Comment by harisenbon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harisenbon | Hacker News Reader

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Even as a computer enthusiast, I've been noticing this trend in my own working styles.

I just assembled a new (fairly top of the line) computer at my house. And for the first few weeks I played on it, installed software, tweaked, etc.

After that I just started using it for email and the web.

Then I got an ipod, and I do all my facebooking, light websurfing, emailing, etc on there. I only power on my computer any more when I want to get some programming done. I don't even use Word all that often -- generally only to open a file that someone has sent me, or is a legacy file from my old computer.

While the general computer will never be replaced (especially at work, or for work-at-homes) I'm seeing a real trend in the desire for single-use, no-fuss hardware applications (the post on Hacker News about TurnKeyLinux is a good example).

For me: Watching Movies at Home: PS3 and a NAS Listening to Music at Home: PS3 and a NAS Music/Video on the Go: iPod twitter, email, facebook: iPod Touch light web browsing: iPod Showing pictures: Net-enabled Photoframe

I see that trend at home too. My dad has a top of the line Dell computer, i7 quad core with 8gigs of memory, 25" 1920x1200 lcd, Nvidia GT200 core, the works. He uses it to browse the web, email (yahoo mail), and uses skype occasionally to chat with distant relatives. He also downloads these korean drama videos every now and then and watches them. He could probably survive on a computer built 10 years ago.

Every time I visit home, there's something broken that I have to fix -- the printer doesn't show up on the network, the computer fan is making a funny noise, the video card is stuck at a low res, the windows file sharing folder disappeared, etc. If you could print via safari on the ipad, I'd probably buy it for them so I don't have to fix windows problems every time I visit home.

Since I got my iPod touch eight or nine months ago, easily 3/4 of my recreational web browsing has moved to the Touch. I frequent a couple of VBulletin-based sites that are just too painful to use that way, and I still use the PC for a lot of things (Photoshop, cataloging & ripping CDs, pulling down media to watch via the TiVo, etc.) but I've moved everything the mobile platform is capable of handling over to the mobile platform.

Exactly. Think of "computers" as becoming "workstations" and the future becomes clearer.

? Regular iPods can do that? You're saying iPod touch in addition to iPod.

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