I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.

90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.

Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.

Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.

My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.

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dmix a day ago | parent | next [-]

Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.

Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.

Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.

	▲	throwaway2037 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel exactly the same: Context switching is awful on a mobile, but great on something with a mouse and keyboard. Even copy and paste on mobile still feels weird after 10 years of doing it.
	▲	scarface_74 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[Context: this isn’t bragging my wife and I got rid of everything we physically owned and downsized so we could do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562] We travel so much, we keep things as “simple” as possible - Hilton and Hyatt brand hotels 95% of the time, Delta for domestic flights and preferably Delta or SkyTeam (AirFrance, Virgin Airlines, etc) for international flights. We have status with Hilton, Hyatt and Delta (Platinum Medallion) and Delta lounge access. Of course we have TSA Precheck and Clear. We found a couple that runs a few AirBnbs in Costa Rica for our winter stays there starting next year. In october 2022, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 4 suitcases, sold our cars, rented our home [1] out to our adult son (and two of his friends that we considered family) and flew one way trips to 15 different cities until landing in our then second home [2] in Florida. We did all of the planning via a shared Google Sheet on our phone, the Delta and American airline apps and Hilton and Hyatt hotel apps. During the past 7 months, we’ve had trips to Vegas, Costa Rica, 4-5 flights back home to ATL, a few flights to see my parents in south GA, DC, London and Niagara Falls Canada, we still have a few trips back to Atlanta and to see my parents this year. While we are doing all of this traveling together, my wife flies to conferences and I did travel semi frequently for business as a consultant but that has died down. At the same time, I’m managing the best use of Delta Skymiles, when to transfer points from Amex to AirFrance to get cheap domestic flights on Delta (check out r/awardtravel), Hilton points, Hyatt points either directly or by transferring from Chase. These are all using the apps. I have a Google sheet to keep track of various credit card perks (Delta stays credits, companion passes, etc) I have a spreadsheet with tabs for the next couple of years plans - next year we are staying in Costa Rica for a 45 days in an Airbnb and 3-4 cities domestically during the summer and a couple of other random domestic flights during the year. I am also keeping track of my budget, when is the best time to “nomad” based on potential rental income from my home [2]. While we have one account for hotels and a shared calendar, miles flying are based on “butts in seat”, whoever flies gets the miles. But you can book flights for others using your miles. We juggle those together too. This is all from our phones usually at night. We really have this down to science after 3+ years. [1] we sold our primary home last year [2] our current home is a unit in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp) we own. When we leave for months at a time, we just pack everything we own in 4 suitcases and store what we can’t in our one car - like my “desk” which is just a card table. We then put our unit in the rental pool and get income whenever someone stays in our unit. That covers our mortgage and all inclusive HOA fee. But that really only works in March - mid April (spring break), during the summer and the last two or three weeks of the year.

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Fokamul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically

Whoa interesting, so everyone is using 3rd party company service, is it paid service or free, I've checked their website and cannot understand if it's free or not for this basic level you've mentioned.

In my country, if this was a thing, that you must pay some company to file your taxes, it would probably cause public meltdown and end of any current government :)

Here, basic level taxes are done by your employer for you, by law, for free. Because actually they don't do taxes, but they only report amount of tax advances, social security, healthcare paid by your employer, to state, (all 3 is required by law to be paid and you or your employer have big legal problems if not). And also variables for tax deduction and then "something like IRS" will just send you tax return into your account.

And for any other cases(if you have more sources of income, eg.: salary + self-employed / rent) you must do taxes yourself, website for helping you to file taxes, is managed by state agency, for free.

Or you pay some money to "tax specialist" to file your taxes for you and liability to file it right goes after them (something like accountant, but hired only for this one task)

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throwaway2037 a day ago | parent [-]

US tax forms and rules are insanely complex compared to other highly developed nations. Lots of people use a commercial product called Turbo Tax to help them.

	▲	ryandrake a day ago \| parent [-]
		If you just have a W2 and are taking the standard deduction (applicable to many, if not most taxpayers), then there is no insane complexity. Your tax document is one and a half pages and can be done with a pen and calculator. If you have stock trades, IRA distributions, rental income, things like that, then yea, you probably need computer-based help.

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const_cast 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.

Well no, the UI on a phone is severely dumbed down because it has to work with a smaller screen and touch input. You can do the same stuff, sometimes, but with more effort.

Like, I could program on my phone, if I wanted. But that would suck major ass. It has the same capabilities, but certainly nowhere near the convenience. Even just running two things at once. It's... possible... on an iPhone. But it's not a desktop with split screen. And, if it can do split screen, I really have to squint, right?

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mathiaspoint 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Programming on a phone is actually pretty amazing if you can run a good overlapping window manager and an OS that won't randomly kill background tasks. I had a phone running Linux for a while and it was great I wrote a ton of unit tests for my side projects on it while taking the train. One time I was out and ran into some UI issue and fixed it right there on the bus. There's nothing like that now and everything that's available is so bad no one even understands what they're missing.

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const_cast 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sure, because phone have multiple problems. One is the software, usually it's fisher-price levels of dumbed down. Buttons are huge because people have fat fingers.

So we can fix the software, but we still have hardware limitations. The hardware is small. The screen is small. There's no keyboard, only buttons on said screen. I can open a document on my phone, yes. But I see 1/10th the content I would on a computer screen - just because the screen is very small. I mean, we have these super high resolution displays... running at 400% scaling. Meanwhile, I have 1440p running at 100% on my computer.

That's, like, a lot more stuff that can be on the screen.

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mathiaspoint 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Modern phone hardware is incredible. Often the most powerful computer people own these days is their smartphone because it's so good.

And I ran my phone with unit scaling. You don't need everything blown up to 400% especially with keyboard driven UIs.

	▲	const_cast 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'll have to try Plasma Mobile sometime. I've been using KDE for 10 years now, and I love it. Very excited to see how Linux on smartphones progresses.

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scarface_74 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do I need to see on my phone that I can’t when I am doing my taxes or even more so planning a trip - which I do a lot of?

I launch the Delta app as a Delta loyalist (Platinum Medallion) to book my flight. I then launch the Hilton app (I am Hilton Diamond) and compare prices/convenience with hotels with Hyatt (I am Hyatt Explorist).

The only exception was when we were looking for an AirBnb for an extended stay in Costa Rica next year.

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jabroni_salad a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Personally if I am going to spend more than $100 I am going to comparison shop and I like having multiple windows open to do it in.

Opening a specific airline's app and just getting whatever they have on offer is completely foreign to me. I would think I am getting cheated.

Also, federal taxes may be easy but the only way to free-file the state tax is to do it directly with the state and that means filling out a form myself.

	▲	scarface_74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I just mentioned in another comment, we travel a lot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583545 We don’t comparison shop. Domestically flights on Delta, hotels are either Hyatt or Hilton brand hotels. Internationally? Most Delta partners (AirFrance, Virgin Airways) or Delta itself. For Hilton, we get points directly and can transfer from Amex (rarely worth it). For Hyatt, points are more valuable and it’s easy to get points from Chase credit cards (r/churning) that can be transferred to Hyatt (saves us thousands a dollars a year sometimes). On Delta, we have lounge access, 2 free checked bags, free regional (domestic, north and Central America) flight upgrades, priority check in, etc.

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ryandrake a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically

Why even pay TurboTax if you're just taking the standard deduction and have only W2 income? Might as well just paper file for free. Anything more complex than that, and having a desktop monitor and full size keyboard is very useful. I can imagine even filling out 5 stock trades in TurboTax on a phone would be quite painful.

> Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.

This one bit me recently as I did some traveling. None of the major airline apps even work on my phone anymore. Their developers all just up and decided to block use of their app on older phones with full-screen modals preventing the software from working. My only choice is to buy a new phone or do my flight booking on a desktop. Mobile apps are an absolute shit show unless you have a <= 5 year old phone.

	▲	scarface_74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Spending $30 bucks to save time once per year is well worth it to me. I live in a state without state taxes so I don’t have to pay for state filing.