mobile computers replacing desktop

Posted Sep 9, 2012 23:27 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I guess I'm not following your analogy. You're saying a Sun workstation is to an Apple II as MacBook is to iPhone?

In sense, yes.

An iPhone does a whole different job from a MacBook.

Sure, you can use it as phone, as camera, as a music player - but these things are not important here. What is important is that you can use it as a poor's-man-MacBook, too. Well, this is less true for an iPhone, because you can not actually program it on the phone, but with Android you can do that... in many ways, in fact. You can write simple scripts or use Java or C++. Sure, just like CAD or office these IDEs are poor substitute for full-blown analogues found on desktop (or laptop), but there are no reason to believe they will always be underpowered.