
Mobile Theses - jdkanani
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/12/15/16-mobile-theses
======
krschultz
The number of people that are commenting 'I stopped reading after X' is
appalling.

When you find something you disagree with coming from a reputable source,
shouldn't you be insanely interested in reading it? Contrarian viewpoints are
what teach you something you don't already know. Are people coming to HN
everyday to get a pile of articles that affirm their world view?

My reaction to the article was a disappointment because most of these are
regurgitations of his previous posts. It feels like he is beating a dead horse
because to me all of these points are non-controversial. Apparently not.

~~~
benedictevans
It's a collection in one place of my previous posts - there is nothing at all
new here ;)

~~~
roymurdock
What exactly is your definition of "mobile"? I usually find it helpful when an
author sets up a definition of key terms at the outset of an argument.

> When we say 'mobile' we don't mean mobile, just as when we said 'PCs' we
> didn't mean ‘personal’. ‘Mobile’ isn't about the screen size or keyboard or
> location or use. Rather, the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android, with 10x the
> scale of ‘Wintel’, will become the new centre of gravity throughout
> computing. This means that ‘mobile’ devices will take over more and more of
> what we use ‘PCs’ for, gaining larger screens and keyboards, sometimes, and
> more and more powerful software, all driven by the irresistible force of a
> much larger ecosystem, which will suck in all of the investment and
> innovation.

So if I'm reading this correctly, "mobile" means devices running on simpler
hardware and software than traditional desktops or laptops, but running
increasingly powerful applications? Regardless of their size and mobility?

And the scale in terms of number of devices in the market will drain
investment and innovation away from larger, more powerful hardware and
operating systems?

Thanks for writing this up. Just trying to make sure I understand your theses.

~~~
bobajeff
"the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android"

------
api
TL;DR:

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.

He'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 ...

 _... and and and and and ..._

What's really happening is a great diversification of computing and a massive
explosion in the amount of "silicon per capita." The part about "how many
electric motors do you own?" is fairly spot on. But he falls down when he
tries to push his argument too far and argue that mobile will eclipse
desktop/laptop _completely_ and we'll all be staring at 3.5" 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'm not holding my breath for
that.

The only way I see mobile replacing the laptop/PC is either some breakthrough
in interaction metaphor (VR? AR that is really useful? brainwaves? who knows)
or a mobile device that _converts_ 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 "swallow PC." It's cheaper and easier to just use two
separate devices and let them deeply specialize and optimize for their
respective roles. A car/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.

I also think he's wrong about mobile being the center of gravity. Mobile
devices are dumb terminals for accessing the cloud. If there's an emerging new
"sun" to replace the PC it's the cloud, not mobile. Increasingly I use both
PCs with their big monitors and keyboards _and_ mobile devices to access
common cloud resources.

~~~
roymurdock
Couldn't agree more with all of your observations.

I agree that cloud is currently the center of the ecosystem, and will be over
the short term. Data is the blood and the cloud is the heart that stores and
pumps that blood. Will become increasingly important as silicon per capita
ratio increases and people look to analyze data for optimization purposes.

As another poster commented, a paradigm shift in I/O (VR/AR?) will drive the
next surge in productivity as new tech adopts to a better/faster way to get it
to do what we want.

~~~
api
Tangential but:

As a cyberpunk hippie who thinks people should own their data and control
their computers (personal comput- _ing_ regardless of form factor), that's why
I focus mostly on the transport and the cloud. The cloud is where your data
mostly lives today and probably will live even more in the future, and having
private transport envelopes to get that data to and from your multiple devices
is key. In the long term I'm excited about personal cloud devices and
homomorphic encryption, which would enable your own cloud resources to be
hosted in commodity cloud data centers without compromising security. The next
"PC" will really be a kind of amorphous blob of silicon orbiting cloud
resources linked by an encrypted communication envelope.

You'll be able to access all that from a variety of different I/O devices:
things with big monitors and keyboards, things with little screens and touch
panels, refrigerators, cars, thermostats, etc.

~~~
roymurdock
Thing is, homomorphic encryption is expensive in terms of time and computing
power. I can't see it being implemented for the majority of consumer grade
data, which will probably continue to be mined by large corporations and
governments in exchange for "free" hardware, software, apps, etc. Financial
data, medical data, VIP data, crypto-junkie data - I think there's a strong
use case there.

The guys developing enigma said they'd be putting out another paper at the end
of the summer but I didn't see anything...any insights into what's going on
over there?

~~~
api
I follow it a bit. Right now we know that it's theoretically possible but it's
very slow, too slow for uses other than maybe very niche things.

In the next five years I fully expect to see an _acceptably fast_
implementation that will broaden use to the application areas you mention:
high security stuff and crypto junkies.

At that point is where things will get interesting. To make homomorphic crypto
really fast will take custom silicon. As soon as I see acceptably fast
software homomorphic, I expect to see either a startup or one or more projects
inside big companies very quickly pop up with the goal of producing either
homomorphic silicon to pair with an existing CPU or -- more interestingly -- a
CPU that computes homomorphically as its native mode of operation. _That_
could get interesting.

I predict that by 2030 you will be able to spin up a 100% "blind" sealed VM in
the cloud for <$20/month that is fast enough to run what can run on an average
cloud instance today.

 _All_ compute doesn't have to be homomorphic to get the benefits. You only
really need it for encryption, decryption, key generation, authentication, and
indexing of security critical data. Boilerplate stuff can be done in the
clear. By 2030 standard cleartext compute will be so cheap I wonder if cloud
providers will even bother charging for it below very large levels.

Edit: can't make this any deeper but to reply to your reply:

I'm not sure. I think that's up in the air. Right now you can do a whole lot
with a small cloud instance with <1gb RAM and 20gb local storage. Software
bloat seems to be increasing less rapidly than it was 10 years ago, and there
are even movements toward more efficient languages today. So I just have to
shrug on that one. We'll see.

~~~
roymurdock
Well the one thing I would push back on is...how useful will the computing
power of the average cloud instance today be in 2030?

------
pheo
Read the whole thing. There are some well developed points near the end, but i
feel many of these premises are fundamentally flawed. For example, that mobile
devices will gain keyboards and become our primary computers.

Mobile is for content consumption, workstations are for content creation.
Missing that key point leads many of the points here astray. Solving the
disparity is one of the major open areas in HCI research.

------
gcb0
i quit reading on topic two. that's just some uninformed musings of someone
who probably call themselves "tweeters" (and here you saw some uninformed
musings on the same level you'd find there. so meta)

~~~
jdoliner
Yeah this was what killed me after topic two:

> But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a
> laptop, not ‘mobile’, and their capabilities make them much more
> sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has
> the limited, cut-down version of the internet.

Smartphones are mostly used when I'm sitting next to a laptop... are they? Not
in my experience.

The PC has the limited cut-down version of the internet? Again... complete
opposite of every experience I've had.

~~~
dankoss
Did you read any of his linked articles? The smartphone use comment is backed
by market research. And his PC internet comment is addressed in the same
article, describing the additional capabilities of smartphone internet over PC
internet.

[http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mob...](http://ben-
evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mobile-internet)

~~~
jdoliner
I hadn't read that. I was probably too dismissive of the claim and the
distribution of phone usage was definitely not what I'd expected it'd be.
Still I'd question the language of the original article. Saying that
"smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop" isn't
quite true to the data in that article. It suggests the person has equal
access to a smartphone and a laptop but picks the smartphone because it's a
strictly better experience. A lot of the at home phone use they're seeing in
that study is coming from people who have just a smart phone. Which is really
the beauty of smartphones, it covers all your basic needs in 1 device. But I'm
not quite ready to believe that smart phones have some better version of the
internet and that's why people like them.

~~~
dankoss
This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to
their laptop for a variety of reasons:

\- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else

\- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop

\- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the
weather

\- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone

I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity /
portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing
the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if
you don't have wifi access.

There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard
and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this
"reversed" review of the Macbook Pro:
[http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-
re...](http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-replace-your-
ipad)

------
ternbot
Mobile is not the future of the internet Ubiquity is; in a sense, internet is
not mobility but stationary; people interact with the internet when they are
mostly still in their bodies, sitting on the bus, driving their cars, not
"mobile"; cell networks allow for talking and walking, but using the internet
while walking or moving is generally handled not by the user but by the bots;
that being said, I am being a creative dissenter, for the benefit of all
beings and I <3 u

Good wishes

------
Jordrok
_...their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms
than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the
internet._

I honestly can't think of a single way in which that's true, and he doesn't
seem to provide any examples either.

~~~
krschultz
He links to three articles with probably 15,000 words explaining that point,
right under the paragraph.

Basically his point is that your phone comes with a camera, GPS, and
persistent internet connection. Your desktop _may_ have a webcam that is
annoying to point around the room. The internet is fundamentally more useful
when you have it all the time and the services you are using have an idea of
where you are.

~~~
Jordrok
Hah, ok fair point about the articles. I had no idea those were even links.
Grey text with no underline or mouseover so I scanned right past them.

Maybe I really am a relic of the desktop era...

~~~
RazorX
Same here. I figured they were keywords or the kind of thought you jot down
quickly to research more later.

------
fffrad
I stopped reading at "Mobile is the future".

Everytime I hear this, its from a clueless manager that saw that most traffic
comes from mobile so decided we should put more ads on mobile. They don't
realize that the over all traffic is still the same.

Mobile is the future is what made every news outlet create their own app and
force you to download on each page view.

~~~
krschultz
Except that Benedict Evans is not a clueless manager, he's an analyst at
Andreessen Horowitz. Everything he writes is worth a read, a lot of it is
really insightful. Seems like it's your loss to stop after the first 3
sentences.

