There are lots of phones in the market with specs better than a lot of PCs.
Choose a PC if you want a keyboard, and a phone if you want something you can hold in your hand. But you can get more power than you need in either.
(I don’t see any appeal in threads. Mastodon, or some other platform that talks to the general fediverse, seems like the obvious choice of i were looking for something twitter-like.)
I was working on a high end video editing product for mobile a couple years ago. It turns out that if you actually tried to use all that power, the Android phone (a highest end Samsung then) just overheated and shut down. One of our QE would run the phone laying on an ice pack to see if they could get renders to finish. So in theory quite poweful, in practice mobile has hella issues.
In practice, for most of what most people use both phones and PCs for, the interface matters more than the specs. And the next most important thing is generally memory (how many photos does this thing hold before i need to start worrying about space?)
I mostly use my phone for stuff like the SDMB. It’s in my pocket. It doesn’t take much room on the breakfast table. I do use my PC for any non-trivial photo editing (rare, usually the phone options are all i want) and for music editing (something i do a moderate amount of. Audacity rocks.) But my phone gets a lot more use.
Nit, that’s not memory, that’s storage. RAM versus flash memory. The Ars story lede you posted was about RAM, not storage. The headline phone had 32GB RAM and up to 1TB storage.
I know the difference, but they are both types of memory, imho. One is “working memory” and the other is “storage memory”, it at least, i think that’s what they are called when talking about people.
And after storage memory, working memory is usually the next most important stat. 
The Ars story used the terms I did in my post. Shrug.
It looks like Threads only being available on the phone isn’t hurting them too much. They’re approaching 100M signups.
And as someone who has calloused hands from playing stringed instruments: The touchscreen interface is the worst graphical interface that was ever conceived for a computer. Half the time I use my current Android phone or my wife’s iPhone, I want to smash them.
What? Not at all. It’s so intuitive. My kids have had it figured out since they were two. I can’t believe how natural it is for them. I fumble with typing on my phone, but I love the touch screen as well.
My complaint with touchscreens, even the big one on my PC, is that where I tap and where I aim to tap are usually ~1/8" apart. I can’t seem to learn to aim my finger offset the correct amount that it makes contact where I want.
When typing on my phone’s onscreen keyboard, about 1/3rd of all keystrokes end up triggering the letter on the keyboard row above or below where I’m aiming. My left / right is very reliable, but my up / down is a mess. I have no such issues on an actual keyboard.
Bingo, the accuracy of the touch screen as a keyboard is atrocious. Even a poor tiny physical keyboard is light years better for myself. I can feel what I’m pressing and press it. With a touchscreen keyboard, I’m spending at least half of my time correcting mistakes. I don’t have that issue with a physical keyboard.
ETA: Selecting a link or triggering the camera is a similar experience. About the only thing the touch screen is actually good at is scrolling and zooming.
I think the issue is entirely with the person. It accurately registers where I touch.
The problem is the “keys” are 1/8" square and the blunt end of my ordinary male-sized finger is a ~1/2" hemisphere while my thumb is a ~1/2 x 3/4" rough ellipse. It’s like using boxing gloves to push the buttons in an elevator.
Depending on the exact angle of approach between finger and screen, darn near any part of the hemisphere of my fingertip makes initial contact with the screen.
Yup. Add in calluses from guitar playing and martial arts, and I have misshapen fingertips that contact the screen in a different place depending on the angle or whether my finger is slightly turned or whatever. Absolutely maddening.
I don’t have a problem with the keyboard on a phone other than it’s a) so damned slow, and b) you have to look at the keyboard to type. I’m typing this on desktop and I don’t look at my keyboard, I just type.
I see mobile devices being for consuming information, not generating it. I can quick reply to texts (though I usually just talk slowly to Siri, which is faster than “typing”). My lady friend has mastered swiping on the iPhone keyboard. If I had the patience I’d level that skill. I’ve tried it and it’s quite tricky, but watching her she’s pretty fast.
I have a couple of friends who talk their texts. They’re simply incomprehensible. Because much of our text content is jargon that the speech recognizer doesn’t know. So it picks the closest “normal” word from its English corpus.
I actually received this sentence today:
Not a bad parent three legs today to tomorrow three Hyundai three.
The topic had nothing to do with cars. The correct intent was:
Not a bad pairing. Three legs today, two tomorrow, three on day three.
Speaking texts doesn’t work well. At least not yet.
Reading my typed texts you’ll often see correctly spelled words joined by a “b” or “v” where a space belongs. My finger missed high & didn’t notice. Or you’ll find a word missing a vowel plus lowercase L because I typed the vowel correctly, and hit low on the “L” which became a [backspace], deleting the vowel. Like this which I really typed this morning:
Ashevle is restricted, but arevyou really expecting …
Those are challenging, but not as bad as the dictated sentences full of effectively random insertions.
It works OK if you go slow. I just went to the trouble of opening this page on my iPhone and I spoke this entire response. As you can see, not one word was messed up.
The rain in Spain falls, mainly on the plane. The roof trough calls through
the only mistakes in the sentence above was an extraneous comma and the word rough instead of a roof (I spoke that entire sentence without correction).
ETA I had to type the word “comma”
ETA Okay, it put an “a” in front of “roof”, mea culpa
ETA Keep your phone to date, Apple fixes this stuff (and breaks other things). Can’t speak for Android.
I have a different problem. Even when I have my iPhone set to English, it not uncommonly substitutes a French word. I do occasionally have it set to French, and it doesn’t seem to have a clear dividing line.
That would correctly be “plain”, but otherwise I’m quite impressed. I wonder if my friends hurry and/or are always speaking in loud environments.
Ima gonna give it a try. I don’t want to be a curmudgeonly Luddite.
Gah, you’re right. “Plain”. Facepalm. But yes, there is a skill to it, word breaks matter a lot when speaking. And Apple seems to slowly improve it; a lot of people can’t be bothered to update their phone. Extraneous commas are the current weirdness.
I’ve been swyping for years. It’s faster than typing for me (I’m not a great typist) unless i want to use an unusual word. That is why my posts tend to have a lot weird of typos. But it’s very fast and comfortable. (And i make a lot of typos on a keyboard, too, they are just less weird.) Almost all my posts to the SDMB are typed on my phone.