First hand from a couple of ~16 year olds I know. Definitely not a representative sample. Some know how to type at an acceptable speed. They're awful at shortcuts (alt-tab, many of the browser shortcuts that also present in many other programs (ctrl-w,-t,-s,-q) and most text-selection and movement shortcuts (ctrl-a,-x,-c,-v and (ctrl-)shift-left,-right)) so they navigate clumsily compared to us. They feel awkward when performing simple tasks but they do it faster than on a smartphone. They don't understand some of the terms and abstractions, likely because the smartphones keep that away from them.
Seeing them navigate things like homework or spreadsheets or multiple tabs in a browser from a smartphone is like watching a caveman trying to use a piece of brittle rock as a hammer. It will work in the end, but it's slow. I haven't looked at them closely enough, but I doubt they can comfortably keep more than 10 tabs open and navigate between them with the same speed as on a laptop or a desktop. I assume their browsing habits are qualitatively different than ours because of that. You can't really do adequate research on a smartphone.
For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil. The one person I know who did do their homework on their phone tried to evangelize it to their friends and got ridiculed for it.
Sadly, most websites forcefully limit the width of the text. It's like they pretend our monitors are oriented to be tall rather than wide. Even HN has unnecessarily big margins. So unless I try to cram another window in my FHD monitor, I have ~50% or more completely wasted space. Margins should be 2-3 pixels wide, not 20-30% of the screen.
The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.
> actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read
That may apply to most people, but not to everyone.
margins to control the width of large blocks of text have a ton of research in their favor, it's not just "more whitespace = more gooder" UI design madness. there's some of that of course, but there's a sane core underneath it all.
Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently?
If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.
I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).
Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.
Modes control which people and apps can trigger a sound/vibration, but also offer the option to hide the silenced notifications from the status bar, pull-down shade, and dots on app icons. I hide them from the status bar, but not the pull-down shade so that I can manually check if I want to, but don't see them at a glance.
I'm not a heavy user of this feature though; I mostly don't install apps that have spammy notifications.
As a millennial boomer, I prefer my triple monitor setup and mechanical keyboard, not to mention network- and client-level content blockers, whenever I have to input more than a sentence.
I was at a conference last week, and I took notes in a fullscreened GNU Nano. Distractions, ADHD, etc. Did get some odd looks, but I couldn't imagine taking notes without an actual keyboard. I'm not an ultra fast typer, but I'm decent - I'd challenge any thumb typer on MonkeyType.
That's only for reading though! For taking notes I go with a real keyboard or pencil and paper whenever I have the choice.
browsing is slowly reducing as time goes on too, as while it's convenient on my phone, it's rarely efficient. it doesn't take long at all before I'd rather pull out a laptop and finish more quickly.
On the other hand, I've noticed lots of people use voice on their phone instead of a keyboard.
Many friends of mine send occasional nonsense in the middle of a text message, and it becomes obvious they're using voice to text.
As a young kid, why would I laboriously type a homework paper when I could dictate it from the couch or some other better location than a desk?
I do that, but only sometimes, because of those dictation mistakes. If not for that, I'd use it a lot, because it's super convenient way to communicate or operate the phone on the go, while pushing a stroller, holding your other kid's hand in your other hand, holding an umbrella in the third hand, and a bag of groceries in fourth.
What I don't do, and hate with burning passion, is voice messages. I get the appeal for the sender, but excepting kids/teenagers, it's about the most annoying thing you can do for the recipient. There's hardly a moment in a busy adult's life where you can listen to someone's rambling without disrupting people around you and/or discomforting yourself and/or having to expend 100x the focus that reading takes.
For me, voice messages over 5 seconds long go straight to "Share" -> save to file [Ghost Commander] -> attach to a prompt saying "transcribe that for me" [any LLM app] - and I'm working on automating this away completely.
I become unreasonably frustrated when having to search for things on the phone. Buying stuff online is a 'big screen task' not because of the security aspect, but because of needing to compare multiple products, which involve jumping between tabs. I can do that via shift/ctrl-tab, clicking, alt-tab etc - basically a single click. On the phone it's at least 3, and a genuinely grating experience saying nothing of having to copy and paste text for searching.
That said I've come across people that don't know basic copy and paste shortcuts / basic PC literacy, so for those I can see how the phone would feel no less efficient.
I think as kids get older, and their tasks require more digital complexity to complete, they'll slowly migrate towards laptops and larger screen devices (maybe including tablets, maybe not). Basic surfing etc is fine, but there is no way I want to be using even a spreadsheet on a phone - it's a miserable experience - saying nothing of something with genuine complexity like Blender.
Yup. From the frontier of mobile tech, I can say that a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) is the first mobile device that successfully ate into this category, and bit a rather substantial chunks out of it. It's only been ~6 months into this experience, but the "big tasks" for me now are the ones that benefit from substantial use of keyboard and/or mouse. If it's only about screen space or doing things in 2-3 apps at the time, chances are my phone is now good enough for its mobility to beat inconvenience - though chances are also good that at least one of the programs will be a browser, because mobile apps still suck.
On especially older phones if I were to write a long comment and move to a different tab or app before submitting, I can all but guarantee the OS would kill and try reloading the tab and lose all my text. What's even worse is this could happen mid online purchase which can have even greater consequences (double booking or purchasing especially but things like flight tickets). People who grew up with older phones saw this happen all too often and moved to a desktop or laptop computer where that literally never happens, at least by default.
This, I'd bet, is the primary reason for big vs small screen activities, although of course there are many secondary ones, such as the phone being many kids' primary interface
The only asterisk is that I also own a Mac Mini but I keep it attached running headlessly to my router and access it from the iPad via Jump Desktop and only use it exclusively for dev work (I only use a single external monitor anyway even with a normal Mac) or if I really need Chrome occasionally. But macOS used in that way feels almost native to the iPad.
Prior to this I was looking at an MBP and selling the iPad but this has convinced me to stay with it for the time being and maybe just upgrade the mac mini to a studio instead and continue to use it remotely.
People hate on it but so far I've been using it this way and it really feels next gen to the point that using a Macbook with macOS vs. the iPP + iPadOS feels genuinely archaic. With the latest iPadOS beta too things have gotten better on the Safari from as well and tabs no longer refresh as aggressively (though it's not perfect still).
Not to mention the significantly higher amount of security with iPadOS and AppleCare benefits (specifically theft protection) that comes with this setup.
If Android desktop mode improves a bit more and the Motorola devices for GOS next year look good then it wouldn't be inconceivable that I could drop my devices from 3 to 2 and not need a proper PC or Mac at all.
My wife is the opposite. It doesn't occur to her that the problem may be with the janky website, not with her. She'll ask me for help with a thing out of frustration and my first troubleshooting step is to reach for my laptop. This is almost inevitably followed by "hey, wait, how come you're able to press the Submit button but I wasn't able to?" "Because the dev never tested this on a phone and it's broken." "So it's not just me being incompetent to use this website?" "Nope, never was."
Thanks for the honor! :)
Sometimes I even copy links from here and send them by mail to myself so I can reply later - maybe Im getting tooo old? :-D (on the iPhone I would store it in a simple textnote)