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why are quantum computers not mainstream?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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They need to be cooled to absolute zero. The hardware to do that weighs a couple thousand pounds, and needs a truckload of liquid helium. There's no real way quantum computers will ever be portable, or even home units.
Well, don’t say never. Forever is a very long time. The scientific world of 100 years ago couldn’t predict PC’s and let alone smartphones based on technology and physics as they were known at the time. It’s insane to think about how much technology is crammed into this small device and how quickly we got here.
I'm pretty careful with absolute words like that.
There will need to be some major breakthrough in fundamental physics or material science to get the cooling apparatus much smaller than it is. That's highly unlikely.
And quantum computing at higher temps won't work because the nature if it requires the atoms being measured to have zero resting energy.
Of course there will have to be a major scientific breakthrough. As there have been many scientific breakthroughs to get to where we are now with smartphones.
Your smartphone houses a lot of technology that was either nonexistent or room-sized at the time. I mean, in 1926 most people still moved around by horse-and-carriage, we had cameras but they were analog, as were film projectors. Now we have a 4k+ digital camera and an OLED screen and they’re only a small part of an entire array of technology scientists at the time couldn’t even fathom, except for maybe Nikola Tesla, although he also made a lot of predictions that turned out to be false.
That was a long series of inevitable predictable progress in engineering.
This isn't a matter of ordinary engineering challenges to be overcome. What I'm talking about is something that upends our understanding of reality. Not just an evolution of what we already know, but a revolution that changes almost everything about our understanding of how the universe works. Discovering new unimagined forms of matter. Things like that.
If it was so predictable, why couldn’t anyone in 1926 have predicted it with accuracy? The point is, they couldn’t and so can’t we.
Also, it’s definitely about engineering issues. In fact, scientists are already working on ways to overcome the major obstacles you named.
The general computer didn't exist in 1927. Once it did, yes it was predicted and expected they would get smaller, more powerful, efficient, and common. There was no limitation of physics getting in the way of it.
Of course, every increment is predictable after you make the scientific breakthrough. Not before, though.
The artificial computer wasn't so much a scientific breakthrough as a conceptual one. It didn't require anything that didn't already exist.
The quantum computer does exist. And it's functional principles are built on physics not engineering. It's a fundamentally different situation.
If I'd be able to ever collect, I'd bet you $10K in an investment account, that in 10 human generations quantum computers still won't be portable personal devices.
Neither does this. You just don’t know about it yet. And the link I provided you with shows that.
Not true. Electrical currents are physics too. And quantum computers have hardware too.
What are your arguments for this? I’ve shown you that your central argument is already being addressed.
What exactly is this, that I don't know about?
And how does Moore's Law apply?
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.
“This” as in a quantum computer, the thing we were discussing. And the physics and engineering is something you don’t know about. For example, you didn’t know about nitrogen vacancy centers that are already theorised to make room-temperature quantum computing possible. On top of that there are many breakthroughs yet to be made that even current experts may not yet know about.
Moore’s law applies to predictions, which is the other thing we were discussing. Moore’s law was indeed an accurate prediction up until recently, but only after the breakthrough was made, like I also mentioned in my previous comment. I never said it applied to quantum computers.
But it seems to me that you’re just going on a hunch. I’ve tried to apply logic, reasoning and sources to no avail, so I think I will just leave it at that.