But mobile is changing everything. I don't have a fixed phone in my house, I use my mobile phone. I don't use one of the two expensive DSLRs in my house, I use my phone. In two months recently in the US, I never hailed a cab, but used an app to hail and track a car. I read books on my phone, I edit photos on my phone, I track site analytics and app sales on my phone, I play games on my phone, I navigate using maps on my phone, I record notes on my phone.

I switched from a desktop to a laptop three machines and 10+ years ago. Never considered buying a desktop since. Modern mobile devices (Surface-style tablet/laptop hybrids) are very capable these days and not far away from the MBP I use. Once phone-form-factor devices are more powerful and we have virtual displays and a keyboard replacement, the needle will shift further. That level of capability will cover almost everyone who uses a computer for work.

Don't get me wrong, I don't work on my phone. I feel cramped with less than three monitors. I like to spread out. But I also like to scrawl notes pencil on paper, and that doesn't mean that computers haven't taken over the offices of decades past.

And there's no denying that the mobile form factor - a computer that you carry around with you easily - is dominating and will go further. Someone who doesn't have a use one will be a blip.

Maybe all those are possible mobile; but just not very good. Edit a photo? For real? With one finger? Books one paragraph at a time? That's gotta be slow. Games - not immersive 3d ones, maybe dumb puzzle games or side-scrollers with a tiny part of the screen visible at one time. And navigation is very hard on a phone - turn-by-turn is the norm, which totally blows any global awareness and turns you into a cog. I can't see enough map on a phone to even begin to plan a route.

I'm heavily biased - I can't exist without 2 large screens, mouse and keyboard for what I use a computer for. But from my point of view every attempt to use a mobile device ends in frustration and despair - they are so slow, such a tiny bandwidth for interaction, information comes in droplets. I'm unwilling to dumb myself down to their level.

> Edit a photo? For real? With one finger? Do you use 2 mice to edit your photos? Most computer graphics people I know edit photos with a pen (also a singular digit). The main thing I miss when editing photos on my laptop is the ability to reach out and touch it, and normally with 1, 2 or more fingers.

The main problem is the damn iPad and its 'fat finger' syndrome, but I have a pen based 8 inch tablet that I wish had more capable photo editing software, because it turns editing photos into a dream (I am not a professional, and could never get the hang of digitizing pads, I like to see what I am editing directly under the pen)

This isn't about productive work for a narrow grouping of people but about life. For 99% of people (the huge growth in mobile the slides talked about), editing a photo is applying filters and tweaking some sliders. It's not Aperture and Lightroom or Photoshop.

My Garmin has about the same screen size as my phone. I've used both successfully for navigation many, many times.

Took a DSLR on a recent two-month trip and outside of Yellowstone (zoom lens...), I barely touched it. My phone takes excellent photos, takes slo-mo videos, auto-stitches panoramic photos instantly, has timelapse options, HDR apps. And it has more storage, built-in sharing/social options and it's far, far smaller.

> In two months recently in the US, I never hailed a cab, but used an app to hail and track a car.

I haven't hailed a cab in years -- rarely need a cab. If I needed a cab a lot, sure, maybe I'd get a cell phone. If some Uber app was a lot better, still, and I wanted to use Uber, then I'd get a smartphone. I live out in the 'burbs -- deer, ground hogs, etc. in the back yard -- where the cab service sucks.

> I track site analytics and app sales on my phone

The times I try to read graphs of data, usually I copy the file of the image to disk, read it with Microsoft's Picture and FAX Viewer, and zoom in a lot: Commonly people who draw graphs like the visual aspect but come close to just ignoring the axes and commonly have the text way, way, way too small -- I can't read the text at all without about 3X zoom. It'd be worse on a smaller screen.

So, you are using a smartphone to read data and less to write it. To draw a graph, I use Excel and scream bloody murder until I get out my notes on what the heck hidden magic ways to left/right single/double click to get the standard things done, e.g., get the font sizes up about 4X, make as much as possible black and bold, etc. It turns out that, then, I usually, for the people I tend to show graphs to, print the graphs on paper.

For photos, it turns out that I bought for about $2 a digital camera -- cute little thing, sold shrink wrapped on a card. Apparently it has the camera guts of a smartphone. It also has a USB socket. And, yes, Microsoft PhotoDraw will read an image from a USB port. So, I can take and print some images.

But, soon, I saw that my sack of Nikon camera equipment, especially with my Honeywell smart flash, takes much better pictures. To develop the pictures, I just take the film to Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Sadly their scanning resolution is much lower than my pictures deserve, but otherwise I get good pictures. Sure, someday I will cough up $10,000 for a new bag of Nikon equipment but with CCDs instead of film. I'll get a copy of PhotoShop, a color printer, etc.

No joke, smartphone cameras (with some interesting principles of optics on the advantages of such a small lens, short focal length, and number of pixels per inch in the detector) are no doubt now taking each year, maybe each month, more photos than were taken in all the history of film cameras. But the quality is like old snapshots.

E-mail on a smartphone? I won't do it: To me e-mail is important; I have some good ways to handle it; and those ways make good use of my PC and its software and won't carry over to a smartphone. I won't put my e-mail in a smartphone silo but want to keep it on the same computer as all my other important data -- data to/from e-mail needs a big fraction of my collection of all my data.

So, right, for some of the easier, read-only work on a PC can move to a smartphone. And a smartphone has some new hardware that permits some new uses.

But, replace a PC? Not for any very serious PC user. But the A16Z piece kept comparing with PCs -- and that's about as relevant as comparing with lawn mowers.

It was just such a really good story -- a PC is a computer, a smartphone is a computer, a lot more smartphones are being sold than PCs, some relatively light work done on PCs can be done on smartphones, a smartphone can also be used for some new work that needs the new hardware, ergo, now the newsies and A16Z have a story -- smartphones are changing everything, including PCs. Nonsense. It's just a tricky, deceptive story.

And that's a lot of what the OP had to say: A lot of that data was interesting, but, net, smartphones are no more replacing PCs than, say, an electric bicycle can replace a car.

A lot of tacos are being sold, more than PCs, but that doesn't mean that tacos are replacing PCs.

My simplest point: Mobile is not replacing PCs. Some people don't like me to say this, but it's just dirt simple that I'm correct. That you like the big monitors on your PC is part of the best evidence -- until there are some suitably good special glasses those big monitors will remain a big reason mobile devices won't replace PCs. Then there's the mouse, the keyboard, the printers, the old software -- dirt simple argument.

Just stop being autistic here. You're arguing a straw man. Nobody is saying that no PC's will be sold any more, or that all work on PC's can or will be replaced by mobile applications. The fact is (and all numbers prove so, from the sales numbers of phones and PC's, to the surveys and tracking data on use of mobile and desktop software) that many users can do on phones what they used to need a PC for (surfing, email, facebook) and that they have so little use for a PC that they, when facing the choice between phone and PC for cost reasons, choose the phone. I'm not sure how you're even arguing this is not true, a blind man can see it - you're arguing the equivalent of creationism.

Likewise, you boast that you are such a heavy PC user, which is exactly what puts you 3 or 4 standard deviations away from the modal user. So your diatribe on your own usage habits is statistically insignificant, and so a worthless sample.

I uderstand that phones and tablets have replaced typical desktop usage for the most casual user section of the population but I also find it quite sad.

These people (if studies and surveys are to be believed) basically 'surf' the internet through 4 or 5 particular apps on their phones and they form the filter bubble that is their experience of the internet entirely.

They don't even use browsers for the most part. Maybe thes epeople never used a desktop to 'surf' the internet and discover new things in the first place, but now they never will.