What comes after smartphones? — Benedict Evans

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them. There’s an old saying that the first ... See more

However, all of this might be the wrong mental model for thinking about the next step. As well as looking at the sequence ‘mainframe - PC - web - smartphone’, we should probably also think about what was going on underneath: ‘database - client/server - open source - cloud’, perhaps. That is, there are other progressions that are less visible but ju... See more

The device model that could perhaps replace the smartphone is VR, or AR, or both. These cannot reach more people than smartphones (again - we ran out of people) but they could nonetheless replace the experience.

Today, multitouch smartphones are getting on for 15 years old, and the S curve is flattening out. All the obvious stuff has been built, Apple and Google won, and the new iPhone isn’t very exciting, because it can’t be. So, we ask “what’s the next generation?”

Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.