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Preparing For Life After the PC
New submitter Doctor_Jest links to a recent I, Cringely column, in which Cringely "is speculating how the world will look when the 'Post-PC' era is in full swing." He makes the case that in just a few upgrade cycles, extensible phones and other devices, coupled with remotely stored data, could replace most of today's conventional PCs — but also admits he thought this transition would have already happened.
Remember what we can do with computers now, because if the industry has it's way, within a few years technology more capable than various sizes of smartphones will be unheard of.
Hmm, there is going to be a continuing and significnt need for a device that has a real keyboard for all the people who write a lot of text every day; substantial local CPU power and storage for people that do stuff like development, modeling and simulations; good screens and specialized input devices for people that do graphical design CAD and the like.
Now, that device might not be an X86 box that runs Windows, so in that sense it may well be "Post PC". But to all intents and purposes it will look and act very much like the laptop and desktop machines i have today.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't see how this vision ever becomes a reality in a world where putting significant computing power on my desk and fully under my control is dirt cheap. Comparatively a tablet or phone has a klunky and imprecise interface, poor processing power and needs more external support. Also the value of having a powerful processor in the box greatly speeds compute operations in many cases.
I wanted to write a detailed rebuttal. But I don't have the patience to enter it in my phone.
I don't see people coding on devices with inferior screen(sizes), cpu power and input devices.
You don't seem to have a grasp of how many people routinely use 3d graphics packages out there in the real world...
Userbase? Sure. Money? Um, go spec up a 3D graphics workstation and see what those things cost. You don't need a billion customers to turn a profit selling that kind of gear.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
From TFA:
It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the fifteenth century. Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s. Television, invented in the mid-1920’s, took until the mid-1950s to bind us to our sofas.
We still have books and telephones and movies and tv's so what the hell is his point?
ps--Judging by his photo in the banner, his blog ought to be called, "I, Crinkly".
As I enter this on my smart. Phone. I can't help but this.k that this demise of the PC is highly exaggerated. Keyboards and mice and the number pad are all much more efficient and less error prone, and therefore faster and more headache free ways to enter data. Until smart phones and tablets and other upcoming "smart devices" can compete in this regard (as well as screen real estate), the PC/laptop in business at the very least isn't going anywhere. I don't want someone angering any of my financial I.to on an autocorrecting tablet touch screen. And for those who might choose this argument, a ta let with a cover or keybiard accessory is really a laptop. Anyway having read the author's previous work I don't need to read thus one to k ow it should have been titled, "Cringley Jumps On The Bandwagon Again With Nothing Useful To Say Or Hasn't Already Been Said A Dozen Times Before, Or Both."
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
In TFA Cringely states: "Radio was invented with the original idea that it would replace telephones and give us wireless communication. That implies two-way communication, yet how many of us own radio transmitters?"
He is apparently unaware that cellphones, tablets, etc. use radio transmitters (technically transceivers) to communicate with cell towers, WiFi access points, Bluetooth headsets, etc.
Whenever I see people saying this, I wonder how many people actually use their computer to do real work.
I work as a recording engineer. You can buy non-PC devices to do the actual recording if you want, but even in that case mixing and post-processing really does require a computer with vast amounts of local CPU power and storage, in addition to some highly specialised equipment (such as external audio interfaces that connect via Firewire or even PCI cards). You can't record ten simultaneous tracks of uncompressed 24-bit, 48 khz audio to the cloud. I'm sure the same is true of many other fields like video and graphics production, software development, and scientific number crunching.
Sure, grandma probably doesn't need a full-blown PC to look at emailed pictures of her family, and maybe the "post-PC" era will benefit her. But I do worry what will happen to the PC world if major manufacturers keep taking their focus away from people who really do require serious equipment. (Hello, Apple, selling 2010 Mac Pros for 2014 prices, with an operating system that's leading the charge towards turning your desktop computer into an iPad!)
He's just showing us how he's 29 years ahead of the curve by adopting Instagram into his "professional" work.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I can't help but think that most people are looking at this the wrong way. I definitely think that the classic pc form factor will be around for a while yet, though it will likely become more niche with time. There are jobs that will need the raw computing power of the desktop for some time yet, there is no doubt there. But I definitely think that over time form factors will get smaller, and eventually, surely within the next 20-50 years, you will generally have enough computing power to do whatever is needed in a device that sits in your pocket. Will all desktop-style input and output devices go away? probably not, at least not the keyboard. Though it may change drastically.
It seems likely that monitors will be superseded in large part by high-resolution ar glasses, once they become practical. Why have a physical monitor when you can have as many virtual ones floating in front of you? I think that they may persist for design if color accuracy and etc in glasses lags, but past that there seems little reason for them to.
I think all of this will take a bit longer than people think, but it is a definite eventuality. I just don't think we'll be going all-mobile with today's technology just yet.
The problem with such predictions is that they rely on the smartphone being a full replacement for a PC. And that's just not the case.
There's the obvious problems - typing large amounts of text, or doing things that require more processing power than a smartphone will have in the foreseeable future. These have been covered to death already; I won't bother reiterating them.
But then there's the lesser obstacles. Let me bring in some anecdotal evidence. I was feeling nostalgic, and wanted to play some of my old Game Boy Color games. I figured I should do so on my phone, rather than try to drag yet another bulky piece of electronics around. Finding an emulator was easy enough (finding one that didn't display ads was tougher, but doable). And I easily found a ROM file (just in case you're spying on me, MAFIAA, yes, I still have those games on cartridge, so bugger off).
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open .ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
There are many other times I've tried to do something on my phone, but been unable to without using a PC. Here's a big one - development. You can code for Linux, on Linux. You can code for Windows, on Windows. I've even coded for freaking TI calculators, *on* the calculator. But you can't code for Android on an Android device, nor can you code for iPhone on an iPhone.
The running theme of it seems to be that smartphones and tablets are designed as consumers of data, not producers. But, given how essential producing data is to modern society, that means they will never replace the PC until that fundamental design concept is thrown out. Sure, for some, even many, uses, they're adequate, or at least capable of doing the task (if slower and more awkwardly). But so many common things remain impossible.
The more paranoid among you are probably preparing a rant about how this is $BIG_EVIL_CONGLOMERATE's wet dream, and something something 1984 something something DRM something from my cold dead hands. But that's not the case. Even *if* you posit a dystopian future where the $BEC controls everything, there will *still* be PCs, because *someone* will still have to produce data. They may become much less common, but a PC, or a PC-functional device, *will* be necessary.
Now, it could be possible that smartphones will change to have this type of functionality, and would be able, in theory, to replace PCs. But *that* seems unlikely, because the form factor itself, as well as limitations of technology, makes them very poor PC replacements.
[1] Note that, throughout, I use the term "PC" for "workstation, desktop or notebook". OS does not matter - your Mac is a PC; your Linux desktop is a PC; even that one guy still running CP/M is using a PC.
What’s keeping us using desktops and even notebook, then, are corporate buying policies, hardware replacement cycles, and inertia.
While I actually agree with the assertion that laptops are on the way out, I don't ever see a day I *won't* want to have my own dedicated box. And what's going to keep me buying (or, rather, building) desktop computers is customizability and control. I don't want Google, Amazon, HTC, Apple or anyone else telling me what my computer should be. I don't want an internet outage to prevent me from using my machine, I don't want to be told what software I can or cannot install on my machine, and I don't want to be a slave to a company's repair center whenever I need to do a simple replacement. It's in the name: Personal Computer.
I'm not saying that thin clients don't have their place, and I don't doubt that their popularity will rise, but I don't think the PC is going anywhere.
Steve Jobs used the analogy of trucks and cars; some of us need trucks for heavy lifting and special tasks, but most of us don't. The PC running Solitaire on a receptionist's desk will probably go away; the engineer's workstation will not.
Give me a call when you can easily develop for the iPad on the iPad. Or when you can develop complex server applications on a Galaxy S3. PCs are going away in the consumer world (to the detriment of anyone who wants to create anything outside work without forking out a fortune), but PCs are going nowhere in the office where you need a large screen or two to efficiently do your job and a decent keyboard to do accurate typing.
We are not whiny buggy whip holders, we are the people that work in real organisations, where the needs are more complex than Facebook access and where legacy applications abound. When you futurists can come up with a decent device for doing complex work that is a realistic alternative to the PC then you can criticise those of us who actually know something. Until then get the fuck off my lawn.
It's not about resistance to change, it's about need. I've got a much more capable device sitting in my computer room than I do in my pocket or on my nightstand. Why utilize an inferior piece of hardware when a twenty second walk will put me in front of my pc. I think it's more about convenience of use. We've got two smart phones, a touchpad and a kindle in the house. For casual forum reading, the phones or the tablet will suffice, For even something as simple as searching for information on a new topic, I much prefer he utility of a keyboard, mouse and multiple screens. People of future generations will utilize the best tools available to them, including dedicated pc's if available.
99% of the user base doesn't need some given functionality of the PC that the other 1% depend on.
About 80% of the user base can think of some functionality that puts them in one of those "1%" groups. For some it's 3D graphics. For some, it's computing power. For some it's the layout capability that a large screen+mouse+keys offers. For most, it's the ability to type... with all of their digits.
It may eventually get to the point where PC hardware is just a big (very big) tablet with a mount and connections for network, keyboard ,and mouse, but it still will be a PC.
Yes, small mobile devices have as much, or more, compute power (including display processing) as PC's of a few years ago. And yes, solid state storage is cheap enough to make a mobile device a practical platform for most uses, but for one thing - the user interface. Just try to get real work done on a tablet. Sure, if you're "work" is a single task, with a UI that is suited to small displays, and if your input doesn't involve much typing at all, that will work. But if you run multiple apps at once, and have to actually type any significant number of characters like say, a paragraph on a /. post, tiny touch screens suck, hard. So Cringe has it right, partly. I'm willing to allow that "the PC" will look quite different in 10 or 15 years. I expect that it will involve a wearable heads-up display of some type. If we don't get that, the screens on my desk will still be there.
All these arguments here over input devices and 3D capable workstations and "powerful" processors vs. "weak" tablets and smartphones. Give me a break.
We're talking about the FUTURE here. Rewind 10 years and tell me you EVER thought you would be sitting around with 3 terabytes and 32GB of RAM inside your "personal" computer at home for less than $1000. Now go ahead and TRY and predict what kind of computing power we're going to be literally holding in the palm of our hands in another 10 years as you complain about 3D capability and resolution (ironically while you hold your 2048 x 1536 iPad in your hand) .
As far as keyboards go, we're only beginning to see what interfaces like Siri can do. Yes, I love my keyboard and can type with speed. But it is still no match for my voice, and I would much rather use THE most efficient method of input. The average person can speak MUCH faster than they can type (250 - 300WPM), and as long as that statistic rings true (along with increasing levels of car accidents due to texting instead of looking at the damn road), we WILL have many reasons to move away from a box of keys.
Sorry, but considering what computing power has done in the last 10 - 20 years, I've given up on trying to predict the wonders of tomorrow, but I'm sure not going to simply dismiss them based on archaic mentality.
Many of us, specifically the ones that create or are techies, will have a "PC" always. the Post PC era is for the appliance operators, the ones that treat the PC as a toaster, and it's about time this happened. I have always said that a computer is NOT what most people need, they need something that is like a game machine. Fixed OS they cant write to, and software as read only. Give them a space they can write to for storage and call it done. An Xbox360 or PS3 kind of device that is a home computer.
Luckily it's coming to pass. and all people that have done IT support in their life will rejoice.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Make him type that article on a tablet and see if he still thinks that. I'm getting REALLY sick of this bullshit.
This is a human factors issue. Look, the form factor for tablets and phones is just wrong for most *work*. WORK. Remember that stuff? Sure, I can watch videos or play games on my phone, but I'm not going to be editing a spreadsheet, editing an engineering drawing, or typing a novel on my tablet any time soon. Servers and portables with keyboards are going to be around until we get practically useful direct neural I/O.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This makes the assumption that the network and remote data store is always available. That is not the case. It is simply not there in many locations, slow in others, unreliable even where it does exist. I want my data in my 'hands'. I backup to my home and business servers. I don't want to be backing up or remotely using my data over someone else's network or storage.
An often ignored issue is that the police, and bad guys, can simply take your data if it is stored in the cloud. You have no data security over the net, even with encryption. The courts have said the police don't need warrants for that but they do need a warrant to invade your house. Keep your data at home.
The reason is has not happened yet is sheer momentum, and the basic fact of human nature that people resist change.
It's not that at all, at least, not in this case.
A lot of foolish people assume that "new" means that everything else automatically becomes "old", and hence "bad". Now, in some cases, this is one hundred percent true, but such examples are the exception, not the rule.
We still wear cotton, several thousand years after it was first used, and a hundred years after synthetic fibres were invented. We have more sheep here in Australia -- raised mostly for wool -- than people! Is this simply "sheer momentum" or perhaps a conservative tendency in the general population? I think not: my grandparents were born decades after the invention of synthetic fibres! Electricity has been around for about as long, but I still cook with gas... you know... fire. Like the cavemen did.
When I was starting out in computing, I looked at mainframes with the same cocky arrogance that you have. "Pfft... dinosaurs," I thought. I assumed that they'd only be around until their technical specialists retired, and then we'd all be using Linux or Windows pizza-box servers exclusively. This year, I replaced a redundant I/O module in a blade system that was dedicated to serving applications via terminal services to thin terminals. At that point, I suddenly realized that I had become one of those mainframe engineers too. Sure, the technology I was using was not called that, but it's practically the same thing.
I like my iPad and my iPhone, I really do. I like having the Internet in my pocket. I like reading the morning paper at breakfast on the tablet. But the fingerprint smudges on the screens are a perpetual irritation, the keyboards are unusable for significant data entry, and even the iPad -- one of the largest tablets on the market -- is way too small to properly enjoy a HD movie. Sure, I could plug the tablet into a docking station, attach a a full-sized monitor, a proper keyboard, a mouse, and some speakers. However, at at that point, the tablet will be effectively indistinguishable from a low-powered luggable PC. Just like with mainframes, we're back to square one.
Similarly, the whole concept of simplified touch user interfaces will last right up until the point when people will want to get some work done with them instead of just consuming content. Feature creep will set in, and the tablet operating systems will have extras added onto them until they are just as complex as PC operating systems are today. Nothing will have actually changed.
It's worth pointing out that laptops still haven't replaced desktop PCs entirely, despite being nothing more than mobile versions PCs. So then, why would you expect something that is only slightly more mobile (try carrying an iPad in your pocket) but nowhere near full-featured to completely replace the PC?
I groan every time I see a reference to Win32 as the "legacy" API on the Microsoft.com site. That's just... ugh... no! It's not legacy! It's the current desktop API, and WinRT is not a replacement. Of course, thanks to the myopic vision of Microsoft's upper management, they're going to drop all Win32 development, and focus exclusively on WinRT. We're going to have another lost decade of computing, just like we did after IE6 stopped web development dead because some dumbass thought that .NET and XAML was going to replace HTML on the web!
Believe me, this isn't conservatism on my part. I've been ahead of the curve of technology adoption by at least half a decade my whole life. For example, in the last couple of years I've read something like a hundred books electronically and only a handful on paper. Chances are that soon I'll donate all of my remaining paper books to the local library, because I just don't need them any more. I know it's hard to go back in a user's comment history, but I was making comments here about e-books replacing paper years before the mainstream opinio
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user. Run any microsoft app, like Office, and you are doubly screwed. If a person wanted to be legal, this setup would cost a fortune, because you are really getting into Windows Server territory.
I've set up a desktop Linux (Ubuntu) with FreeNX. Holy cow, we are just a Linux-based Quickbook client away from taking over the corporate world. All the licensing issues go right out the er....Window(s).
I could easily see a Linux version of your plan taking over the world, though. No matter how powerful PCs get, Microsoft isn't going to just let one copy of Windows work where it used to take 4.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The post-PC world will look much like the post-paper office does... how long ago did they predict the paperless office again?
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user.
Citation on that please.
Windows has the capability to have multiple users, with multiple passwords, built right in. I can't remember the last home PC I've had that hasn't had a separate user profile for every person in the house (plus guest). And they've never tried to extract more money out of me. Why would they put that option in there if it were illegal?
Back when I lived with my parents, there was one desktop computer shared by four people. Maybe this is a "youth of today" attitude- where it is now practically unthinkable that people might not have at least one computer each...
Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s
This argument is forced.
The most obvious example would be all-electronic television, commercially viable no later than 1939, but deployment held back by World War Two.
Take a closer look at the history of the movies:
The Birth of a Nation began filming in 1914 and pioneered such camera techniques as the use of panoramic long shots, the iris effects, still-shots, night photography, panning camera shots, and a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras made to look like thousands. It also contains many new artistic techniques, such as color tinting for dramatic purposes, building up the plot to an exciting climax, dramatizing history alongside fiction, and featuring its own musical score written for an orchestra.
The film cost $112,000 (the equivalent of $2.41 million in 2010). A ticket to the film cost a record $2 (equal to $45.95 today).
The Birth of a Nation
I have a copy of a contemporary essay from The Saturday Evening Post which explored the social changes that could already be seen at work in the success of the nickelodeon theaters of a decade earlier --- as the writer summed it up, the nickel theater was a night out anyone could afford and a national classroom for our new immigrant population.
My next pc will be a smartphone.
If this prediction comes true, it's the ultimate lock-in for data. People complained in the 90s and 00s about how MS Office files weren't readable in other programs. Well, you could still back them up and distribute them as you wished, and MS couldn't take them away if they didn't like you. Text, image and video files on the desktop can be opened in different applications depending on the need, while in the cloud it's at the mercy of the provider. If the present is anything to go by, most providers aren't going to have public APIs for interoperability.
(There are of course advantages to thin clients, which are harder to implement in "fat" clients, and even harder in a P2P setup, but the lock-in problem is pretty fundamental)
Yes. I just built a terminal server at work. 5 legal remote desktop users = 450.00 - 500.00 dollars. And that is not counting the OS, which must be a Server OS, or the hardware. You are easily looking at 1500.00 - 2000.00 for a legal 5 user remote desktop.
Make a copy of Office available on the Remote Desktop...need a license for each user. You sneeze right, you need a license for that.
There are several dirt cheap Citrix-like products: Check out http://www.thinstuff.com/
Now do a search to see if that product is legal. Well no, they are not. If you don't have a Remote Desktop User CAL for each user, it's in violation of Windows EULA. I just spent a lot of time researching this stuff.
You can even run thinstuff on XP. Works great. I tested it. Is it legal. No. On XP, you can't put in Remote Desktop CALs, so there is no way to make it legal, even if you used thingstuff and attempted to purchase legal CALs.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality