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PC Designer Says PC "Going the Way of the Vacuum Tube"
jbrodkin writes "One of the original engineers of IBM's first PC says PCs are 'going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.' With the 30th anniversary of the IBM 5150 (running MS-DOS) coming this week, IBM CTO Mark Dean argues that the post-PC world is very much upon us, perhaps not surprising given that IBM sold its PC business in 2005. Microsoft, of course, weighed in as well, saying the PC era is nowhere near over. But perhaps in the future we will consider a personal computer anything a person does computing on — whether that be laptop, tablet, smartphone, or something that hasn't even been invented yet."
Your microwave. Ok it is a magnatron, but still its a vacuum device (electrons in a vacuum). But vacuum tubes are far from obsolete.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
How do you figure that? By and large they have the same components.
And a retail video game console "by and large" has "the same components" as a debug console that mainstream video game developers use. One just has different binary signing keys, is much harder to buy, and is much more expensive.
After decades of race to the bottom competition to make low-margin PCs, the race to the bottom will end up shifting to tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, allowing price pressure on PCs to relax. Then PCs will become a luxury item that not everyone feels a need to own. The new feature of iOS 5 to make it independent from iTunes is one step toward end users not absolutely needing a PC. I guess the real test of my hypothesis will come in the next version of Mac OS X after Lion: whether not Apple will choose to continue to make XCode upgrades available for $5, or whether the Mac SDK will become a $99/year subscription like the iPhone SDK.
Seems to me that the trend isn't "the death of the PC" so much as "the rise of shiny toys for simpletons who don't know how to computer"
Use of traditional PCs might decline among those who want to use a computer the same way they use a microwave –to do a handful of simple pre-defined tasks, without any control or knowledge of the details– and maybe that's a big market segment these days, but I can't see myself replacing my big box any time soon.
I prefer the form factor, the desk setup, the ability to open the thing up and tinker with it, the extra power and storage... everything.