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Comment by rubbingalcohol | Hacker News Reader

Hitching your wagon to one company, whether it's Apple or Google, is a great way to set yourself up for being exploited.

And, yeah. That whole "mobile is the future" thing really was so 2010. But mobile only turned out to be _part_ of the future. Everyone was so convinced that tiny plastic devices with no keyboards or computing power would supersede decades of awesomeness that was, and continues to be, the personal computer.

"Mobile is the future" didn't pan out, similarly to how today's "enterprise is the future" fad is going to.

Developers should be able to see past all this noise, choose a compromise between what they enjoy doing and what makes money, and go do some cool shit.

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> "Mobile is the future" didn't pan out,

Really? Please enlighten me.

A recent mobile phone, such as an iPhone, has approximately the same computing power as Deep Blue when measured in Flops, i.e. the same as a super-computer from 15 years ago. It's about as powerful as a PC from a half decade ago. (And it's currently made of aluminum, rather than plastic.)

Moreover, Apple's iPhone revenue (just the iPhone) is in the same ballpark as the revenue from everything sold by Microsoft.

As for the equipment rate of smart phones, it's steadily growing higher than PC equipment rates. This is particularly true in developing countries and in lower-income segments of the population in developed ones (both groups are Android users for the most part). In both cases, a smartphone is becoming (indeed, has become in the case of the former, since they often skipped the PC step altogether) the main device they use to access the internet.

I'm not really seeing how "mobile is the future" didn't pan out... Please, please, enlighten me.

Agree with original sentiment.

Part of the future.

More serious work in the arts (imaging, music, architecture, etc.) and sciences is simply a ridiculous suggestion to accomplish on mobile devices. Horsepower, input / output contexts, technological hurdles, and a plethora of other issues make mobile devices simply useless in many of those contexts.

Because we still have/need PC's.

Mobile is a new market, a new branch of computing, so naturally there is going to be a lot of growth there. A lot of people don't need a full-blown PC at home, so a phone that lets them check facebook and read articles covers most of their needs. And as you mentioned with india: computers were simply not affordable for most, but smartphones are. But again, this is just growth potential and untapped markets.

Businesses will still use computers, as will gamers, developers, writers, filmmakers, accountants... and so on. Mobile has helped them, but it hasn't obsoleted PC's. We still need them to create the things to be consumed on mobile devices.

> I'm not really seeing how "mobile is the future" didn't pan out... Please, please, enlighten me.

Okay. Try editing a spreadsheet on your iPhone.

I said that mobile is _part_ of the future. It is not _the_ future. But you wouldn't have known that in 2010 when big tech companies were acquiring every tiny little mobile startup they could get their talons into. And then most of their products ended up languishing because none of the big tech companies knew what to do with them.

Those companies didn't see the whole picture, and it seems you still don't either.

(Also, 6 cores at 4.5ghz stomps on your iPhone :)

Multi-modal computing is the future. One device to do everything fails just as much when that one device is a phone as it does when that one device is a PC. There are many things that a mobile device just can't do as well as a PC (not in terms of computing power, but in terms of user interaction). There are other things that can be done better by a specialized embedded computer than they can by a phone or a PC. The future is in seamless interoperability between different forms of computing devices; not in a single form of computing device taking over all applications.

> A recent mobile phone [...] has approximately the same computing power as Deep Blue...

Computing power doesn't mean a whole lot when the screen is just 4 inches wide and the only way to interact with it's proprietary non-multitasking OS is by poking it with your finger.

> Moreover, Apple's iPhone revenue (just the iPhone) is in the same ballpark as the revenue from everything sold by Microsoft.

Microsoft generally doesn't sell hardware, so I'm unsure how this comparison would be useful.

> As for the equipment rate of smart phones, it's steadily growing higher than PC equipment rates. [...] a smartphone is becoming [...] the main device they use to access the internet.

PC hardware's biggest customer is and always has been business. That's not being replaced by mobile. College kids aren't writing their papers on mobile devices in large numbers. Government agencies aren't switching to mobile devices for their data entry. So in that respect, "mobile is the future" didn't pan out because "the future" is generally expected to wholly replace the "the past" and that is certainly not happening.

> please, enlighten me.

Consider yourself enlightened.

True. I was a fresher passing out of the college and I was not able to cut through the noise as I can do today. Today I work on Big data and other areas which have same momentum and importance.

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