Smartphones...
Some may define a smartphone as a pocket computer, but I prefer the term “a device without a filesystem”. I mean, like—“smart” is in the name!
But to be truthful, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that society went from doomscrolling on a 4:3 monitor to a 9:16 rectangle strapped to your hand. Most people, without a doubt, are blissfully unaware of all the advancements traditional computers have made over the years. For instance, modern ultrabooks ship with top-tier CPUs, 16:10 touchscreens, and massive amounts of RAM we couldn’t even fathom being possible in a consumer device 8-10 years prior.
For me, as a software developer, I am with my laptop the vast majority of the time. I use Docker. I use VMs. Of course—and I couldn’t forget this—I use VS Code. But I suppose I could give up Docker. After all, GitHub Codespaces is an alternative. I suppose maybe VMs aren’t that important after all. I mean, I’ve got a Proxmox cluster anyways. Oh, and VS Code? Yeah, that can run on the web. But there’s one problem with that: It’s not what I’ve become accustomed to. It’s not my workflow. It’s not even me.
Then again, I suppose old-fashioned desktops and laptops aren’t for everybody anymore. But that’s kinda my point: Society hasn’t moved away from computers—in the general eyes of the public, at least—but rather society has advanced. We now have technologies, in the palm of our hand, that rival workstation desktops from 5 years ago. We now have smartphones with terabytes of storage. We now have cloud-based archives we can access with the click of a button. We now have everything we’ve asked for, and what we could possibly want.
Computers didn’t go away. Computers weren’t replaced. Like, computers aren’t even gone. Sure, traditional computing has gotten more expensive—that’s true. Sure, it’s also true that computing has lost some character; Using a phone often feels vastly different than a traditional computer.
Maybe computing was supposed to stay the same. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the fact that I can spin up a VM to do absolutely nothing important is overblown from the demands reality insists. Maybe I’ve gotten too familiar with traditional computers. Maybe there’s more than one true type of computer.
But maybe that’s not a bad thing?
Note: everything contained in this article is an opinion piece...