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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.'"
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"?
It is tapering off. Any smaller and quantum mechanics come in to play
So obviously this whole concept of parallel computing and multi-core processors has just whizzed right past you, huh? Especially when Intel and AMD are planning for 128 and 256 core CPU's for HOME use, and current supercomputers use tens of thousands (or more) of CPU's, thus busting the "we can't get smaller" myth. Yeah ok maybe you can't fit more transistors on a 5mm x 5mm chip, but you can fit a LOT of chips in a mini tower case...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
i read almost the exactly worded article almost 10 years ago when everyone was afraid of Microsoft.
i like my iPhone and will probably buy a few iPads, but we're reliving the 1970's with this stuff. people will get tired of their dumb devices in a few years like they hated the rent some time dumb terminals and someone will sell a mobile device in 5-10 years that will run a real OS and not the dumbed down iphone OS that's locked to apple or google. we are in a flash memory revolution and in 5-10 years we will be back to more mobile power than we know what to do with. like we hit with PC's around 2000
people are looking for a good mobile computing experience today and Windows 7 isn't it. Slate looked OK but too slow.
It's not moore's law is tapering off. It's just that machines are so fast that 99% of the population doesn't need it.
Why i7 when a core duo would be just as good? Or an atom? You don't need a lot of processing power to log onto facebook, watch a Youtube video, or create and edit a word doc.
The world is changing, and many people in the field find it hard to believe. Just the other day I heard some tech make some crack about an underpowered core 2 duo box...for general office use. A P4 would be perfectly fine for that; a c2d is overkill.
Actually, I have to wonder about this. I got into computers because of gaming (ie what parts do I need, how to troubleshoot problems, etc) and never had the latest console until my brother got a PS2 when I was 17. I can't help but wonder that if my parents had bought me an N64 instead of a PC for the family that Christmas if I would be where I am now.
There is more to science than physics!
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We hear this "everything's already there, been there, done that". But in reality we have a lack of innovation in products and markets because of a rather large monopoly that has stifled competition at every turn, even after being convicted. It isn't that we have one OS to rule them all that's helped us get to where we are, it is inspite of that that we are where we are. We have continued to penetrate new markets, to educate people, to bring products such as tablet computing and smart phones inspite of being smothered from the top.
There's an old saying that goes "You can give a monkey a computer and he'll use it but probably just to crack open walnuts." The IT failures I've seen come from a lack of vision, a lack of understanding, and a lack of follow-through. It's like watching someone turning an electric screwdriver by hand because they don't realize there's a power switch.
It's a false line of reasoning to say "Just because I can't think of a better way nobody else can, either." But it's really hard to improve on what we've got. Look at the mouse. I can make a lot of complaints about it but have we yet found an input tool to make the mouse completely a thing of the past? No. It's just like we haven't really found a good replacement for the keyboard. People keep trying but I think it's safe to say the computers of the next decade will come with mice and keyboards.
We're going to be going through a system upgrade at my job. The old system is pretty crappy, no argument there, but we're still not even using it properly. Back to what I said above, failures in vision and understanding. I'll do my best to see that we can make a change of it this time but we're likely to be back to using the system to a fraction of its full ability.
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Sell the spice to CHOAM
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I won't reply to AC, but I will reply to you.
WHile you are technically correct. we could do parallel development with any chips and it has nothing to do with Moore's law, in actuallity the poster was correct, and here is why: Market.
A by product of Moore's law was speed. So When AMD became a player, Intel removed a lot of there focus from parallel development, to focusing on clock speed. Increasing clock speed drove the market, not individual clock cycle usage.
Now the number of transistors on a sqr millimeter of chip has gotten damn hard to double. There are many reasons for this.
Running out of transistor space and forced companies to focus on parallel development, finally. I think we would be a decade ahead if AMD didn't come along...or marketed parallel as real performance, and not speed.
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