Allow me to share a vision with you. Or perhaps a nightmare. This is not a market prediction, I’m not an economic analyst tasked with laying down those kinds of prophecies. I don’t actually want this to happen. But I worry that if things don’t change significantly from the current direction, it might.
A grim phone-only future
Let’s say it’s 2030. A laptop with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB storage drive costs $2,500. (If you doubt that price, a 16GB/1TB Surface Pro laptop costs $2,000 today. So, if anything, I’m being conservative in this estimate.) It is simply unaffordable for most users, who would have been hunting for those specs in the $700 range in 2025. They decide to go with a secondhand mini PC, if they go with any dedicated PC hardware at all. Maybe with that kind of sticker shock, they wonder if they really need a desktop or a laptop.
But they do need a phone. Everyone needs a smartphone — okay, not everyone, there are certainly people who do without them. But I think I can confidently say that the vast majority of people who work and communicate with friends and just generally get stuff done in the modern world consider either an iPhone or an Android phone in their pocket a necessity. That’s a non-negotiable purchase at least once every five years or so, in the way that a new laptop might not be.
Chris Hoffman / Foundry
So the natural move in a world where PC hardware is unattainable is trying to do more with your phone. Maybe spending more money on it to enable this. Someone who might have bought an $800 phone instead budgets $1,500 for one, even if they have to pay for it in installments, or just fully finance it. You know, the way most people buy cars now, even if they’re secondhand. The smartphone is the way most people interact with the digital world initially even today. And so that decades-long trend just continues, and swallows up the formats of the laptop and desktop.