Mobile Theses
TL;DR:<p>The number of cars on the road is growing much faster than trucks, and far more people drive them. Even most truck drivers also own cars and often drive their cars in preference to their trucks. Most ground-transportation-related investments revolve around cars and not trucks, and there are far more car-related products than truck-related products. Therefore trucks will soon be obsolete, and all cargo will be moved with cars.<p>He&#x27;s not totally wrong. Mobile is the future. But desktop is also the future, and server, and IoT, and special purpose devices, and hacker devices like the Pi, and smart TVs, and smart cars, and smart appliances, and ...<p><i>... and and and and and ...</i><p>What&#x27;s really happening is a great diversification of computing and a massive explosion in the amount of &quot;silicon per capita.&quot; The part about &quot;how many electric motors do you own?&quot; is fairly spot on. But he falls down when he tries to push his argument too far and argue that mobile will eclipse desktop&#x2F;laptop <i>completely</i> and we&#x27;ll all be staring at 3.5&quot; screens. I will say this until someone shows me a viable port of SolidWorks, Visual Studio, or Revit Architect that is usable on a smartphone. I&#x27;m not holding my breath for that.<p>The only way I see mobile replacing the laptop&#x2F;PC is either some breakthrough in interaction metaphor (VR? AR that is really useful? brainwaves? who knows) or a mobile device that <i>converts</i> into a desktop when you plug a monitor into it and pair it with a keyboard. It would also have to be capable of being used with as much versatility as a PC, which would mean significant evolution of mobile OSes. Personally I doubt convergence... because why? Silicon is so cheap there is no economic driver for anyone to invest the development necessary for mobile to &quot;swallow PC.&quot; It&#x27;s cheaper and easier to just use two separate devices and let them deeply specialize and optimize for their respective roles. A car&#x2F;truck convertible is possible too, but the result would probably be an oversized gas guzzler car with poor handling that converts into a shitty underpowered truck with poor capacity.<p>I also think he&#x27;s wrong about mobile being the center of gravity. Mobile devices are dumb terminals for accessing the cloud. If there&#x27;s an emerging new &quot;sun&quot; to replace the PC it&#x27;s the cloud, not mobile. Increasingly I use both PCs with their big monitors and keyboards <i>and</i> mobile devices to access common cloud resources.