What are they going to be replaced with now? You still can't do anything actually useful on a mobile device. You need an actual computer to get anything done besides dicking around playing games or scrolling through apps.

People do “useful” things with mobile devices all of the time with only their phones. Most people don’t define “useful” as running VIM in a terminal and running Docker.

You might be shocked at how many people make big-ticket purchases and other "major" stuff on their phone.

8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.

We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.

We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.

Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer

(but looks like I got my timing wrong, as those were proposed 25~30 years ago!)

And those were mostly marketed toward businesses not consumers. Even your citation says the idea quickly died when computers were less than $1000.

Around 2000, was the time that eMachines were selling $400 desktops and you had promotions from places like MSN making them free if you signed a contract for dialup.

Before the AI stuff it seemed people assumed everything would get smaller and more portable continuously.

Not consumer computing, but desktop computers would disappear.