Mobile Has Replaced Desktop, and That’s Scary

Why’s everyone celebrating the PC’s demise?

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders,” said a young Steve Jobs for an interview back in the eighties. To get his point across, he mentioned a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species, humans included. The study found that the condor impressively uses the least amount of energy to move one kilometer, putting it on top of the list. Us? Far from majestic: a third of the way down. Equip a human with a bicycle nevertheless, Jobs continued, and she would move on top, surpassing the vulture. “And that’s what a computer is to me,” concluded the Apple guy. “It’s the equivalent of a bicycle to our minds.”

35 years later, computers have gotten faster, smarter, and smaller: now we hold a powerful tool in our palms capable of connecting us to the internet, bringing food to our door, and applying filters to our faces. We’re increasingly ditching these bulky desktops and laptops in favor of the octa-core Exynos or the A11 Bionic, flexing their muscles on bezel-free displays. The reward, in this case, is the unprecedented ease of use. At no point in time was there a computer with a user experience smoother than what we have now. But when we get serious for a moment and decide to learn a programming language or check the latest report on climate change, the mobile experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Smartphones’ small screen size is an indication of the technological luxury we’re surrounded by. However it comes at a cost: the small display has turned us into passive consumers, munching on whatever the app store throws at us. And while we can comfortably spend 5 hours on a Sunday watching the latest YouTube drama as it unfolds, we can’t learn, or create, something of significance on a 6.1” screen. That’s scary. The scarier part is that consumers, tech experts, and the media seem oblivious to this fact.

A 2015 Wired article, boldly titled In less than two years, a smartphone could be your only computer, cheers for the collapse of the PC. Anyone with a mobile device can now handle almost all of their at-home and even at-work tasks without needing anything else, argues the magazine. An expert quoted in the article declares that “the PC has very much become a secondary computing device.” The reason? Apple’s A8 chip and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810.

What the article left out though is that mobile, so far, has failed to empower us. App stores promise users of time well spent on catching zombies, screaming in rage to a restaurant’s social page, and silently weeping while comparing themselves to others. Smartphones’ limited screen size doesn’t allow for deep, valuable work. Their portable aspect is supposed to support us with fast, time-sensitive requests: texting a family member living overseas or taking a photo of a book cover we’d like to purchase. But it seems that our phones are serving the exact opposite purpose: when we lay them down, they scream at us; we silent them, they whisper.

Desktop, on the other hand, is already transforming people’s lives. Disadvantaged unknowns can become programmers, musicians, writers, and filmmakers from their bedrooms with the help of a machine able to accommodate their curious minds. While PCs offer a productive environment that encourages research, production, and multitasking while putting the user (mostly) in control, non-stop mobile notifications are stealing our lives away.

To understand the gap between desktop and mobile, let’s look at how Apple, a company that builds both, markets MacBook and iPhone. Behind the Mac was a campaign dedicated to the former, featuring videos and stills of creatives and problem solvers working on the famous laptop. Grimes makes her art from start to finish using it. Bruce Hall edits and retouches photos behind his Mac. Peter Kariuki, an app developer, coded a solution that connects passengers with safe motorcycle taxi drivers across Rwanda using the machine. But when Apple decided to celebrate creativity among iPhone owners, the best it could do was publish photos taken by the company’s flagship smartphone after getting it professionally edited by a desktop software.

Back in 2002, my father brought home a secondhand, poorly assembled PC. And although it crashed several times, it taught me invaluable skills. With each upgrade to our family computer came exciting possibilities: writing, on a 23” monitor, the personal essay that got me accepted into a college I couldn’t afford, learning how to edit videos, an ability that provided me with leverage when negotiating a job offer, exploring Google Ads, a platform I owe my current job to, and many other journeys of discovery.

I ask myself, what kind of future would I have experienced if my first, and possibly only, interaction with a computer had been one of these bezel-less, notch-less phones, much like younger and future generations? Certainly not a promising one, even if it made me sit at the top of the locomotion efficiency table.