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No Need to Upgrade that PC?
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free reg.) has an interesting article about a developing trend in the computer retail business: People aren't buying new PCs. Why? Well, no suprise to those who read this, but grandma and Joe Sixpack don't need a screaming new P4 to surf the net and write letters. Are they just figuring this out?"
As Boogaroo, above, pointed out, gamers need to pretty much constantly upgrade. Used to be, developers put a lot of time and effort into making software compact and min spec - friendly. No more. The bigger and more demanding the software, the better the computer you need to run it. Everyone wins. Oh yeah, except the consumer.
Thankfully that's not where everyone's at. My parents need their email, a little word processing, and that's it. And if console games keep getting better (and offering network play), it may finally come to pass that gamers have their console and their word machine and never the twain shall meet.
I'm currently considering a downgrade.
Except for my gaming needs, I'd like a small (physically), extensible, *low-noise* little PC, with a comfortable screen and a decent keyboard.
It seems to me like the low-noise requirement is starting to appeal to more and more people. Hell, else the Via C3 would have been laughed at in *every* review it's gotten.
I'm currently thinking of getting an (otherwise worthless) Epia C3 933MHz box for server duties, provided I can hang my harddrives in there and keep those silent a bit.
Oh, where are you, Transmeta, with halfway decent performance low-noise/heat solutions?
I seriously think every software designer/programmer/whatever should have a Pentium-133 as their primary platform.
:p
People with new, fast computers sometimes end up writing bloated software just because they don't realise that everyone doesn't have the same equipment they do.
I'm not a softeare developer, I'm a GIMP artist, so I'm allowed to use a Celeron-600 powered laptop.
Once you hit 1Ghz you hit the point of diminishing return on CPU's. Unless a hard core gamers or running some high end graphic or simularion software you aren't going to see much difference and Joe Public is seeing it. IMO the main contribitor is software, there is no popular with the masses software that needs that many CPU cycles. Most software is sitting waiting for the user to give it something to do. Then the rest of the computer system memory, buses, cards, and devices are way slower, again a lot idle cycles for the CPU. Intel has noticed this and has said they are going to start focusing more on power usage. Also this is part of the reason for HyperThreading, trying to take advantage of all those idle CPU cycles.
I also see analogies between the computer industry and the auto industry when it developed. At sometime back in the auto's history, probably the 40's or 50's, cars could already travel as fast as most people would ever want to drive. That didn't stop the industry from improving, and I don't think it will stop the computer industry either. We'll start concentrating on safety(security) and design factors, making software safer, easier, and more fun to drive.
But first, economically we somehow need to get out of this funk. As long as what we make is an extra that people can do without(and it always will be that) people won't buy in economically hard times.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I sell Macs for a living. In terms of processing power, for the consumer-targeted lines of products it can reasonably be argued that you get more processing power for your buck with a Wintel machine. However, very few of my potential customers are concerned with such things. I'd say maybe 50-60% even bother asking about what sort of Pentium an 800 Mhz G4 (the CPU in a flat-panel iMac) is equivalent to. Home users care about applications, and about not having to deal with driver conflicts and the Blue Screen of Death. When a potential "switcher" comes into the store, I mention OS X's stability, then start showing the iApps. And that's usually all it takes. :-)
the funny thing is that even for power users you dont need the super-duper gee-wiz stuff.
I just bought and built a non-linear video editing machine for less than $900.00
Dual-P3 motherboard $29.00 with IDE raid on board.
2 P-3 866 processors $50.00 each
Geforce 2 MX400 video card $29.00
Antec Case with 350 watt power supply $89.00
3 40 gig hard drives - $75.00 each ATA100
512 meg PC133 ram - $100.00
Firewire card $19.00
Mpeg video output card (hardware decode) $19.00
Adobe Premiere 6.0 - $188.00
Windows 2000 - $75.00
keyboard+mouse $10.00
Add the monitor of your choice and Voila.. Everything needed to make professional videos from your DV camera... if you want to capture Analog get a DV bridge for another $188.00
this machine is as capable and as fast as a spanking new NLE machine that costs upwards of $3000.00.... I know as one of the guys at work just bought one for $3400.00 and my old boat is as fast as his... and I can do anything his XP + Premiere 6.5 machine can... hell I can do everything he can with NT4.0 and Premiere 5.1c.. it just requires more plugins and skill.
The AVID we use professionally at work is based on NT4.0 and is a old P-III 500. and it works great! the ice-card does all the rendering faster than any computer any of you can buy or build that can run windows.
There is no reason to buy the new systems.. espically with the large numbers of people finding that the latest games like UT2003 run just fine no their older hardware (P-III with a geforce 2! cranks the frames without a hiccup) from mom-pop to the power home user.. there hasn't been a real reason to buy anything but video cards, ram(because it's dirt cheap) or hard drives..I dont plan on owning a P-4 ever.. by the time I'm ready the P-5 will be well into production or AMD's offering will be there (I dont believe that amd is going to quit... it's rumor and hype)
I have more computing power in this old desktop Pc than we had on this planet when we sent the first man into space... I think it's enough for now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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For most users, the only killer app for a fast desktop machine is games.
- Now that A-title games cost around $20 million to make, good games have to be high-volume products.
- The game industry is moving to consoles for the high-volume products.
Therefore, games won't be driving the PC industry for much longer. The requirement for a PC is levelling off.What this may mean is the beginning of the PC appliance era. About 80% of PCs are never opened once they leave the factory. They could just as well ship as sealed boxes, with the usual "no user serviceable parts inside" marking. It's already possible to build $400 boxes that will do everything needed for 80% of home and business desktops. That's the future of the PC. Expandable boxes will be a niche market, sold by specialty retailers.
I first used a 286 with about 1MB of RAM. This ran Wolf3D, but poorly. Wolf3D was copied to my dad's pride and joy 386 w/3MB RAM where it screamed.
Then Doom came out. And it wouldn't run on my 386 (needed 4MB of RAM). Luckily my dad just bought a 486dx2/66 with 8MB of RAM and Doom was good. Doom2 was just as fine, but we bought a sound card to complete the experience.
And then came out Quake. It ran at about 5fps on the 486, so I saved up some cash and transformed the 486 into a P133 powerhouse at 16MB (and it only cost about $1000 to do). Quake played nicely and the world was at peace.
That was until Quake2 came out. Time for a k6-2/300. That was cool, but with a voodoo2 it was even cooler. I bought a companion k6-2/350 and could host h2h deathmatch in my household for the first time.
But what's this? Quake3? This prompted me to put together a powerhouse of the likes that I had never seen before. I built it piecemeal over time, like mechanics might build a hotrod in their garage. Acquiring it piece by finest piece. Finally, my Athlon 700 was complete. It sported 256MB of RAM, a voodoo3, and an SB 512K.
And here I am using it now, waiting for Doom3 to come out so I can no doubt upgrade again. I dare to say id Software is more important to the home computing industry than most vendors realize.
He does still have one excellent point -- No UNIX environment that I know of (definitely no lightweight one) has real, Win2k-level alpha-blending support.
Sure, we've had the pseudo-blended stuff that grabs the root window and alpha-blends it since way before Windows did. But Win2k long ago got real blending (you can see other windows behind the current one), and looking at an XP desktop runnin WinAMP (which alpha-blends into the background when it's not the foreground window), Linux has lost pole position in the flashy-sparklies department. Enlightenment used to put Linux up there, but E17 seems to never be coming out, E16 is old, and no one else wants to do eye candy. Dammit, it was awfully useful to impress potential Linux users...
Furthermore, both GNOME and KDE are fucking bloated and slow. GTK2 has improved a bit, but it's still *far* slower than the blisteringly fast GTK1. Qt has always been slow. My solution is to simply not use either -- gkrellm + sawfish + xbindkeys + a couple of scripts makes for an awfully customizable, flexible environment. But most people don't have that option available when they're moving to Linux. To them, Linux *is* "slower" than Windows from a workstation perspective.
* I'll never willingly give up the remote nature of X, but X is somewhat slower (and has *much* higher latency, thanks to the required context switches during a draw operation) than Windows does.
* Linux may be a tough cookie, but X is quite killable. The other day, I wrote a program that accidently got into a loop and started opening windows like mad. It made the X environment completely unusable and prevented me from using a keyboard/mouse. Fortunately, there was a Windows box nearby and I could log into my machine and kill the offending process remotely, but for certain X tasks, from the point of view of a workstation end user, Linux is significantly more fragile than Windows.
May we never see th