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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.
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.
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.
must be that new fangled iJuana
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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
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.
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.
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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.
A couple of points:
cheers,
Andrew
Whoever this fucktard is
He is a top-tier science fiction author with Hugo and Locus awards, including a nomination this year. Before that, he was a programmer and tech journalist with a monthly column on Linux.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
This guy sounds like a desperate market speculator that has no clue how the market works... etc etc etc
Whereas you sound like you didn't even read TFA. Or if you did, you don't understand it. Let me break it down for you.
TFA says that there will be relentless downward pressure on computer prices from now on. This point is unassailable.
I can buy a Compaq laptop with a dual-core AMD chip, a great 15.6" display, big hard disk, a DVD drive, and lots of RAM, all for about $400, quantity 1 retail. (Or $370 on sale at Fry's.) I can put Ubuntu on it, and the result is nearly as nice as an Apple laptop. Checking apple.com, I see that I can buy a 13" MacBook for $1000, or a 15" MacBook Pro for $1800. No question, the Apple notebooks are nicer: they have that nifty magnetic power cord, they have slot-loading optical drives, they have the great unibody aluminum chassis, etc. But I have to tell you, if I'm spending my own money, it's going to be that $400 computer, or even a $250 netbook with a 10.1" screen. Does a 13" MacBook really offer me four times the value of a $250 netbook?
TFA says that in the future, Apple is worried that it will be forced to cut their prices and sell at low margins, because the entire PC industry will be forced to cut prices and sell at low margins. I don't see much to debate here either. Here is a quote from TFA:
Is that clear enough for you? PCs aren't going away, but the traditional PC profit margins are going away, and this will cause a shakeup in the PC manufacturing industry. Apple has, so far, managed to make higher margins than the typical 10%, but how long can they continue this?
And what do you know, Apple has successfully set up a whole ecosystem where consumers must go through the Apple App Store to get applications, and Apple collects a 30% cut. TFA says that Apple would do almost anything, maybe even give the hardware away, to get all their customers locked into such an ecosystem.
In short, TFA doesn't say that PCs are going away. It says that PCs are going to be cheap, fast, and ubiquitous, and that companies selling PCs will be forced to accept slim margins. And Apple really doesn't want to play that game. Remember how Steve Jobs dissed netbooks? Apple doesn't want to sell a netbook, or even an iPad, for $250; and the market won't let them get away with selling a netbook for $500. The actual problem Steve Jobs has with netbooks is the razor-thin margins. So far, the market will allow Apple to charge $500 and up for an iPad (although I don't think that can last forever either; great iPad competitors ).
TFA isn't the only place I have seen this theory. See also: http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10006035/why-apple-will-eventually-dump-the-mac/
Maybe the article is far-fetched. But if Steve Jobs thinks he has any chance at all of locking all of Apple's customers into an App Store ecosystem where Apple skims 30% of all the action, you better believe he will go for it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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
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.