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Why Mobile Innovation Outpaces PC Innovation
Sandrina sends in an opinion piece from TechCrunch that discusses why mobile systems are developing so much faster than the PC market. The article credits Intel with allowing hardware innovation to stagnate, and points out how much more competitive the component vendor market is for smartphones. Quoting:
"In PCs, Intel dictates the pace of hardware releases — OEMs essentially wait for CPU updates, then differentiate through inventory control, channel / distribution and branding. Intel and Microsoft win no matter which PC makers excel — they literally don't care if it's Asus, Dell or HP. In the smartphone world, it's the opposite. Dozens of component vendors fight each other to the death to win designs at smartphone OEMs. This competitive dynamic forms an entirely different basis for how component vendors approach system integration and support. Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple's graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"
I point to this fallacy:
Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple’s graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
Dell is not comparable with Apple in this case. Apple develops the operating system software for the iPhone. Intel also has permanent engineers at Microsoft, just like Infineon has engineers at Apple. Microsoft develops the operating system software for the PC. Intel also funds many Linux driver developers, and has staff working specifically on Linux support.
There are multiple x86 vendors including Intel, AMD, VIA. The reason there is not more competition is that Intel exploits network effects leveraged by their market monopoly which lead to the current situation. It used to be at a time that the chipset was manufactured by different vendors than the CPU. This enabled more rapid progress in some cases (e.g. ALI and VIA had a chipset with onboard 3D graphics long before other vendors). This is no longer the case. In fact it seems chipsets are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more things get integrated in the same chip. Intel is starting to include the graphics card and high speed I/O in the processor chip. Eventually the chipset will be today's equivalent of a slow I/O south bridge. Perhaps it will even vanish completely.
Another reason that mobile devices will not leave the PC industry behind is that Intel has superior manufacturing prowess. Historically Intel has had inferior chip design capabilities: the 8086 was inferior to the 68000, the 486 was inferior to many RISC processors, the Pentium Pro was inferior to the Alpha, etc. None of this mattered because Intel had the ability to deliver in volume and price where its competitors could not. The Pentium Pro, for example, had similar integer performance to Alpha because it had superior manufacturing, even if the hardware design was worse. Today Intel enjoys a healthy manufacturing process lead over all their competitors. It is a matter of time until they develop a specific chip to attack the smartphone market, like they developed Atom to counter the rising MID market, or Centrino to counter Transmeta years before.
Even more than that: you don't want rapid "innovation" in established products. When I buy a new computer, I want it to be better than my last computer, but I specifically want a lot of things to be the same. I'm used to a certain UI, and I have a variety of peripherals already that I might want to plug into it. I want to be able to perform essentially the same tasks in the same way.
Basically, the smartphone market had a distinct shift a couple of years ago (when the iPhone was released) where vendors started offering a new kind of product. They were starting with a clean slate, and you can draw whatever you want on a clean slate. Once you've established a new product that way, you have a relatively brief period of time to refine that vision before people's expectations become established. Then people want everything to work "as expected", and they want legacy support more than they want new features.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more innovation in the desktop/laptop market. But if someone did conceive of a new and interesting vision for the computer, they'd have a lot of inertia to overcome.
PCs are failing hard at something the same vendors have figured out is really important for mobile computing, and that is UI responsiveness.
My experience is this:I upgrade on a 4-year average, and I usually do so because I can no longer run a recent Adobe CS at a usable speed. Every upgrade allows me to work on more complex and bigger files, for sure, but the responsiveness of the UI has definitely gone down. Illustrator CS5 feels slower on my 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb of RAM than Illustrator 9 did on a 500Mhz G4 with 256mb of RAM. This is true even working on very simple stuff. Launch times are absolutely atrocious, cancelling a mistakenly called operation (like say, applying a texture) still virtually impossible (why the hell do they even bother with the "cancel" button on progress bars?). It's not just Adobe, Apple's never managed to claw back the responsiveness of the classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Office... well, it's got seriously nasty.
Big-ticket software has made using a modern computer like wading through molasses. Yeah, it gives you a lot speed for some things that are processor intensive, but pressing a button, opening a menu, or bringing up a dialogue are all going to be slower. In some cases, much slower. This is EXACTLY the opposite of what I want. I don't care if a filter that was going to take two minutes takes four, if I can go and do something else without everything being as slow fuck. Even as I type this, the computer occasionally failing to keep up. I mean really, typing words into a web browser while playing an MP3: I was doing this in 1998 with no lag.
If I really believed there was still innovation in PCs I would say that instant-response UIs--where cancel buttons worked and processes just got slower rather than stepping destroying responsiveness--were going going to be the next big thing. However, I don't think anyone gives a shit, because all the software vendors have gone down this road.