Wow, cool, but is it a good thing? It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices. Desktop applications can be more advanced than mobile apps, there's just inherent limitations on the mobile input methods and OS. Though if you're playing games or browsing the web, touching and swiping works great.
Don't even get me started on the fact that only one tech giant allows you to run code on your mobile OS without their permission, and next year we're even losing that. Because the other tech giant normalized taking away the freedom.
The ecosystem had a lot of diversity. When there was a new need or opportunity, new hardware arrived from a fairly diverse set of manufacturers and distributors.
Some of those still exist in niches - music hardware, ham radio, specalised navigation hardware for boats and planes, and high-performance high-end professional cameras and such.
But consumer-grade products are now mostly software, and the software runs on a handful of platforms controlled by a handful of corporations who charge access tribute (taxes.)
The entire system is very locked-down and brittle, and gives those corporations the option to create individual and collective kill-switches for people and/or activities they don't like.
That would have sounded unlikely a couple of years ago, but it sounds a lot less unlikely now.
> It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices.
I continue to find this assessment of phones and tablets impossible to relate to. The very-portable device with multiple cameras, microphones, various other sensors, maybe stylus support built-in, is in most cases in which I’m creating anything in my personal life vastly more useful than a laptop or desktop computer. This seems to also be what many people who create real things for work have decided. (I do computer-things with computers for pay, so it’s different for me there)
I could have been clearer, what I said wouldn't apply to cameras, I was only talking about things that could be done on a desktop. If a phone can capture audio/video in the field freeing people up from having to carry a separate camera, that is a good thing.