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Comment by nkkollaw | Hacker News Reader

No, but a smartphone is not a computer.

Smartphones are capable of computing and are sometimes very powerful, but the analogy is totally out of wack in my opinion.

If you can live without using an actual computer, it means you don't really need computers. You can check your email and browser the web on a Kindle, on your TV, or even your car.

Everything is a computer, then.

I think a computer is a productivity tool. Smartphones (and I'd definitely say tablets, too) are to consume content, not produce it. Some companies (most notably Apple I think) believe otherwise, but I think they'll have to come to realize that smartphones and tablets are horrible to produce most kinds of content.

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A smartphone absolutely is a computer. It's maybe not a "productive" computer for a lot of workloads, but it still carries out operations and produces output based on the input it is fed.

You're just making up your own definition of "computer" and then claiming a smartphone isn't one because it doesn't match your made up definition.

If the definition is so broad, my oven and fridge are computers.

Your oven and fridge (probably) has a computer within them, but they're not computers themselves.

According to that definition, yes.

You have programs, you have a UI to control them, they have a CPU and memory.

And "that definition" is the official dictionary definition and it works. There is no need to redefine it like you tried to.

Why not? They have buttons and speakers (I/O), I can program a timer on them, and there’s a little processor in there somewhere. How is that different from an iPad?

The computer that has those things is part of the oven, but it is not the oven itself.

Certainly in the rough sense of 'Turing machine' a smartphone is clearly a computer. And, even in other senses, I can connect a keyboard to my S5, open up Termux, run ffmpeg, open up Emacs --- all on the smartphone itself, not through ssh or anything. But it's hardly as productive as a regular laptop or desktop, of course, but that's largely due to screen size, lack of keyboard (or lacklustre keyboard), and weakness of processing capacity compared to a desktop/laptop.

Totally agree. That's where the line is drawn I think.

Otherwise everything is a computer.

I can’t check my email on my Kindle or my car.

Maybe cut to the chase: what specific capability is an iPhone lacking that every “real computer” has?

If a keyboard (and a decent-sized screen) can be added, definitely a mouse and a mouse-centric interface.

I have tried using an iPad Pro for productivity, and it's living hell.

> definitely a mouse and a mouse-centric interface.

Wouldn’t that mean most servers aren’t computers? Not to mention the DOS machines I grew up with, or everything made before the Xerox Alto?

> I have tried using an iPad Pro for productivity, and it's living hell.

Not going to disagree with you there. But that doesn’t make it not-a-computer.

Those are servers.

If we want to classify devices, we need to group them somehow. Otherwise we call them devices and call it a day.

Servers are still computers.

We already classify them: smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, servers are all groups of computers.

His old DOS machines certainly weren't servers. Not having a GUI does not make a machine a server and having a GUI does not make a computer not-a-server (especially since we have graphics chips inside CPUs now).

Even though you're technically wrong (the best kind of wrong), I can see where you're coming from. Even microcontroller ICs without enough memory to store this comment are real computers and are silent, but if you say you've built a silent computer and then unveil some Arduino contraption, expect eyes to roll.

That said, I still think smartphones qualify as computers even by your productivity definition. Newer smartphones would sit somewhere above older netbooks on a ranking of overall utility.

I don't know about iDevices, but this is very much supported on a lot of Android phones. Samsung's lineup even has it as a bullet point feature, and they sell docks which let you connect your phone to a screen, peripherals, and switch to a mouse-oriented UI without having to do _anything_ weird.

At that point, you're running a mouse-centric, multi-window OS with a wide array of software, that can run basically whatever you want.

So that's a computer, definitely, right? When does it stop being a computer? If you disconnect the display? Is it using a stylus instead of a mouse? Maybe the software keyboard instead of a hardware keyboard? (But then is the MS Surface not a computer when you detach the keyboard case?)

Do you run the SDK on the device itself, or do you have to develop somewhere else and then transfer the build output to the device?

On Android, you can definitively develop and compile on the device itself. See for example: http://www.android-ide.com/

What a nightmare, though.

Have you tried programming on the original Eee laptops? I'd take a 10" tablet with a bluetooth keyboard over that 7" screen and tiny keys any day.

I've tried touch based UIs to do actual work, and I just can't handle it.

Android can be quite well driven by the keyboard. Even alt-tabbing between applications works.

Personally, even a touchpad compared to a mouse will slow me down significantly.

It's possible that I could be somewhat productive on a tablet in an emergency, but not as my main machine like Apple suggest people should do.

Why can you not check your email on your Kindle? There's a browser, you can absolutely check your email.

>I can’t check my email on my Kindle

I can on mine…

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