ARM as a primary architecture

[Bill Nottingham]

drago01 (drago01 at gmail.com) said: 
> > The data is noisy but there's a significant minority who do not have computers, now buying a smart phone. This will grow. They may never end up with a desktop. Even Apple has disconnected a requirement for having a desktop. My parents are candidates for replacing their laptop with just an iPad. Maybe 1/4 of the friends I have use a desktop/laptop once a week or less.
> 
> Interesting. People I know just using them (tablets) as "toys" to play
> some causal games, surf the net & read mails. They go back to there
> laptops / desktops to do anything beyond that.

In my experience, that's way more about the interface than anything else.

Take for example a middle schooler  - mine uses a laptop. Not because it
runs a desktop OS, not because it runs Fedora, but mainly just because
who on earth wants to write a 5 page essay with an on-screen keyboard.

There's really no reason a tablet device with an attachable keyboard
wouldn't work for her, and the next device she gets might *be* that; the
reason it's a laptop is because it's what we had lying around. (Hooray
for hand me downs!)

Sure, I use a laptop for web browsing because it fits my "open 40 tabs to
read later and then sequentially go through them" model of working better,
but I don't pretend to think that that's a normal mode that people will
move to more of.

Bill