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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.'"
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.
That's some over-the-top fear mongering.
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.
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.
" 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.
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"?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
A couple of points:
cheers,
Andrew
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's why they sold only 1.147 millionen desktops last quarter, compared to a staggering 818 thousand same quarter last year.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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'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.