zlacker

I'm wondering if those still are the majority, worldwide. Smart-phones have done a lot to democratize computing power (now if only they weren't used to put >90% of their users in corporate controlled walled gardens...)

>>contra+(OP)
I bet they're still the majority - the people who only use their phone do it through apps, not through their mobile browser.

>>contra+(OP)
Smart phones didn’t change anything here: 99% of their users didn’t care about the “open” nature of desktops before they were a thing, too. A vanishingly small percentage of computer users care about tinkering and openness. It’s been decades since tinkerers and hackers were the majority of computer users.

>>sidlls+ea
one could argue that the mobile era has put computers in the hands of the vast majority of people on the planet that couldn't even be bothered to operate a pc.

>>contra+(OP)
That's the tragic outcome of that type of democratization and I'm not sure it can ever be fixed.

>>sidlls+ea
That tipping point was probably 1995 at latest.

>>contra+(OP)
I don't actually believe smart-phones have done much to democratize computing power because phones don't give you much control over computing power. You can't develop software on a phone using a phone. And frankly the vast majority of phones have way more computing power than is actually used.

On a related point, the push to the cloud is befuddling when everyone has a phone with "free" (from the developer's point of view) computing power sitting there unused. Everyone's wasting money on centralizing compute despite more distributed compute being available than ever before.