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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

You completely lost me at "they're general purpose computing devices."

This is not even remotely a reasonable definition of today's smartphones.

I beg to differ. They might not be suitable for "power users" or Stallman but for most people they're fine. I've got at least a few non-technical friends that haven't owned a laptop or PC in years and do all their "computing" from their phone and maybe an iPad. The only reason my parents still have a computer is because they like to look at their photos on a large screen, but outside of that one use-case (which could be solved in other ways) they barely ever turn their PC on.

You can bank, search, chat, consume content, and shop from one device - it doesn't get much more "general purpose" than that.

I beg to differ. They are higly optimized attention seeking monsters with side "benefits". They will turn on you thr momemnt google/apple so choose.

Right but that doesn't make them any less useful as a general purpose computing device - they still serve that function perfectly well with or without them slowly eroding our mental capacity and stealing all our data.

> They will turn on you thr momemnt google/apple so choose.

> Right but that doesn't make them any less useful

Sounds like a contradiction to me. If you can't do anything you want with your phone but Google/Apple can, it must make it less useful for you.

Shop at higher prices for smartphone users.

You fundamentally misunderstand and misrepresent what is commonly meant by "general purpose." General purpose is not merely a set of specific purposes that a lot of people are into. General purpose means I can freely change it if I want to.

I cannot find a single source that agrees with you on that. The first 3 pages of Google when I search "general purpose computer definition" all show results that largely equate to;

"A general-purpose computer is one that, given the appropriate application and required time, should be able to perform most common computing tasks."

Interesting, my search absolutely showed definitions closer to mine (or more specifically, definitions for which my definition is a necessary prequisite), e.g.

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/3/250710-the-decline-of-...

Gotta love personalised search results! For a laugh I tried searching it in a few different engines and came up with mixed results - some similar to my definition and some similar to yours.

I'm starting to get the feeling it has a "mainstream" definition and more of a "people in the know" definition. A lot of the sources that matched my definition tended to be from more non-technical, mainstream outlets like the BBC; https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zkrr97h/revision/1

FWIW I like your definition better, I think closed off environments in the long run will be worse for everyone (except the people that make them).

I think this is just the classic problem of two engineers talking past each other. I think by "general purpose computing devices" the other poster means "general-*use* computing devices".

Many phones are very much unlocked, even though support for other operating systems is limited. However, even Android can be installed as a standalone OS with no Google crap.

If you want them to be general purpose computers straight from the store, yeah, that's not happening. But you still own the hardware and can change the software, again, on many, sadly not all, devices.

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