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My boss printed out a 2008 article saying smartphones would never replace laptops, and now we argue about it every lunch break
Last month I was cleaning out a filing cabinet at work in Cincinnati and found a printout from a 2008 tech blog that said phones would stay a toy and real work would always happen on a laptop. My boss taped it to the break room wall as a joke and now half the office takes it seriously. The thing is, I kind of get both sides here. One side says the article was dead wrong because I run my whole job from a phone now, invoices, email, even our scheduling app. The other side says the writer was half right, because nobody is building a spreadsheet on a phone unless they have to, and I still grab my laptop for anything longer than a paragraph. Last week I spent 20 minutes typing a report on my phone and wanted to throw it at a wall. So is this one a bad prediction or just a lazy take that aged weird? Where do you all land, did phones really kill the laptop or did they just split the work?
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the_james7d ago
The "aged weird" part is what gets me, because I remember reading somewhere that the guy who wrote that article later said he meant it as a warning about phone keyboards, not a real call on hardware. That makes a big difference. The screen got big and the apps got good, but typing is still the wall, and that lines up with you wanting to throw your phone after 20 minutes on a report. So the laptop didn't die, it just stopped being the only tool. Phones took the quick stuff, the checking and replying and scheduling, and laptops kept the long stuff. The boss taping it up as a joke is fair, but the writer wasn't totally wrong either.
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