[TeMPOraL]

Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)

It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.

[audunw]

> Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)

When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:

1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.

2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.

There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.

Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.

> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.

I do agree, I am in a similar situation.

[nhecker]

(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)

> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]

I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?

[nhecker]

Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))

[bluGill]

In a lot of ways the cloud is better than my personal computer, even if I'm on it.

There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house because sharing files between computers is so much better than only being able to work on one (or using floppies). The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world: it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone else's problem to keep the software updated.

There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers also have annoyances. However for most things it is conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)