I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.

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[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.

Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)

It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.

> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).

> It is incredibly easy now to get an idea to the prototype stage

Yup. And for most purposes, that's enough. An app does not have to be productized and shipped to general audience to be useful. In fact, if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "takes majority of time and effort" - is entirely unnecessary, irrelevant, and a waste of time.

The productivity boost is there, but it's not measured because people are looking for the wrong thing. Products on the market are not solutions to problems, they're tools to make money. The two are correlated, because of bunch of obvious reasons (people need money, solving a problem costs money, people are happy to pay for solutions, etc.), but they're still distinct. AI is dropping the costs of "solving the problem" part, much more than that of "making a product", so it's not useful to use the lack of the latter as evidence of lack of the former.

Me, and photo editor tool to semi-automate a task of digitizing a few dozen badly scanned old physical photos for a family photo book. Needed something that could auto-straighen and auto-crop the photos with ability to quickly make manual adjustments, Gemini single-shotted me a working app that, after few minutes of back-and-forth as I used it and complained about the process, gained full four-point cropping (arbitrary lines) with snapping to lines detected in image content for minute adjustments.

Before that, it single-shot an app for me where I can copy-paste a table (or a subsection of it) from Excel and print it out perfectly aligned on label sticker paper; it does instantly what used to take me an hour each time, when I had to fight Microsoft Word (mail merge) and my Canon printer's settings to get the text properly aligned on labels, and not cut off because something along the way decided to scale content or add margins or such.

Neither of these tools is immediately usable for others. They're not meant to, and that's fine.

Overwhelming majority prefers shit[0] - people pick from what is made available to them, not from what could possibly exist, and they don't have direct say whether or when what's available changes.

These cashless solutions are just another thing[1] being pushed from top down; the passengers only notice when they suddenly find themselves unable to buy a ticket for coins, but by that point, the decision has long been made, so people only get to whine and complain, or otherwise express opinions that are not actually listened to by anyone with power to change things.

This is not saying that all those solutions are bad or inferior. Just that nobody is actually checking with people whether they want it or not; technology is deployed as fait accompli, and regular people just find ways to cope.

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[0] - Like flies, I suppose. There's millions of them, they can't be wrong!

[1] - Like most technology, really, both software and hardware.

> Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.

Unfortunately, a more accurate way of putting it is: stuff takes cards in lieu of coins. Like, where I live (also EU), ticket machines in buses and trams have gradually been upgraded over the past decade to accept cards, and then to accept only cards.

It's a ratchet. Hidden inflation striking again. Cashless is cheaper to maintain than cash-enabled, so it pretends to be a value-add at first, but quickly displaces the more expensive option. Same with apps, which again, are cheaper to maintain than actual payment-safe hardware.

It's near impossible to reverse this, because to do that, you have to successfully argue for increasing costs - especially that inflation quickly eats all the savings from the original change, so you'd be essentially arguing to make things more expensive than the baseline.