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I am 75, and have a ton of computer gear. I can imagine myself as an old man later in life, not wanting to do any programming, and just wanting a single digital
by mark_l_watson 7d ago
I am 75, and have a ton of computer gear. I can imagine myself as an old man later in life, not wanting to do any programming, and just wanting a single digital device like a future version of this product. Let’s see what Apple has available in 10 years.
- lvl256 7d agoI take it this is a joke? I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding. Edit: I don’t know of anyone 75 still coding outside of retired professors here and there. I am not trying to be an ageist. I just don’t think I will be physically capable when I am 75.
- ericmay 7d agoIt doesn't seem like a joke?
- FpUser 7d ago>"I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding." I am 65 and still enjoy software development (not coding in particular) but decomposing business idea into software architecture and functionality. Decomposing is the part I really enjoy, the rest is a necessity but with AI that rest takes way less of my time than it used to. I do not work for someone though. I develop products for clients or for my own business, was doing it all my life and was doing it from my own office for last 26 years. Not overworked either. Have enough time to enjoy life. Al in all very happy
- FpUser 7d agoin 10 years any phone should be able to wirelessly stream it to any monitor / tv and plenty of those will be everywhere
- varjag 7d agoI mean you kinda can do that now.
- FpUser 7d ago>"kinda" - is a keyword. experience is abysmal, especially when it works but true desktop paradigm is not supported
- static_motion 7d agoI find Dex to be decent enough. Its biggest limitation is that it runs Android apps, but for doing stuff in a browser on a big screen and multitasking with some other apps that are tolerable to use that way it's pretty good.
- FpUser 7d ago>"I find Dex to be decent enough" - I guess it is very personal. I find it atrocious. Not this and not that. My instincts are screwed
- 9dev 7d agoRight — I would have hoped a while ago already that we transcend past the notion of an endpoint device. A tablet, a laptop, or a phone should all just be entry points to access my one OS instance. You could think this a bit further still, and have all kinds of devices offer an interface to nearby endpoints with a display or controls, establishing connectivity automatically.
- Danox 7d agoRight now, Apple is the only vertical company out there at scale. Maybe one of the Chinese companies might eventually get there but who is this western company other than Apple? It certainly isn’t Google or Microsoft at this point their efforts are more halfhearted me-too products, and when I say hardware, I mean in-house designed and engineered hardware not buying it from somebody else.
- HalcyonicStorm 7d agoI'm really sad that the ubuntu phone dream was never realized
- mywittyname 7d agoWe can do this now, but I don't think the user experience makes it worth it compared to casting. Bandwidth limitations require lower frame rates and responsiveness, which is fine for video but bad for interactive apps (most phones are native 120+hz + VRR_. But re-encoding video is (processor & battery life) expensive and probably lower quality than the original stream. People who do this a lot probably just use a DV adapter (maybe it just works with USB-C, but I haven't tried it) for native apps, or casting for streaming video.
- reenorap 7d agoApple does this right now. I use AirPlay to extend one laptop into an older laptop so I can have 2 displays when I’m away from home
- FpUser 7d agoThere is a difference between laptop and a phone. Hopefully in the future phone can be switched to a full desktop mode and OS when it beams to large screen. Well that is unless by then we have chip in our brains or what's equally bad everything rented and leased and can be used from any physical location. Convenient but deadly.
- Dlemlo 7d agoIts a 2200$ device which does the same thing as a 500$ tablet or any other option. If people would at least use the power they buy... :|
- dgellow 7d agoWe (the HN audience) have disposable income for that type of thing, I don’t see the issue with being a casual user of an expensive device
- officeplant 7d agoI can't even afford the 17e, who is this we?
- dgellow 7d agoThe audience at large. It’s obviously not every single individual
- yesitcan 7d agoThat’s a roundabout way of saying “you’re unusually broke.”
- paganel 7d agoI also can't fathom paying $2,200 for a phone, which is to say that we're not all working for US big tech companies in here.
- dgellow 7d agoI have the disposable income and would still not pay 2k USD for a phone a FWIW. But I spend that on other hobbies (just ordered a programmable power supply and an oscilloscope earlier this week, close to that price when taken together)
- justinator 7d ago
- electriclove 7d ago[flagged]
- switchbak 7d agoI presume you're trying to be friendly here, but your first couple sentences come off a bit harsh. I like that he's well into his life and still enjoying writing (or authoring, or whatever we call it now) code, and looks forward to a nice long life. No one lives forever, and I'm sure he's aware of that.
- electriclove 7d agoYeah I'm quite old myself and that's ok. I find that sometimes we put off things unnecessarily. Life is short, enjoy it.
- delbronski 7d agoSir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming. I used to love this stuff. But after watching all my favourite companies and CEOs turn to greedy villains… I’m just done. How do I survive another 35 years doing this stuff?
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- qmr 7d agoThey've always been greedy villains.
- 1attice 7d agoQuantity has a quality all its own
- estearum 7d agoNah, this is a really dangerous narrative. Shareholder primacy is a pretty recent concept (a fundamentally anti-American one) that has recently gone metastatic and is now completely self-referential. We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something. Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.
- ThrowawayR2 7d agoJohn D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.
- dymk 7d agoEnshittification says hi
- mkw5053 7d agoHey other Mark Watson :)
- koreth1 7d agoMy dad is 87 and I'm seriously thinking about buying him one of these. He wants a phone that will fit in his pocket, but his vision isn't great so he has the text size bumped up pretty high. Right now he's using an iPhone 15. Large text size on a small-form-factor phone, it turns out, makes a fair number of apps nearly unusable. For example, it's super common to see a dialog box pop up where the "OK" button is pushed off the bottom of the screen by the text, leaving you with no way to dismiss it. I frequently get tech-support calls from him that end up boiling down to that problem, and it makes using apps a pretty frustrating experience for him. A device that fits in his pocket and that he can still hold in one hand when he's using it as a phone, but that has enough screen real estate to run apps in large-print mode without constantly breaking UI designs, would meaningfully improve his life.
- teiferer 7d agoIphone 15 counting as "small form factor" says a lot.
- koreth1 7d agoGood catch! I misremembered his model. He actually uses an iPhone 13 Mini, which definitely counts as small (by modern smartphone standards, anyway).
- tkgally 7d agoI encounter the same problem of unclickable buttons on my iPhone 15 fairly often. Sometimes I can make them reachable by switching to landscape mode, but not always. I’m 69 and do prefer larger fonts, though I don’t think my font size settings are causing the problem.
- sajithdilshan 7d agoThis would actually be a growing market in 10-15 years due to increased life expectancy and every boomers has reached retiring age by then. Maybe Apple would introduce an iPhone optimized to be used especially for older people
- 7d ago
- smugglerFlynn 7d agoIf Apple continues like that, in 10 years it won’t exist
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- nonethewiser 7d agoYou all laugh but yeah your brain is going to directly interface with some small portable client hooked up to the internet. Will probably just be integrated with the microchip in your head.
- wittjeff 7d agoHow about open and rotate for 1.4x zoom?
- plazmatic 6d ago[dead]