Slashdot Mirror
The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive
Hugh Pickens writes "Charlie Stross has written a very interesting essay, ostensibly about the 'real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash,' but really about how Jobs is betting Apple's future on an all-or-nothing push into a new market as Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland. Stross says that Apple is trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat — the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry and turn PC manufacturers into suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit. 'Any threat to the growth of the app store software platform is going to be resisted, vigorously, at this stage,' writes Stross. 'And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.' The long-term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary. 'This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over Silicon Valley. This is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google,' writes Stross. 'The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.'"
If you don't know what Cmd-Shift-1 and Cmd-Shift-2 are for, GTFO.
If you think Firefox is a decent Mac application, GTFO.
If you're still looking for the "maximize" button, GTFO.
If the name "Clarus" means nothing to you, GTFO.
Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among real Mac users. Keep your filthy PC fingers to yourself.
...just changing. People seem to be exclusively using mobile devices more and more (whether it be phones, tablets, or laptops/netbooks/etc). That being said, tower PCs will ALWAYS have a place in the enthusiast and hobbyist markets. Even with my phone, laptop, and whatever else, I still love having a full-blown setup at home that I can chill out in front of.
Hard to beat a multi-screen setup with a full size keyboard and a kensington expert trackball :-)
Living With a Nerd
Ah, the smell of hyperbole in the morning....
Ah, yes. 1984, when Apple cunningly replaced beige boxes with ... beige boxes. Life would never be the same after!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
suck dick; for money, pleasure, and as a food source.
WHAT is this man smoking...? ... and WHERE can I find some?
That's some over-the-top fear mongering.
now we're going back to the thin-client model in a spectacularly fucked-up way? What a sack of shit!
Time to give up my nerd hobbies and look for something else to get interested in. As a non-IT user now there's no more point in GNU, Linux. Everything's going to be a fucked-up locked-down black box bunch of HORSE SHIT.
yay.
Fuckers.
I don't think the PC is going to meet its demise anytime in the foreseeable future. Microsoft dominates the business sector right now because it caters to businesses in a way Apple doesn't. Apple may take over the home user market, but until they convince businesses to adopt their ideologies PCs won't be dying anytime soon
Offer a phone with a USB port.
I hope this helps the bankruptcy of Apple.
Cheers.
I have to say that just but reading the article and the way things seem to be going in the IT field just on support I can see where he is coming from. I myself have put to use google docs as a way of storing my files so that I can access them anywhere. Cloud Computing is definately penetrating the IT industry in its entirety. Apple's stance on this and their fear of everything is understood, as is everyones fear of the change. Many companies will change with the times, but can we honestly say that PC's are going to go away and the revolution is over? There are still many flaws in making things available over the cloud and a lot of companies would rather have the ability to maintain their own information as opposed to putting it on the cloud and losing control over the hardware and software that maintains it. Most will not trust the security of the cloud over the ability to run NIDS and other such devices to secure their own networks and files. So a valid fear yes, unsubtantiated no, but is it truly going to take over and make pc's secondary any time soon, doubtful.
The description sounds like the business model for consoles
Half of my users have trouble getting vpn protocols to work reliably over their isp links. ALL of my users complain loudly when things aren't fast and snappy. I would NEVER put any of these people 'on the cloud', considering one lost packet is enough to get them riled up. It's bad enough that they will complain about new emails not coming in....it would be worse if they can't get to ANY of them when their connection is down.
You can get a lot of power into very small notebooks now.....why go backwards back to a dumb terminal that is dependent upon overloaded Starbucks wifi in order to get ANY program to work?
Desktops may be dying out....but we're not switching the entire world to the cloud anytime soon.
- Eric
Moore's law is tapering off? I've heard about the impending end of Moore's law for at least the past 10 years, but they keep on going. What evidence is there that Moore's law is tapering off? Wikipedia cites Intel in 2008 as predicting Moore's law to continue until 2029. Not an unbiased source, but I think we'd see the end coming if it was to come in the next 10 years.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So far most of these new devices seem to have a huge tradeoff.. Privacy. There are very few apps on my iPod touch that allow me to keep my stuff within the confines of my home; especially if I am on the road and not on my own netwok. Until these privacy concerns are addressed I would hope PCs survive, otherwise the tech industry has done a monumental disservice to everyone. This all sums up my main dislike for Apple.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Not quite.
Many people still don't feel like having a "cloud" service in the Internet hold the only copy of my documents. They can and will hold the files hostage if I stop paying, if they go belly up or if the government says so. Unlike money, documents don't loose value in a mattress.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This guy sounds like a desperate market speculator that has no clue how the market works. The "personal computer" market is just have as rough a time as other markets, but it does not mean that we should just throw our arms in the air and give up. While I have not purchased new PC hardware in four or five years(for economic reasons), it does not mean that I do not want new hardware. Whoever this fucktard is, he needs to keep the stupid opinions to himself.
Yeah, perhaps Apple and HP are looking to switch their platforms, but it does not mean that this will seal the end of the PC market. Only an idiot would buy into this horseshit.
...the Y2K bug.
I tend to take any prediction anyone in the computer industry makes with a rather large grain of salt since then.
Particularly the ones relating to "the end of the world as we know it" and similar predictions of global occurrences.
Seeing "END OF THE WORLD!!!11eleven!" not happen before your eyes does that to you.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
must be that new fangled iJuana
Reply to That ||
PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath
a sawed off shotgun, lots of ammo, and a Ford Falcon XB Interceptor
Yup. And I think this article is not at all wrong except maybe in the timeframe. Sooner or later networks will be reliable and very, very wide. The timeframe for the sustitution of local computing for remote "clouded" computing is directly proportional to the value of "sooner or later". The more networks take to get decent, the more time the PC has.
Now there is an interesting gridlock: network providers are idiot money whores that still want to get dough out of an investment that has already returned them many times over. They do not want to move to ipv6 and PC software makers like MS have no incentive to do so because, yes, this will cheapen networks and make them more reliable thus making them obsolete.
It is Interesting that yes, GNU, Linux and FOSS platforms in general will kill microsoft by being the dominant OS infrastructure of the new cloud which will be subsequently used to lock us in for the "service" of content providers and of just about anything else (applications and games)....
Now, in the future, if this happens my young padawan, an Open Net movement with the GNU ideal on its mind will make its own cloud and we (yes, you and me) will compete with the other fuckers on services combined with foss platforms, unlocked phones and "freePads" or LiberPads. You see, if what I forsee is coming, and ipv6 is implemented despite the gridlock, net neutrality more or less comes by default and killing it looses any justification from the net providers who should anyways compete in price per MBPS and that only.
And on and on....
NO SIG
If this guy was any more pro apple / elitist, he'd be Steve Job's sex slave.
i will trust my sensitive online applications, my sensitive information, with apple ? control freaks who send 'representatives' to people's doors after LOSING their latest prototype phone because an engineer got DRUNK in a bar ?
oh yea.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-april-28-2010-ken-blackwell
there's another daily show skit in an irrelevant subject actually. i would like to link that too but its too long watch for the punchline in the end - i will summarize it : "go fsck yourself"
Read radical news here
" moore-money-moore-problems" /. editors!
is a very good gag.
My personal "recent" favorite is "weapons-of-map-reduction" about big table IIRC, but I laugh out loud periodically. Good work
I think someone (else besides me) should put together a list of the best depts and hack some voting software together.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
The key here is 'only' copy. Services like Dropbox - where you keep the file locally AND in the 'cloud' are immensely useful But the elephant in the room is synchronization. Syncing such files (and calendars and address books) is still a technology that doesn't work well more often than not. If Apple is really serious about putting their heads in the cloud then they damned well out to work on their software for same.
If MobileMe is what they think the future looks like, I'd start shorting Apple stock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Beyond the hyperbole and the buzzword dropping, he's right.
People are on the move more, and are more connected, than ever. People picking up and moving across the country numerous times is commonplace. Going halfway around the world for whatever reason even moreso. People want their information at their fingertips. The coming cloud, Android, the iPad insanity, Palm, and all. Mobile is the future. Myself, my current desktop is probably the last one I will ever own, save for use as a server. I picked up a 5 year old Toshiba Satellite and it does just about everything I could ask for (youtube is choppy but when you have 512 MB nowadays it will be). I like the compact form, and the portability. My server will handle the music, movies, and the rest.
What I disagree with is the assessment of Apple. Apple is, and has been for a LONG time, paranoid and closed. This is their culture. It is simply how they view the market, where the market is going and how they will profit from it.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
seem to be awfully well informed and experienced on this subject ...
Read radical news here
Sorry, but I've been around too long to buy it. I remember seeing Larry Ellison predict the end of the PC era just as it got going. Literally, I was in the audience, as he described how the NC (Network Computer for those that don't remember) would replace the PC. Conveniently, it was all driven by Oracle. No need for Apple, or Microsoft, or any of their nonsense anymore! And that was in 1998 I think... Remember 1998 folks? You were still using those clunky Netware networks - might have even been on Token Ring still, and you were excited by that new Windows 98 that was coming out that was FINALLY going to fix the problems with Windows 95... me, I was excited about that new fangled phone operating system... Palm OS.
Sorry... Saying that PC's are going to bite it because of the "cloud" is like saying that we have bullet trains now, so you no longer need your car.
(There's your car analogy for those looking for one)
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
LOL. End of PC era. Can I have what they're smoking? In a Smithsonian exhibit, I saw a graph of TV ownership in the US. It was a saturation curve, flattening out in the 1970s, IIRC. By then, most people had TVs, and it was just gap filling. I saw the PC ownership curve saturating in the late 90s. By PC, I mean Personal Computer, including Macs.
The point? Companies like Zenith and Sony made money long after the "TV revolution" was over. Better models, ergonomic features, add-ons, incremental refinements, solid state vs. tube, etc.
It's shortsighted to think that we aren't going to continue to have refinements in the PC other than Moore's law related speedups. No, companies like Intel won't be driving huge speculative bubbles anymore; but they won't be going bankrupt either. Just like TV makers, the differentiator will be how well they run their business. It'll be things like customer service, cashflow, etc. It'll be boring business stuff, sorry; but not the end of the world.
Oh, and f*** the cloud. You can have my hard drive when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Actually, make that my affordable solid state drive. See? Plenty of refinements left in the pipeline.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Lose, fucktard. Not loose, lose. Even a goddamn monkey can be trained to get this right!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I guess I was wrong about America...
I thought Apple's grudge against Flash was all about free Flash applications competing with it's own commercial apps from the App Store. Want your lame "fart button"? Just browse to www.fartbutton.com and have a field day for *free*; it's faster than a micro-transaction and less painful, especially when you have to justify to your spouse all those micro-purchases making a macro-dent on your income.
No Flash, no cool little applications on your Phone for free... your only source for a quick fix is the App Store.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I see no end in site for PCs. I see only changes. The biggest change is that hardware has gotten good to the point that you no longer need the best for many things. I mean time was, computer were slow even for simple stuff. I remember in high school I'd send a document to print and go off to the kitchen to snack while I waited the 10+ minutes it took. The system was just slow. Booting took forever, launching an app could take 30 seconds, etc. Media playback was limited to tiny, postage stamp sized video. Even if you had good hardware, it wasn't good enough.
That's not the case these days. For basic stuff a low end system works fine. Also because lithography technology has progressed so much, basic can be quite small. Hence a small, cheap thing like a netbook is feasible to make and sell, and quite popular for various things. Still a computer though, and it hasn't killed off other computer markets.
We just don't have a "one size fits all" market, or perhaps more accurately we are now able to make technology good enough to make different kinds of systems for different uses.
The iPad is not the future. The iPhone is not the future. A combination of devices, including ones not yet created, are the future. We do not appear to be heading towards a "death" of normal computers.
For the past 25 years we've seen these types of predictions. What's being said is nothing new. Just a new surface on an old polygon.
The industry has a long way to go before it is going to die. There's nothing Apple nor anyone else can do that will change things. The industry, in a way, is at fault for any problems being perceived. The constant niggling of customers by tiny incremental change leads customers to believe that there's nothing happening and thus their unwillingness to pay the price for the technology. Make big changes, some radical, such as from the command line to the GUI and we'll see another 50 years of growth in PC.
This is more feldercarb by some industry exhaust spewing waste into the ecosystem. They are just blowhards seeking to get you to think that this Apple product is the direction we'll be going. We do not run our computers for gaming, as gaming is secondary. We expect significantly more from our computers than a gaming console provides. We do not do serious productivity work on an iPad or gaming console.
And Moore's law has nothing to do with this. Everytime someone says Moore's law has come to an end we have another go at it.
I think what I'm reading are the younger generation that didn't see the world as it was back then, before computing was involved in every aspect of our lives. These people have a problem with their imagination and hence their mind is out of focus when it comes to innovation and technology. I'm certain this isn't quite like the music business where a friend said that the only reason music sucks today is because all the good music has already been made. It's really a lack of vision that drives one to conclude that these cobbled devices are technology's future. They are a just a crutch to innovation.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Its entire purpose is to fit into the producer/consumer model, and provide yet another carbon-based audience member to Big Media. Why else would Rupert Murdoch love it? The PC will remain as a more populist, creative device.
You know, even if one buys into the premise, one does have to wonder about the efficacy of saying things like "If you want pornography, buy a Google phone" or some such. Seriously. How does saying FU to the flash community, forget Adobe, in anyway going to endear people to your position? This is beyond, the Field of Dreams "build it and they will come" failed approach so many try. This is religious dogma. As Matt Damon spouts in the movie Dogma, "Do this or I'll spank you." Yeah, right. For a company that focuses on the customer usability where others don't, it is just totally bizarre to use scorched earth marketing. "Use our product and you'll experience Heaven, don't and we will send you to Hell."
Sorry Jobs. Your attitude smacks of Microsoft and IBM and you are being classified accordingly.
"The Cloud" is just the fancy new name for "Utility Computing", which was a fancy new name for "The Grid", which was a shorter version of "The Network Is The Computer", which was just a fancy new name for what used to be called "Mainframe Computing"
When the world does actually switch over to it, it's not still going to be called "The Cloud", and there's a few spectacular failures and legal changes that will happen before we get to the shiny new name that sticks to a successful implementation.
the PC industry already IS a profitability wasteland. PC manufacturers have been suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit for over 5 years now. That's why IBM liquidated their PC division to Lenovo. It's also why Dell's market capitalization continues to dwindle despite their efforts to diversify. And why Acer gobbled up Gateway and eMachines. Companies either have to continually grow their volume to maintain the same profits, or get into something different with more margin. Apple has been doing that for a while now, as has IBM. HP's PC division doesn't make them much money at all (relative to volume), but with all their other lines (printers, servers, etc) it's worth their effort because they can be the sole supplier for some huge corporations, thus making their profits on the specialty equipment.
...all that bandwidth means you can run your own cloud right off of a tiny desktop at home. You'll have constant connectivity to your own personal server, backed up any way you want it, running any software you want, without any of that tasty vendor lockin. They'll try to do some software as a service crap, but Ubuntu 27.04 will have a bunch of tasty open source replacements for your streaming music/data/movies/etc/etc/etc.
I remember how much time and money was spent updating software and hardware to deal with it. I remember that despite that there were still glitches.
Best Slashdot Co
I don't necessarily believe any of this talk about the so-called death of the PC; I do not want my data or computing done in "the cloud" any more than I want my personal information splattered all over the internet, which is to say not at all. I'll just keep building myself nice, high-powered desktop systems, like I've been doing for the last 20 years or so. The rest of you can do whatever you like.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
And to think that Apple originally wasn't going to allow any native apps, only "web clips"...
Let's assume we hit the absolute limit. We develop a lithography technique that is as small as possible, and there is no way to do anything on the quantum level. I'm not saying that is remotely likely, just assume. So what? That now means there no use for anything but an iPad? Hardly. While there's a wide variety of users for computers these days that require little power, there are plenty of other uses that require more power. Media creation would be a big one. People love to shoot, edit, and distribute video. Wonderful, but you need an ok system to do SD video, and you need a reasonably high end system to do HD. Video games would be another area. Those modern consoles, including the Wii, have some heavy hitting graphics hardware in them. Not the kind of thing you pack in an ultra mobile device.
In fact, if we hit the absolute limit of transistor size scaling, we'd then be at a point where the only way to get higher performance is larger chips, more processors, more power usage. It would in fact be a hindrance to portable devices. The mobile market we have today is possible only because we've been able to scale things down so well. The potential technologies that people talk about for the future in the mobile market will only be possible with more scaling. If we can't build smaller, more efficient chips, well then we'll just have to live with larger devices.
Also just because a market becomes saturated, doesn't mean there isn't money to be made in it. Sure, everyone who wants a PC owns one these days, more or less. It is even getting that way with laptops. So what? There's still a market. As an example, look at TVs. In America we hit TV saturation long, long ago. EVERYONE has a TV, even extremely poor families have a TV. What's more, you can now replace a TV with a tiny device. In theory, a smart phone could replace a TV. Doesn't matter, people don't want to watch TV on their smart phone, they want a 65" big screen TV. Doesn't matter that they could have it more mobile or in another device. They want a bigass TV, so they'll buy one.
Lose, fucktard. Not loose, lose. Even a goddamn monkey can be trained to get this right!
Dude, did you get a pink slip three days into quitting smoking after your dog died and your wife left you for a Windows MSCE?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
?
All my non-apple phones have USB support or am I not understanding something.
Does this go along the same lines as the floppy disk would be dead in 2000? Or the DVD was the last video format you would ever need to buy? I agree with an earlier comment, this is more fear mongering. Yes phones, tablets are going to become more important, but they will need better file management and storage abilities, but there will be for quite awhile laptops and home computers. The problem is two fold. One people want privacy, and a lot of people are going to be reluctant to store their lives online, especially seeing some of the nationally reported security and storage problems that have happened. Two, broadband in over 90% of the US would not be adequate for cloud storage of anything other than documents. Home videos, photo albums, 10GB of music yah not so much. Until the broadband gets better, and people's views change, the PC is going to be around the common user. As for the technical user, the PC will be around for a very long time.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
The PC is fine. What's coming to an end is Apple's desktop era, because Apple really isn't in anything for the long run. They take quick opportunities to make a lot of money with the currently hot thing, go with it for a few years, and then drop it to move on to the next thing.
For general office computing, we've had everything we've needed for years. There's not much I'm doing right now that couldn't have been done in the late 90's. Spreadsheets have been around for ages, same with word processing. I was really impressed with getting two screens and the Apple guys scoffed and said they had that twenty years ago. And while I haven't had much experience with Amiga, evangelists tell me the OS was awesome and did all sorts of cool stuff that Windows couldn't duplicate for a decade.
There's stuff I'm doing at home I couldn't have done years ago, mainly with video. Didn't have the storage capacity, didn't have the bandwidth, didn't have the ability to render properly. It's taken some horsepower to deliver the great video we see today. But basic office apps? There hasn't really been anything innovative in Office for years. I can't imagine what we would need more horesepower for in the next few years. Yes, that sounds pretty stupid, 640k being enough for anyone. The $2500 word-processing computer from 1985 (a lot more inflation-adjusted, maybe $3500?) has the shit kicked out of it by the cheapest emachine on the market and that thing has gobs of power to spare. Of course, what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. And if not Microsoft then HP and other purveors of shitty bloatware.
All that being said, I just don't see what else could be done on the corporate desktop. Things are fast as fuck. There's not any compelling improvement I can think of that would justify running out and buying more kit. At best I think we're going to continue seeing software that could have been written efficiently with the tools of yesterday written with the tools of today that will require the computers of tomorrow to run with any kind of speed. But if the performance hit is taken at the server, old desktops will be fine.
Here's the real question -- how's the money in phone systems these days? It's all proprietary shit and the units cost a few hundred a pop but they're solid state and completely interchangeable. Maybe we'll finally see convergence with a smart terminal built into the flatscreen monitor, keyboard, mouse plug into it, terminal and phone plug into ether at the wall jack? Total cost, $400?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
As a 45 year old let me just say: Yes. That's why I don't have a smart phone, and am thinking about a tablet type device.
Best Slashdot Co
not buying this for so many reasons. privacy, ubiquity, safety are just the first three. i simply don't want my stuff on someone else's server, thanks. then there's penetration. how is dick going to share his stuff with jane if every company's running their own little format fiefdom? say what you want about word but everyone can understand your work in that file. then what happens when those cloud servers are compromised and your stuff gets wiped, or sniffed on its way around? you get slammed is what. speed has nothing to do with it, i've had speed for years and i won't park my stuff in the ether. for that i have multiple copies of secure physical media.
i'm dubious that there are any merits to this theory in general, but tfa's specific prognostication is fantastical.
I'm still praying for the DDOS equivalent of Judgement Day that I know eventually is going to hit Google. I really want it to come, and get it over with, because once Google has had its' system owned with sufficient severity, that will hopefully get the mutton-headed idea of cloud computing out of everyone's heads, once and for all.
Centralised dumb terminal is a BAD IDEA. It was tried, 30 years ago. It failed, and it is going to fail again. It is basic engineering sense, that you do not design a system of any kind, with a single point of failure.
As for Steve Jobs, I don't care what he thinks, and truthfully I never have. He has traditionally sold desktops for twice the price of a PC, which I've thus never been able to afford, and more recently he's branched out into selling pointless handheld status symbols, to consumerist lemmings. I'm sure one of said lemmings will likely respond in angry protest to that statement, but I really don't care.
The only thing that Apple have done right, which I give them praise for, or really care about in any way, is the fact that with OSX, they moved to being based on BSD. Given that I literally believe that BSD was the manner in which God intended man to interact with a computer, it follows that I also think that such was an inspired decision on Apple's part, but I also believe that the rest of humanity would benefit from doing likewise.
The point? Companies like Zenith and Sony made money long after the "TV revolution" was over. Better models, ergonomic features, add-ons, incremental refinements, solid state vs. tube, etc.
Those guys (I think SONY too), GE and RCA licensed their names to cheap Asian electronics makers. Meaning that named brand TV is really some really cheap thing from Asia that is using the name only. The reason is that the margins became so thin that those big US companies didn't think it was worth it to manufacture and they were able to get a better return by licensing their names. The Asian manufacturers got instant brand recognition.
I was really surprised when IBM cut their ties with Lenovo. I was really expecting IBM to license their name to Lenovo, allowing Lenovo to keep selling PCs and Laptops under the IBM name - with IBM having nothing to do with it.
Many other industries operate this way.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Content Serving. The traditional server system but with new software serving the content others are creating. This is becoming the so called "cloud". This is where Apple wants to be and create something new.
Content Content Consumption. This is all iPad, iPhone iPod etc. Net books fall in here too. Devices to get what you want when you want it where you want it. You don't store much here and you get a new one every couple of years. You don't create content with these devices. You might gather data with them to put into the cloud so you can work on it later. This is where Apple is going right now.
Content creation. The traditional desktop will become more like what we remember as "workstations". These systems will create the content and apps being used by the other two areas of computing. People won't have desktop PCs for browsing web pages and email. This is where the Macintosh is now and will continue to be.
It all starts at 0
Why pay $2500? You can get the same thing built for half, and it'll be faster.
people like to own things. Unless there is a really good trade people will opt to not put stuff on the cloud. Right now that trade appears to be it is free to use. I have a hard time seeing that changing any time soon no matter how many marketing people try to push it. It is a bad business model.
You can argue that until the cows come home; the bottom line is that the commonly-accepted meaning of the term "personal computer" is one that broadly conforms to the desktop, single-user model that first rose to prominence with the Apple II, Commodore Pet and others.
:-)
The laptop is kind of in there, though that may be as much because most of those are "IBM PC compatible" derivatives. At any rate, the iPhone or a high-end calculator may be personal and computers, but most people wouldn't call them that. And in the end that's what matters.
It's also what the article meant, so you're kind of missing the point. One could define "blasphemy" as "imitating a marmalade sandwich", but it wouldn't mean you could treat the passages in the article condemning blasphemy as referring to that.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Remember when the Mac was way better than any other computer on the market? I do. It had a mouse, a windowed desktop environment, was an all in one idiot proof box, and even talked to you in your language. But, attempting to control their software stack from the bottom to the top, Apple did not allow developers enough room to make good software for their computer, and Mac lost to DOS, and then Windows in rapid succession.
They are doing the exact same thing now on iPhone/iPad. Without the killer app, their platform will die, and they don't have the killer app. Firefox easily beats Safari in every usage scenario I've seen, and that alone is enough to thwart serious users from using their platform. Nix YouTube, and other Adobe sites.....
As usual Apple is first to market, with a vastly superior product, but by trying to control the whole enchilada, they will be relegated to an also ran in no time.
Not to mention that the latest Ubuntus and derivatives (specifically Mint) are better OSes, with better apps included out of the box, free, and ludicrously easy to install, EVEN ON A MAC. You think some hackers won't port a killer touch Ubuntu over and make an iPad no better than other cheaper competing slates? Think again. By the end of this year there will be competing pads that are adequate, and with a superior OS a la Linux, or perhaps android.
And in the phone market, Apple has already lost to Android. The writing is on the wall, give it 2 years.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
A couple of points:
cheers,
Andrew
The reason this problem exists is because software isn't evolving at the same rate as hardware. You can use a computer that's 10 years old and still do all the things that you need to do today. The only exception is gaming, and content creation like movies, music, and other such art. The problem is that there's very few software developers that are on a pay roll. That and DRM prevents what software can do on your PC. You can't edit videos and put music in it from your favorite band without getting attacked. You can't have a HTPC that streams Live HDTV HBO special to your iPhone without jumping through loop holes. If all you're allowed to do is surf the web and use a word processor, then why the hell do we ever need anything made in the past 10 years? Oh and computer games. With Xbox 360 and PS3 forcing developers to make games for their consoles first, PCs can't take advantage of their hardware. BTW, PC gaming has been pushing consumers to own more advanced hardware just to play games. Yet, the biggest game that does that today is World of Warcraft. A game that's over 5 years old. Take away IP/DRM restrictions and produce games that could only run on powerful PCs and suddenly people give a shit about owning better PC hardware, especially desktops.
I want a job where I can spout deranged foaming-at-the-mouth drivel and get paid for it too! I can make up all sorts of crap as good as the next guy.
I should have gotten on the "The PC is Dead" bandwagon years ago, started a blog, made loud crazy pronouncements and gotten them echoed in the news media, and maybe made some money via the AdSense ads on my blog. But no. Here I am eagerly awaiting consumer PCs with 12 cores on them so that I don't have to wait 24 hours for renders to finish. I guess I should move all my 3D work to the iPad or the cloud.
Seriously, though, what a crock of shit. Surely only lunatics and the mentally disabled buy this crap, right?
This seems so much like the Wii/Homebrew/DVD player situation. Wii's all have DVD-playing capability, but Nintendo doesn't make or sell a DVD app, leaving it to hackers to make one. By doing this they direct the Wii's use to applications and games provided by Nintendo (ie. if they provide DVD ability, then the Wii will be used less often for purchased products). It's scummy. Glad I don't have any Apple products.
Actually, probably not the ganja, because he's too apocalyptic and conspiracy theoristic.
Look, Apple bet all its chips on selling the best user experience. This is why there was no multitasking. This is why there is an approval process. This is why they now cut out middleware.
Apple thinks that by cutting out middleware, when it comes up with something new, the developers will be able to quickly adopt it. Imagine that a very popular app with little competition was written in slow-moving middleware that couldn't support new features fast enough. Then, you end up with a phone that can do, but an app that can't do the new thing and thus users that can't. Who will the users blame? The developer? If there's no competition for that app, then the users can't switch and are stuck with the crappier experience. That is, crappier according to Apple. Since Apple is selling the experience at a premium, it has to maintain it. Otherwise, it's just another computer maker.
"I never liked the Macs and their frilly user interface. Being a Unix geek, I just wanted a set of Unix-like (or better) tools."
"Why is 'Fairplay(TM)' so superior, other then the fact that it lives within the safe confines of the Apple reality distortion field, guarded by a phalanx of Apple fanbois?"
"Perhaps if you weren't a fag using a fag computer this wouldn't be a problem. Studies show that Mac users are fucking retards who should be beaten and laughed at, and sent to live in Mac ghettoes where they get to pound their nobby, worthless, Apple hands on a single button mouse."
Well, here's the problem. The Mac OS, and in fact the entire Apple experience, is intuitive for a certain kind of person. Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a 13-inch MacBook running Snow Leopard and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic. It's a rare instinct, this appreciation for beauty and truth; unimaginative, dogma-bound drones haven't a prayer.
In summary, unattractive squares should stick to Linux and Windows.
Macs are for different thinkers.
We hit the end of PC profitability some years back, and Apple is feeling the price pressure on the Mac. But that doesn't mean the industry is over. The US auto industry hit market saturation half a century ago, but it wasn't the end of the industry or the end of product development. Market saturation and competition on price is the normal state of affairs for manufactured goods in the developed world.
Apple's risk is that pad-type devices may hit that point sooner than Apple would like. Soon, everybody is going to have something that looks like an iPad. The Kindle, Nook, etc. are obviously going to have successors with bigger screens and color. Those devices will get cheaper, and we will probably see them for $79.95 in shrink-wrap bags in the "back to school" section of drugstores.
Apple is used to being a high-margin company. Few companies survive the transition from high-margin to low-margin. Usually, somebody from the low-margin end of the industry eats the high-margin companies. Graphics cards/boards/chips are a classic example. Where are SGI, and Evans and Sutherland, now?
Hence Apple's focus on its closed "ecosystem". They're desperately trying to stave off commodization of their various players. That's the threat to Apple. Apple's strategy is to get control over content and the payment system, as they did with iTunes. "Cloud computing" is irrelevant to this, although content server farms are not.
If you don't know what Ctrl-Alt-F1 and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace are for, GTFO.
;)
If you think a pretty web browser is more important than a properly secured one, GTFO.
If you don't know how to listen to music with any player other than iTunes, GTFO.
If you think the App store counts as a software repository, GTFO.
If you think you know how your computer actually works, GTFO.
If text that is not encompassed by a pretty bubble widget scares you, GTFO.
Most importantly:
If you think personal computers are no longer necessary, interesting, or are part of a dying industry, turn in your geek card at the door as you GTFO.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I think you train/car analogy is almost correct. I'd rather say put it this way... Are you going to sell your car now that your local transport agency provides bus routes past your house? I doubt it. Same thing with "cloud computing". The bus being available is a "service", but it's not a service I choose to use, because I like to be on my own schedule and the bus doesn't drive right by my house, it goes two blocks away, and I'm too lazy to walk the two blocks. The same issue will exist with cloud services. There WILL be lots of them, and everyone will want a slight variation of the exisiting services. I'll want a little laxed security, but with more bandwidth. Someone else will insist on very high security and lower performance. I'll insist on being able to make 2 orders in a batch instead of just the 1 at-a-time the service provides. This will ultimately drive up the cost of the "service providers" and they'll go the way the network computers went. At some super high level, it seems great (as does a lot of stuff), but once it's actually implemeted, people will realize they can do it themselves cheaper with those pc things.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Apple fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPad (a Cortex A8 w/256 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder in the cloud to another cloud. 20 minutes. At home, on my Core i3 running NT 6.1, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPad, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Because of lack of multitasking and keyboard, I can't even type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iDevices, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an iPad that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Apples' faster chip architecture. My Linksys WRT54GL with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 1000 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Apple addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an iPad over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Do you allow a bank to hold the only "copy" of your money? Why do you trust them?
It appears many of the responders have interpreted the "end of the PC era" to mean that in 5/10/15 years there will be no more PC's. This interpretation is amazingly stupid, and misses the entire point Steve is trying to make.
Steves point is that particular applications and use cases are moving away from the PC. We watched NetFlix and YouTube on a PC in the past because we needed to push out new software to a general purpose platform to support it. But that's not how most users want to watch it. My new TV streams both inside the TV. I'll never watch Netflix on my PC again.
A couple of years ago if I wanted to find a nearby restaurant I would have loaded Google Maps, searched, and clicked around on my PC. Today I take my iPhone off my belt, load UrbanSpoon or Yelp, and get more useful information plus a map I can take with me. I don't search for restaurants on my PC anymore.
People aren't going to get rid of their PC's, and the PC will always be the platform for really new innovation because of its general purpose nature and the ability to run new software. But PC's have effectively saturated the market. Maybe people need a desktop and a laptop, but no (consumers) need 10, 20, or 50 PC's per person. There is no growth.
But TV's, game consoles, smart phones, tablets and other form factors are just starting to do interesting things. They are doing them in a more convenient way much of the time, and in a way consumers are more likely to use. I can start a netflix movie on my TV with 3-4 remote presses. Compare to 5 years ago where you had to build a media center PC, hook it up to your TV, deal with all sorts of programs to get content, etc.
Steve's point is that while PC's are 95% of the way people access information today, they will be 50% in 10 years. Not because PC's have gone away, but because there is an explosion in other devices. So if you keep building for the PC, you'll be building for 50% of the market in 10 years. We'll still be doing word processing on a PC with a mouse and keyboard then, but other things will be done elsewhere.
As I have said since 1995.... Apple SUCKS! PCs will never die. There are too many hardcore PC gamers out there and too many developers out there that need ultra powerful PCs to either play games or develop programs. The mobile devices are nice to have to stay in touch but you still need a desktop or a beefy laptop for the heavy lifting. When Apple first started out they portrayed themselves as the rebellious dreamers against the big corporate IBM. Well guess what? Apple is the new IBM. Microsoft is not the dreamers either although their OS is wide spread enough that anyone developing games or business software does so with Windows in mind. The true dreamers now are the linux people with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and all the other open source variations of the linux kernel. Take that Steve Jobs! Anyone who would fire a lead designer for showing Woz an Ipad just proves that Apple is the new big evil. The best ipad I have ever seen was on "Will it Blend" copy this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko and paste it in your browser.
Followed, of course, by Bill Gates with a bathroom plunger exclaiming: "Exterminate! Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!"
Maybe I just need some sleep...
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While I fully expect "cloud computing" to result in the same resounding THUD as did earlier Paradigm Shifts (the network is the computer, etc), I think Old Doc Jobs is trying to take a look over the next hill at where computing for today's non-computer-geek/non-computer-professional/non-power-user computer users will be in five to eight years. He's decided where he thinks that will be, and he's pissing in all the corners of that particular property so that he and his progeny can milk it for all it's worth. It's not so much what the next paradigm will be, but the fact that there WILL be a next paradigm of some sort or other. I expect to be using a PC (Mac, actually) until they pry it from my cold, dead, fingers, but that's on my professional side. As a personal user, I am keeping a close eye on iPad because I think it's got a chance of morphing into something really useful. People have been calling Jobs a fool and an idiot for years, and he's still standing and still doing some good work. I'd not bet serious money against him.
Cloud is a new name for Software as a Service (SaaS), or hosted apps. Which failed to replace PCs the first time around, while succeeding where it made sense. Not worried about the "cloud" turning PCs into commodities. They are already commodities if you know what you're doing.
Software companies for well over a decade have been spewing the same dreams trying to take over channels and move all software to a subscription ("cloud") model with endless streams of predictable recurring revenue. How many speeches has Bill gates made on this very same topic over the course of the past decade?
Its funny that part of what Apple is saying is that the hardware business isn't profitable and they shouldn't be in it in the first place...Well DUH. You'd have thought that was obvious when they abandoned PPC.
The iphone is a **phone** just like nintendo consoles is for playing games. You can easily get away with vendor lockin and appstores for consoles and phones. You can get away with going online to pay a bill, do your taxes. Its not rocket science.
If your data has so little value that you trust Amazon S3, fine great. In fact, commoditization of servers might actually reinvent mom & pop brick and mortar by letting them compete, great! If you're playing for high stakes however, well you best know what data best represents those stakes, and you best keep that data away from untrusted handlers.
IBM has actually made massive inroads into cloud computing, despite arriving late, since they are willing to guarantee banks real hardware isolation for their number crunching. I'm sure however those banks have some idea about what applications must run on in-house servers.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
So I have to retouch a 1GB layered file on my iPhone... No thanks
The bus being available is a "service", but it's not a service I choose to use, because I like to be on my own schedule and the bus doesn't drive right by my house, it goes two blocks away, and I'm too lazy to walk the two blocks. The same issue will exist with cloud services.
Round here there are lots of private cars and public buses. They seem to coexist just fine. What's more, there are these things called "taxis" which will pick you up right from your door and take you to wherever you want to go. Not everyone uses them all the time, but they are definitely thriving.
Guess what? The analogy with cloud computing also works here. There's going to be lots of room for people providing cloud services that are specific to a relatively small group's needs. (I've seen the business models, the figures, I know the names of some companies doing this, and it freaking works as a way to deliver some things. Can't say names though; promised not to.) Just as with a taxi, the cost of using the service is higher than doing it all yourself all the time, but you avoid having to purchase, keep and maintain all that software and hardware (the car, by analogy) and that turns out to be a big saving for businesses that only use the service from time to time. There are a lot of businesses like that; heavy computing isn't what they do as an everyday thing, it's what they use from time to time.
Don't like the taxi analogy? What about a u-hire truck? Most folks don't want one of those things littering the place up, but if you need to move a bunch of stuff about then it's great, so they hire one in when needed. If they were moving lots of things every day, they'd have their own truck, but they aren't. (This tells us that grid computing won't be right for everyone, but so what? What you need to do is work out whether it is suitable for you. Just don't over-extrapolate to say that because it is – or isn't – good for you, it is perfect – or utterly unworkable – for everyone else. That would be just spouting BS.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The paperless office.
All businesses loves Apple's ideologies when properly focused on their business interests! You see, there's this small issue that businesses aren't nearly so homogeneous feature wise as movie watchers, music listeners, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
... it's all Science-Fiction, right?
Oh, those adorable bisexual Mac ravers. I'd forgotten all about their deliciously ambiguous sexuality and rebellious fashion sense. Here, have some glow sticks and pacifiers, Mac rave kids! Ah, the good old days, when trolls asked us to think of our breathing, to picture mare sex, and the GNAA was more than just a funny name. Not like trolls these days, with their 'nigger' this and 'Obama's got a bigger dick than me which makes me feel inferior' that. Boring! Open Source developers sodomizing innocent coworkers in an orgy of shit and puke, THAT was a troll. But try telling that to kids these days...
Damn kids, git offa mah lawn.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anyone who thinks that the PC market is going anywhere, that 'cloud computing' is ever going to do more than serve very specialized niche applications, and that (most importantly) all of this is going to happen before 2020 needs to have his head examined. The 'cloud' is a solution looking for a problem, and its most likely incarnation will be a network of users tethering mobile devices to home computers, not the web. If it ever happens outside of the office, which is about the only place where network applications have had any real and remarkable success.
Also, 'Moore's Law tapering off', really? Again, utterly baseless. By 2020 chips will still be getting denser, and they'll also be using more than just transistors and more than just two dimensions. If anything, the computer is about to get a lot more personal - portables with a high performance per watt, with the ability to communicate with other displays and peripherals without any obnoxious docking, that have all the storage capacity and computing power of a PC today. Don't believe me? Today's smart-phones are roughly on par with computers from after or at least during 1999. Unless Gabe Newell trips over and causes the entire west coast of the United States to break off into the ocean, thus terminating a great deal of our electronics research, mobiles in 2020 will resemble desktops of 2010 in terms of capability. They very well could be personal computers for the majority of people by 2025-2030, and they won't need any silly cloud to perform their basic functions. (If it performs the functions of a computer, is the property of its user, and as such is under the user's control, it is a personal computer - just because it isn't a desktop all of the time doesn't mean it's not a PC.)
Dumb terminals died off for a reason, and anyone who salivates over resurrecting them and renting computing out for a healthy profit probably has a few screws loose. The 70's were a long time ago. Get over it. And one more thing: PERSONAL COMPUTERS ALREADY ARE COMMODITY ITEMS, YOU IDIOT. (Okay, I know the author can't hear my caps-lock, but if only...) They've been commodity items since the 1980's! (Or, depending on your definition, 'IBM compatible' computers have been a commodity since the 1980's. The others, maybe not.) Again, solution, looking for a problem! If anything, Apple is making a serious strategic error here - by locking down the platform, they're just begging cheaper and more flexible competitors to repeat history by creating a market of highly modularized 'iPad clones' and other high power portables, which is absolutely going to happen. It's not a matter of if but when.
Mobile computing definitely has a future, but it's still going to be personal, and it's not going to involve the cloud nearly as much as tech-pundits seem to believe, nor in the same way.
First it was time shared main frames giving way to the PCs
Then it was a push onto thin clients which came back to PCs as the computing power needed outstripped the thin clients and the cost wasn't that much different
Then it was virtualization which came back to PCs generally since it takes a lot to manage all the different applications
Now its cloud computing which will probably come back to PCs again once the networks get saturated
Its a constant cycle between centralizing and de-centralizing networks. Cloud computing is just the latest one.
I can't wait! Instead of torrenting stuff for weeks, like some sort of caveman, I will have instantaneous access to petabytes of HD content from The Pirate Cloud, even on my phone. It will make train journeys more interesting.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Yeah, what does he know about computing and the future? After all he's just a long time Linux user, former sysadmin, Perl hacker and currently a very successful science fiction author. And a very good one at that. IMO the best current SF writer that I know of.
How about a former programmer and science fiction writer?
And he runs vi on his iPhone.
Not quite the typical Apple fanboi I'm afraid.
Where they predicted that dotcoms would replace brick and mortar (who uses that expression anymore?) shops, and that everybody would be on the internet?
Man, were they wrong. Amazon.com is a penny stock, and I'm pretty sure those Goggle guys are never gonna make any money from advertising.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that the world will be a better place the sooner its rid of Flash. Please, buy all non-Apple products if you wish, but let's all dump Flash ASAP and help promote open web standards.
devs have to pay fees to make free apps! the pc is not like that!
when you pry from my cold, dead hands.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Does a 13" MacBook really offer me four times the value of a $250 netbook?
Even if you ignored resale value and longevity and a screen that does not pummel your eyes - yes, the Macbook really is worth four times that cost. Actually far more, since it's so much more usable for everything than a netbook is. I know developers who develop only on a 13" Macbook with no other systems, just connecting to an external monitor every now and then.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you look at it, it turns out the number of mainframes in use hasn't gone down. It didn't peak and then decrease. It has in fact grown a bit. It is simply that other kinds of computers have grown more. The microcomputer didn't kill the mainframe, it just expanded the computer business to markets the mainframe was never going to reach. I would never own a mainframe of my own, no matter how much I might want to, however I do own a microcomputer. In fact, I own 3 of them.
However mainframes are still in use in many places. IBM still makes new ones (the IBM zSeries). The market is still there, though small. It was never very big, and was never going to be very big.
We have probably reached saturation for desktop computers already, and probably did so some time ago. We are likely reaching saturation for laptops too. Doesn't mean they are going away, doesn't mean new ones aren't going to be sold all the time. Just means that the total number in use isn't going to grow a whole lot.
But I need it at the moment if i want to use the internet - because hey newsflash Job: tons of pages use it.
So that means I won't be buying Apple products in the near future.
So Steve baby, if that is what you are going for: Two thumbs up!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
devs have to pay fees to make free apps! the pc is not like that!
Windows is free of charge now? That's news to me. Also, all developer's tools for Windows are now free, too?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Many people still don't feel like having a "cloud" service in the Internet hold the only copy of my documents.
Why would you have your only copy in "the cloud"?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I didn't say there wasn't still a gap, I said the gap has been significantly reduced.
I haven't looked at the numbers closely, but I suspect the gap hasn't been reduced at all. ATI's new Evergreen is kicking out a trillion SP FLOPS and now has full IEEE double precision as well. After ignoring graphics for years, OpenCL has caught my fancy. I once hoped that IBM would kick out an upgraded version of Cell with fast IEEE double precision, but their unholy alliance with Sony proved to be quite the fiasco.
What has greatly changed is the relevance of the gap. When you're a student living in a 300 sq ft apartment, 600 sq ft is a screaming upgrade. Later in life, the upgrade from 2500 sq ft to 5000 sq ft has a narrower appeal. Good if your favorite game in life is playing indoor hide and seek with your grand-toddlers or you're a world class model train builder.
The people who are happy enough with the tower PC they already have are not going away. Like Jobs predicts, it's not a sector capable of supporting the high living Apple desires. Everyone's creative energy is going to be poured into finding the bisection point between mobile and cloud. Everyone with aspirations for high living is piling into this sector. It won't be cheap. HP is going to congress to ask for a $50/month levy for virtual ink on every user of cloud computing services.
On the other side of the coin, the boring old sector will fade from mind a lot faster than it will fade from reality. I predict large PCs will fade away about as quickly as large SUVs in America. If you look at the dealerships, you might come to one conclusion. But then look on the road around you. Sit in your Smart Car in heavy traffic some day and count the number of bumpers at eye level before declaring dinosaurs extinct.
After writing such a nice screed about Flash, Jobs won't have any difficulty understanding why Google might wish to undermine H.264 with V8.
The interesting thing about the computer industry these days is that control points have less to do with de facto product monopolies, and a lot more to do with physical embodiment. Running a huge data center, the pendulum swings toward the ability to maintain trade secrets, and I suspect there's some of that in the closed device mobile sector.
In this new world, the incumbent monopolists have an alternative to circling the waggons and supporting each other's misbegotten prominence. Steve's essay is an excellent rendering of the king is dead, long live the king.
We don't even have real time ray-tracing on the most advanced PCs doing anything yet.... There's lot's of life left for profitability in hardware.
There's a lot that Stross got right (I do hope he doesn't delay the launch of his next Laundry novel because he spends his time writing essays). There's going to be a major change in the PC/network world soon, and Jobs is reacting to that knowledge. What's going to happen is that people who do not know how to use a computer or secure their own wi-fi network will be buying appliances that require no technical knowledge. There's also going to be a big market of people who do have tech know-how, but just want to do a lot of things you can do with the new devices, in addition to owning a personal computer. The "cloud" is not going to replace corporate computing and databases, because—as many other people have remarked—no sane corporation would trust their family jewels to anything as amorphous as "the cloud". Sure, corporations use the services of other corporations to manage their data—but the owner knows where the data is, and how it's being secured, and all kinds of conditions are locked up tight in a contract that invokes huge penalties for things like, for example, security leaks.
The "home computer" for the masses is going away, that's right. Its place will be taken by phones and (because there's obvious limitations to such a small screen) larger tablet-like devices. However, there's one problem with this scenario: it isn't going to happen as long as every big player wants users to live only in their corporate cloud.
Two major innovations brought us where we are today: the standard PC operating system and the World Wide Web. Neither was planned by any major corporation. DOS (later to become Windows) became the universal OS because IBM didn't understand the importance of their PC OS, and gave control of it to one of the luckiest opportunists of all time—Bill Gates. Sure, Gates founded a hugely successful corporation as a result of recognizing this opportunity. But that corporation came about as a result of the success of his idea—the insight that the real money was in software, and the way to make money on an OS was to license it to anybody who wanted to pay. Once consumers realized that they could buy the cheap "IBM clones" and run the same programs as would run on the IBM PC, the hardware ceased to matter, and software was everything. This was not planned by one of the big players in the computer industry; it created the biggest player.
The same was true of the WWW. It just grew on its own. No corporation started it deliberately (sure DARPA started the internet, which provided the necessary infrastructure, but the internet is not the Web). Nobody made big bucks on the Web itself (which is not to say that the Web can't be used to make big bucks).
Now we're at another cusp. What's going to have to happen for mass acceptance of the "cloud" is that the cloud be both free and open . But none of the big players of today really want that. They want to lock people into their proprietary cloud-jails. That is not going to work. Somebody is going to have to come along and think of something new, something that will leave Apple, Google, HP, and all the other players in the dust. That will be the new Player.
"flatten the existing PC industry and turn PC manufacturers into suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit"
Because the current PC hardware industry has ENORMOUS margins, and machines aren't commodity at all
margins have been dropping for years before there was any cloud talk, PCs keep getting more powerful, but what the average user needs is quite minimal, making the PC that meets their required performance specs cheaper and cheaper over time.
Which is completely irrelevant for the prospects of the cloud turning PCs into, essentially, the commodity terminals with the real work being done in cloud apps. Cloud computing is a set of techniques for abstracting and dynamically provisioning server resources, and can be used just as easily in a businesses own datacenters as in a third-party datacenter. In fact, as there is a widely-available open source implementation of the Amazon cloud APIs (and which is bundled now with Ubuntu Server), and I believe there are also production-ready open source implementations of the Google AppEngine APIs, in many cases, it can be done with the same code base.
I seen one the other day on a dating website. PLUR this and PLUR that, bio is 10-feet long about how this former-raver is tending to it's college education as though being reserected from an acid-induced 5-year coma. Are they a lost cause or do I have a chance? Also, what is the possibility it was a race-mixer, so are there any sterilization techniques in-case it had sex with a nigger/spic/chink/jew?
yes. hardware is changing. is getting more and more capable of intercommunicating and it needs a universal language. the question is: who will be still standing?
Thanks to the current status of the world, original apple hardware is expensive for almost anyone that as soon as cheap alternatives come, they will be the ones most sold. . it's clear that whatever the language is to be the standard, it is going to be open source sooner or later, so apple hopes to stay in the market by making his software open source, thus setting a standard for the lower quality imitations (that are going to flood the market) and, in a worst/best case scenario, displace everyone except apple out of the market.
applause to mr jobs, and a hope for his failure on exploiting us until the inevitable open revolution arrives..
Powerbook G4 circa 5 years ago or so? $385
How much will your netbook sell for in five years? Could you even sell it? I had a Dell desktop about that age, I couldn't have sold if I wanted to.
Modern Intel Macbooks hold value very well, and of course the many years you are using them you have a more stable platform. I still have a Powerbook G4 667MHz system (7/8 years old I think), that our family uses daily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you have to buy mac osx but on pc there is no fee to put app out for free on your own.
you have to buy mac osx but on pc there is no fee to put app out for free on your own.
There's also no fee to release an app for Mac OS X, so what's your point?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I had a Moto Razr, unlocked too. Couldn't stand the UI. Threw it in the trash when I got home after buying my iPhone.
When people get fast, reliable performance that delivers what they need on a platform that's unchained and has awesome battery life, there are going to be some questions about the Windows monopoly on the desktop. People are going to ask things like "why doesn't my desktop work this well? Why doesn't this thing need an anti-malware suite?" When their desktops don't work they'll just grab their slate type PCs and hustle down to the cafeteria and work there. Eventually the questions will evolve to "Do you remember when people worked in cubicles, with desks and those huge boat anchor PCs instead of lounging on couches and stuff like we do now? Man, those were the dark ages of tech. Gosh, I remember when you couldn't just video chat an expert and point the slate at the hardware while he told you left, right to help him find the wiring problem."
Somewhere along the way the world will lose the need for the generation of 2 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity, which is nice.
Yes, I'm aware the HP Slate with Intel Atom and Windows 7 that Steve Ballmer showed at CES is rumored to be dropped today. I said it would be then. The relevant part of that comment:
The tablet that Steve Ballmer announced in partnership with HP in his CES keynote speech will never see the light of day. It is vaporware. It does not exist. Steve-o panicked and held up a half-working concept prototype because he's scared spitless about both the Android tablets working on display at CES and Apple's announcement later this month.
There is no such thing and there will never be. It sucks so much power you need a 3 pound power brick to work it at all. It sucks juice like a diabetic 300LB hummingbird. If it was impressive he would have showed you how it worked. Microsoft is looking around for an answer to Android on Snapdragon and to be blunt, they're still going to be looking at Christmas time when you're putting those cool new Android tablets/music players/movie players/Kidsafe GPS locators/notepad computers under the tree for your kids, your spouse and yourself.
In 2010 Microsoft's innovations are going to be limited to paying people to force you to use Bing instead of allowing you to Google what you want. That's all. And in fact TFA announces just that.
We're going to use slates and similarly low-powered user-facing devices because ubiquitous fast networking and power-efficient technologies mean that the bulk of the work will move once more back into the datacenter, or "cloud" as we're calling it now, and the per-user hardware is going thin and low-watt. This makes a great deal of sense because compute power is watt and hardware intensive - costly. It makes sense to timeshare costly resources and put cheap efficient devices in front of end users. This works really well if the network and devices are performant enough to deliver a reliable usable experience. We've reached that tipping point. Heck, we've passed it. For the eco-sensitive folks this is a grand thing - and for the warmists too. Every Watthour a scrapped desktop doesn't burn is a little bit less coal turned into CO2. It's also grand news for emerging nations because it doesn't just lower costs - it doesn't need the expensive ridiculous electricity generation and delivery capacity that they haven't yet paid to build out and now may not need to. Because they plain don't have the watts they'll adopt early and so take the power edge of the technology curve. For one more time in world technology history it's Advantage: India, China, Pakistan. Because they're lagging getting the tech out to rural areas because they haven't yet had the money or power infrastructure, they don't have to pay for the prior power-hungry coal-sucking IT generations of years past.
It's not about the widget. It's about what you can do with it: the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. If it empowers users to do what they want or need to do or to expand what they can do in new ways and doesn't get in the way, you'll sell millions of 'em.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I also remember Worldgate Communication in 1998 promising that you would not even need a computer!!! just plug this damm thing into your TV and BAM! instant WebTV. No computer.
I can understand the lack off Flash on the iPad and all, but if I am going to access my data on a big computer somewhere, I want to make sure the iPad supports VT100.
I was using a Quadra610 and regular old dial-up. I didn't care about Windows at all - I had enough of that in school.
Macs have always been a little better. Seriously. It's just the other little trade-offs that eventually get to ya.
Moore's law matters very little in the way that you think of it. We turned a corner here and you don't see it. When performance is good enough, we don't need more performance - we need more performance per Watt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"I think we would be a decade ahead if AMD didn't come along." = If she wasn't so fine I wouldn't have raped her?
WTF
Reminds me of presidential candidate Bill Clinton's 1992 quip (at nattering TV media hysterical talking heads portending inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable, unswayable doom for no USA presidential candidate before had lost the Iowa caucus, as he had, and then won the presidency): "Things are the same until they aren't."
Adapt, I Ching, roll with it, whatever.
The newest "network computer" cry that the PC will die. This is what, the 3rd, 4th, time? Sure cloud/network computing would be great is you trust the provider, always have super-fast communications, and never have an outage. Oops.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I disagree about cheap commodity computing being the death knell of hardware.
1. I still don't have real time voice recognition on my computer. I can't say, "Max: email Heather at Tree Time: Start message: Heather can you increase my order for aspen to 200 number 5 pots." End Message. Show. Send. Go to sleep.
2. One of the biggest problems with the 'paperless office' is the lack of desk size monitors: a monitor system that has the information capacity of a desk. 5' x 3' x 200 pixels/inch (at least on the centre blotter size area.
3. I still don't have an application that I can tell, "Find me the near duplicates of this image, despite crops, and edits in the contrast, brightness and hue.
4. I live in Canada. 3G communication may nominally be 6 mbit/s but my iPhone takes 30-60 seconds to load a page. I barely get cell phone coverage at home. Edge Network (2G?)
covers about 75% of the paved roads outside the cities. I don't want my life to depend on cell phone coverage.
Home broadband? Currently my options are satellite and dialup. I pay $85/month for 1 Mbit download speed with a 50 MByte per hour cap. If I exceed the cap, I'm reduced to dialup speeds until there is essentially NO activity for an hour. I'm looking at a non-satellite option. It will require that I build a 60-75 foot tower to get line of sight to the provider's tower.
Tablets may be a partial answer, but there's portable and there's portable.
For me, when I'm in the field portable means it MUST fit in my pocket. I use two hands at a time most of the day. I can't have something that requires that I grab it and carry it. The iPhone is too small. I think I want something that just fits a shirt pocket that opens like a paperback.
I can't depend on networks, so it has to be self contained.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I've talked with my coworkers about this a few times.
We agree that the future will involve something much like a Nokia N900 with a couple of USB ports on it.
The basic idea is that you get to the office, plug your 24" LCD into the mini-HDMI port on the device, plug your keyboard and mouse into the USB ports and away you go.
Network access would be provided either by wireless or VPN via HSDPA.
For one, I was only talking about the PC market. Smartphones still have a life ahead of them. Also, I am only talking about hardware. I think that once someone creates a foolproof voice recognition software, then it will be able to run on today's PCs. I could make you a "desk sized monitor" with todays technology, and your current PC could probably run it. It would just be very expensive. I think there are still advances to be made in the PC area. But, there is less room for innovation because the technology is basically getting "mature" so people are not willing to spend tons of money on the new "cutting edge" product.
I have seen this for a few years now. My laptop does everything I want it to. I don't feel a need to go buy a new and better laptop. Same for my desktop. It could do some things a little better, but I cannot think of an improvement that would convince me to go out and spend 2k on a new laptop.
Apple is a new, trendy Microsoft but a little worse. I have used a Mac at work for a couple years now and I just don't understand the hype around these machines. Give me a PC I can dual boot into Windows 7 and Fedora, laptop in the same config and Symbian based phone and I am a happy man. I think this "model" will die if they continue this way. If your as old as I am you'll remember when IBM tried this "lock in" strategy in the eighties. That worked out real well for them....
Voice recognition is hard. Image comparison is hard. Working with video is hard.
Kodak has a digital camera back for view cameras that has 50 mega pixels 16 bits each per channel. That's 300 Mbytes per photoshop layer. Todays computers cannot render that fast enough. Most people don't use view cameras. Most of those don't use 20,000 buck digital backs. Those that do can put fractional terabytes of RAM in their computers.
People have gotten used to mediocrity in computers, and they don't expect much from them, and they are so used to their limitations that they are unaware of them. It will take some 'killer app' to move that forward.
I mentioned the phone market mostly to emphasize that reasonable network speed is NOT a given, and that even service of any kind is far from ubiquitous outside metro areas.
To a certain point you are right. The market is no longer one of, "replace my computer because it can't keep up" and more of one of "replace my computer because it's worn out." The number sold each year is declining to replacement units rather than new units.
Re: desktop. I want the desktop to BE the computer. 5 x 3 feet rolled into a quarter cylinder, touch sensitive, hyperbolic scaling. (If I move a window toward the edge of the screen it shrinks.) This is not a commodity item yet.
Would you replace your laptop if doing so it would weigh less than a pound, be as thin as a clipboard, be usable in daylight, was waterproof, and had enough battery to allow you to fly to Perth, Australia watching Blu-Ray movies all the way?
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
PC != Microsoft Windows, no matter what Apple's marketing tells you.
Dev Tools for Windows are free. Microsoft makes the Windows SDK available for free. The .Net framework includes the necessary compilers for the framework. If you want an IDE, there are the Visual Studio.Net Express options or the open source SharpDevelop. Notepad ++ can also be used for developing VB, C, and C# on Windows.
My Sysadmin Blog
The only exception is gaming, and content creation like movies, music, and other such art.
And browsing the web ... ...) ... )
1, Flash
2, HTML has changed quite a bit during the years (div tag e.g.)
3, watch movies (HD puts on quite a strain
4, even gmail will be sluggish on an old machine (Javascript, you know
I've seen packages for the N900 that claim support for bluetooth keyboards and mice, and the N900 definitely has video out, so this exists. I'd imagine this holds for all Nokia's Symbian phones with video out too, N95, N97, etc.
You can alternatively pull up an N900 on your desktop using x11vnc, but the performance sucks over wifi. I've hear people prefer USB networking for VNC and X11 connections with their N900s, never heard anything about bluetooth. In any case, you'll nuke your battery pumping such high bandwidth though the wifi, so usb networking seems preferable regardless.
I'd imagine the best solution overall would be pulling up a whole second login on your desktop, presumably using straight X11 so the desktop does all the graphics work. Individual applications should work fine already because N900 developers using scrachbox remote shell (sbrsh) already launch their apps this way, but I'm unsure about multiple logins or apps launching other apps.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Sorry, but I've been around too long to buy it. I remember seeing Larry Ellison predict the end of the PC era just as it got going."
Larry was right, but the NC wasn't the answer. There is no answer.
The NC never went anywhere because PC hardware prices really started plummeting in the 2000s. Surely someone who has been around as long as you can acknowledge that PC prices have fallen greatly since 1998.
So how was Larry right? Well, he predicted that PC hardware makers would start to push each other off the low-price cliff. And yes, they have. They couldn't compete on features because they were all running the same crapware Windows OS. The only way they could compete was on price. And apparently there's no limit to how cheap PCs can get (if you factor out the Windows tax).
So no, NCs weren't the answer then, and they're not the answer now, but it doesn't matter. There's no way to stop the trend. PC prices will keep dropping, the market will become flooded, and that will keep the price down. Even Macs will get cheaper and cheaper, until there is just no more profit in making and selling them any more. PCs will be everywhere, like light bulbs or extension cords or t-shirts.
Where have I heard this before?
Radio was supposed to kill printed media.
TV was supposed to kill radio.
The PC was supposed to kill TV.
The Cloud is supposed to kill the PC.
When a new communications medium develops, it never kills the old one, it just redefines it. Cloud computing will have its uses. As for me, I will never give up my PC because of dependence on a 3rd party.
Sales Force
Oh and .com, not really a word.
The cloud is not about Gmail and Hotmail, heck thats 20 year old tech! It's about tools to do the same things better, which is all any enterprise company be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP or whoever has been trying to sell forever, today however it's just a new platform for the same thing. Ask anyone who uses the aforementioned salesforce.com which I think is a great example of how the cloud is not something that we're all going to be using in the next 10 years, but that it's something that most of us have been using in one way or another already for the past ten years!
Yes there are quite a few out there screaming to toss their money at Apple.
I am a growing segment that has put their foot in cement and said enough is enough. Support the computers you have and the siftware you have and take a small breath and just say "NO" to Steve and his crazies.