The Only Possible Future

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[snarkyboojum]

The irony is most of what we do is off device already, we just don't think about it.

[cryptodude_btc]

Can confirm, I just came back from the future, and people pull their phones out of their butts.

[kngjulien_]

i just love how compute moves back and forth between client and server/centralized and decentralised every 10 years lol
mainframes to pcs back to cloud compute, desktop apps to web apps back to desktop apps as webapps, php to SPAs back to ssr, thin clients to thick clients back to thin clients.
we'll never learn, will we? 😂

[TehKarmalizer]

Not too sure about that. Communicating over the internet seems to be one of the most battery-draining things a phone can do.

[k_gold]

1. There's no guarantee that it'll be Microsoft
2. Most of the juice goes to displaying the screen, so 10 day battery life is bullcrap, not the compute

[JanJozefo]

So we're all gonna be using the HTMX Phone???

[natheyshiro]

Ill be the weird dude owning my own cloud

[JakobMusic]

I disagree.
We can see it right now, more than ever:
Tech companies actually still care ALOT about processing power on device.
With the rapid growth of AI, companies suddenly realized its way to expensive to do everything in the Cloud, thats why so many new features like Copilot plus or Image Generation happen on device. It's Just more profitable for companies to have users buying a 150$ high end snapdragon chipset each and outsource some logic onto millions of chips rather than Azure or AWS or whatever.

And yes, AI is fully overhyped, but the concept applies everywhere.

[TimBell]

Yeah, that's a dumb terminal. They went obsolete in the 90's

[VivekYadav-dsoz]

The fortunate reason why this won't happen is Physics. It's a hard limit. There will ALWAYS be latency involved when doing anything on cloud. And any competitor that simply does the computation on-device will be hailed and win out. As for AIs, they're already on cloud as of now and rest of the computing model is unaffected, and yet more AI advances are happening to bring smaller and faster AIs on-device.

[ricknelson]

People used to say this about desktops, that they would be replaced with dumb terminals. And that didn't happen for a lot of practical reasons. So I'm skeptical that somehow we're going to have basically the same thing but with mobile devices. It's possible, I guess, but I think it's unlikely.

[Schadowofmorning]

Prime, im younger than you and I remember the early 2010s... Latency is an unsolved issue, no amount of processing power is gonna fix that in the near term. This is gonna fail like it did back then, because a laggy userinterface or slow response times are the primary reason for lost customers.

[Salantor]

If we could use said devices to record videos, take photos, and do other stuff like that then maybe, maybe. But I doubt if that will be possible in only 5 years. Also; Imagine those cloud outages that happen more and more often. It would be a disaster waiting to happen.

[Aerroon]

I think it could happen in some select parts of the world, but not in most places. If it's somebody else's computer then you're going to be paying a premium to get that compute from them while having to endure higher latency. Most people aren't too keen on spending more money to get a worse experience, especially with all the privacy implications and what not.
Just look at things like cloud backups. People will get on board with it until their google drive fills up and google then tells them to pay a subscription fee. That just pisses people off.

[alexnefi]

Bad take about the battery life. If anything it'd drain the battery faster cause it constantly has to send and receive data, which is power intensive especially on a cellular network.

[JArielALamus]

So, are you saying we are going to regress to the mainframe days with thin clients but a modern twist? 🤔

[smddev]

Can confirm that this is actively being worked on by the big fellas.

Sources: I thought it up as I was typing

[austinjones]

This has been the oscillation of tech for years this isn't new. Original computers for cloud-based computers then we got the personal computer and we had personal computers now everything's moving back to the cloud

[Florida.dev.]

my device will never be this, your device might

[techsuvara]

Didn’t they say this when dump terminals existed, then the PC came along.

Prime is overestimating the amount of work done on a mobile phone.

People have been saying the same thing he is since react native was a thing…