocessor appeared, we all said Wow, we can all have a PC! And the mainframe is dead.

I don't think anybody said we'd be papering the world with giant server farms based on microprocessors, or that most of the Fortune 500 would still be running on mainframes 40 years later.

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