my friends and i all fantasize about cyberdecks and sometimes i’ll daydream about a pocket sized device i can use as a computer. which is funny bc my phone is literally a tiny computer in my pocket. but it’s so restrictive of course it doesn’t even enter my mind as an option
I really believe that the core issue with phones-as-computers is just the input schema. It's so difficult to type accurately at speed, to select things on screen accurately, or to use any more complex inputs (analogous to right-clicking or keyboard modifiers like ctrl) that it severely limits the possibility space of the devices as tools. Obviously the corporate motivation to make the user beholden to rent-seeking app stores plays into this, but even if you wanted to go off and create a new phone OS that really works like a real computer you'd be dead in the water.
I occasionally fantasize about what it would take to change this. I think you could come up with some sort of gloves that would register specific finger movements as "typing", but they'd take so much work to learn I don't know how they'd ever get enough traction to be feasible.
like 20 or 30 years ago I always imagined that eventually computers would just be a tiny box or other nice-form-factor easy to carry thing that just projected a screen somewhere and then projected a keyboard onto the nearest flat surface that you could type on
nowadays I'm a little surprised that with all the AR stuff we haven't gotten a phone that can just Do That
