Did you read any of his linked articles? The smartphone use comment is backed by market research. And his PC internet comment is addressed in the same article, describing the additional capabilities of smartphone internet over PC internet.
I hadn't read that. I was probably too dismissive of the claim and the distribution of phone usage was definitely not what I'd expected it'd be. Still I'd question the language of the original article. Saying that "smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop" isn't quite true to the data in that article. It suggests the person has equal access to a smartphone and a laptop but picks the smartphone because it's a strictly better experience. A lot of the at home phone use they're seeing in that study is coming from people who have just a smart phone. Which is really the beauty of smartphones, it covers all your basic needs in 1 device. But I'm not quite ready to believe that smart phones have some better version of the internet and that's why people like them.
This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to their laptop for a variety of reasons:
- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else
- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop
- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the weather
- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone
I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity / portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if you don't have wifi access.
There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this "reversed" review of the Macbook Pro: http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-re...
Can't speak for parent, but I didn't even realize those were links until someone else in this thread pointed it out to me. I'll try to avoid turning this into an aesthetics vs usability rant, but gray text on a gray background with no underlining doesn't seem like a great choice to me.
Incidentally, I have no trouble distinguishing the nice black underlined link in your post here on HN. =P