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by wintermutestwin 1314 days ago
> The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would.

Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

6 comments

I wish I could ignore it. It seems many web designers, even at major companies, don't consider PCs anymore.

Google's new carousel features aren't proper links and don't respond to middle-clicks. If you want to pop out an image into its own tab you have to first click it, then pop it out from their more-info panel.

Azure has similar problems, where listings collapse to nigh unusable sizes on desktop and Ctrl-f is broken horribly since many of their page switches actually just slide the current page to the left while keeping it loaded, so that when you go to search, the interface starts dragging back to hits on the previous page. Not that Ctrl-f really works in the face of the "only load just enough of the content that fits into the undersized box" anyway.

They'll push megabytes of javascript to avoid server-side rendering kilobytes of source, making the whole thing harder to use than it needs to be.

I highly doubt the phone and PC markets will converge any time soon.

Apple has made seemingly made the most progress toward this and it isn't hard to imagine someone plugging their iPhone in to a screen when they arrive at work and resuming their Excel spreadsheet with the connected keyboard, no different than the company-issued laptop today. But I don't see what incentive Apple has to make that a reality when they can keep selling people two separate $1000+ devices.

Edit: I would love to be proven wrong, so any opinions/examples to the contrary are very welcome.

Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand why so few companies have put effort into making a phone with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there are so few of them."
Samsung DEX.
That is innovation! I like scrcpy for controlling the phone from my desktop.
I got a Galaxy Fold and it's remarkable how much more 'active' work I'm doing on my phone now that I can switch to iPad Mini-sized dimensions and it still fits in the palm of my hand. The narrow screens that 99% of phone users have seem to adversely incentivize shallow, consumption-oriented usage in my case.
With iPadOS 16.2 you’ll be able to connect your M1/M2 iPad to a big monitor via usb-c, use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and it’ll be just like using a laptop.
Yeah, except I can't run uBlock Origin, which makes an iPad a nonstarter for me.
Because of the sweet, sweet advertising dollars.
tbf, a lot of sites i use these days have apps that are better than their web sites from a UX perspective, and the iPad Pro 12.9 I just got has an unbelievably color-accurate XDR display that bests the MacBook Pro 13 I'm trading in for it.