Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

concealment points out a rebuttal from PCWorld of the increasingly common claims that we live in a post-PC world. "It's an intriguing proposition, but don't count on mobile devices killing off your desktop PC any time soon. While mobile gear is certainly convenient when you're trying to conduct business on the go, it's nowhere near as convenient as a desktop when you're trying to complete serious work in an office environment. Sure, your phone, tablet or even laptop might conveniently fit in your pocket or backpack, but all these devices are fraught with compromises, whether it's computing power, screen size, or, well, a really expensive price tag."

Comments

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Re:Yes

[gman003]

Indeed, this is a rare counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

Re:Yes

[jxander]

Basically this, with a few reasons

As long as desktop hardware is cheaper than comparable laptop/portable hardware, it will have a niche. You can hook up all the docking stations and external monitors in the world to your tablet, but a desktop rig will have more storage, more memory, more GHz and better longevity (if only due to superior air flow) at a lower cost.

That's not even getting into the ability to customize and replace hardware without a dozen proprietary bits.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

These claims of a post-PC world seem based on the fact that the vast majority of the population is fine with the kind of walled-garden content consumption found on nearly all phones and tablets and has no need for the sort of content creation you have to sit down at a workstation for. OK, I'll stipulate to that premise.
But if the shift of that group of people away from the desktop PC means we live in a post-PC world, then what did we have before that group of people started using PCs?
They pretty much didn't come along until we had mainstream GUIs, the World Wide Web, and ubiquitous digital media--all of which came considerably after "the desktop PC".
Their departure won't kill the PC any more than their arrival created it.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we'll actually approach the point where you only have one "computer" and that what you carry is the user interface and cache. The distinction between a seperate desktop computer and tablet will become one of thickness and cache. Email and calendar are already there; my wife doesn't care wether she's using the destktop, laptop, tablet or phone; they all just sort of mostly work.

Re:Yes

[dgatwood]

Kill, no. Mortally wound, perhaps. Think about it this way: right now, you can get cheap PCs for a few hundred bucks. Adjusted for inflation, computers in the mid-1980s ranged from about $3000-$6000 in today's dollars. Now think back to high school economics class and remember the discussion of economies of scale, then think about how few parts from modern tablets are actually used in a typical desktop computer.

Re:Yes

[jellomizer]

At some point maybe. But I see the PC (including Laptops) to migrate dominance positions to follow the same patterns at the Mainframe (which are still not dead yet)

1970's Mainframe was absolute King No PC to speak of.
1980's Mainframe is king PC was a toy with a few Business applications
1990's Mainframe is considered dieing PC's began to dominate small and midsize companies reducing the needs to big expensive mainframes. Used for Big companies.
2000's Mainframes are still there, PC's are now indespensable and used by most businesses (the PC based servers has taken over the mainframe for most new task) Ultra Mobile Devices are appearing but mostly a toy with a few Business applications.
2010's Mainframes are limited to a few Old Legacy Stuff (too expensive to move off) or some very detailed performance related stuff (Modern Mainframes) Mobile devices get more ingrained into the business and every day use....

Now I see the PC moving away from the personal computer and to more of a high performance workstation usage. This will used mainly by software developers, and engineers for CAD and other high performance work. while the Mobile stuff will dominate every man Computing. As for the mainframe more old legacy systems will go away but still have a market for the really high performance needs.

Re:Yes

[jedidiah]

When I was in high school you could buy a non-PC home computer for $300 and it ran circles around a kludge clone. The idea that you need a Lemming driven PC mentality in order to have sufficient economy of scale for home computing is just a Lemming fantasy.

Re:Yes

[poetmatt]

No part of mainframes has *anything* to do with desktops. It does not correlate in any fashion.

Desktops will always be in use in some fashion - miniaturizing technology only goes so far - so it's not a question of expense alone but also thermals and physical space. Since people tend to have to work on hardware you can't have it all be the size of a mobile SOC to do so or it becomes prohibitive. That's not just a "workstation" situation, but an "All PC's" situation.

Re:Yes

[n30na]

I would counter that while you're right in the short term, they say forever. It seems unlikely that the current desktop form factor will persist recognizably forever, since eventually we'll probably just have implants showing us whatever we want via thought, and all sorts of fancy stuff like that.

But it'll probably persist for quite a while yet.

Re:Yes

[maxwell demon]

Actually it's been quite a while since I've last seen a desktop PC. The computers which nowadays are called "desktop PCs" are actually towers.

Re:Yes

[hairyfeet]

That is pretty much the end of the thread right there, congrats AC.

The only thing I would add is all the morons that are hyping "post PC" simply don't understand the consumer or the market. As someone who has been building units since the 386 and still has no problems moving systems i think I can shed some light on their misconception.

You see people aren't "replacing" anything, they are ADDING to what they already have. What happened was the OEMs and MSFT got spoiled by a little blip in computing history called "the MHz war" where everyone pretty much had no choice but to replace all their systems every 3 years because the hardware was jumping in MHz so often and software following the hardware that a 2 year old desktop would be struggling to run the latest software. in one 4 year period I went from 600Mhz-900MHz-1.4Ghz-2.3Ghz, that's a pretty damned big leap in such a short period of time.

But when Intel and AMD hit the thermal wall they decided to switch to cores, and that was a game changer. You see building software to take advantage of a faster single thread? not that hard, trying to build software to take advantage of multiple threads? VERY hard and there are many tasks that simply can't be broken into multiple threads. Now lets look at what I was selling on the low end FIVE years ago...Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of DDR 2 RAM and a 300-500Gb HDD. Now is they ANY task your average user does that won't run well on those specs? heck i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on Phenom I X3s and is quite happy with the performance. Even the gamers don't need to upgrade near as often, my boys and I are doing great on a couple of Phenom II X6s and a quad and with HD4850s we blow through any game we want to play and those chips are...what? 4 years old now?

The PC isn't going anywhere, in fact I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have at least 2 if not more. Hell my LOL customer Ms Pipkin has an Athlon triple for the kids, a Phenom II quad for her main system and a little AMD netbook for when all her family is over or she just wants to sit on her couch and chat. The problem is the OEMs got spoiled on the MHz war and didn't see that these insanely cheap triples and quads were just crazy overpowered compared to the kind of work average users like Ms Pipkin do, that's all. Hell I used to replace my system every year and a half like clockwork but now I have an X6 with 8Gb of RAM, the above HD4850, and 3Tb of hard drive space...what more could I possibly need? So X86 isn't going anywhere, my iPad and iPhone customers still have desktops and laptops, they simply use their iDevices on the couch or bed. All that is happening is that PCs won't be replaced until they die, even the gamers will be looking at only swapping every 6 or 7 years, simply because we have got insane amounts of power. this is why I supplement my business with HTPCs and home theater setups, still plenty of uses for an X86 system people haven't considered yet, you just have to show them the advantages.

Re:Yes

[HPHatecraft]

The Desktop PC is kind of like a Highlander, actually.

Re:Yes

[The Grim Reefer]

At some point maybe. But I see the PC (including Laptops) to migrate dominance positions to follow the same patterns at the Mainframe (which are still not dead yet)

1970's Mainframe was absolute King No PC to speak of. 1980's Mainframe is king PC was a toy with a few Business applications 1990's Mainframe is considered dieing PC's began to dominate small and midsize companies reducing the needs to big expensive mainframes. Used for Big companies. 2000's Mainframes are still there, PC's are now indespensable and used by most businesses (the PC based servers has taken over the mainframe for most new task) Ultra Mobile Devices are appearing but mostly a toy with a few Business applications. 2010's Mainframes are limited to a few Old Legacy Stuff (too expensive to move off) or some very detailed performance related stuff (Modern Mainframes) Mobile devices get more ingrained into the business and every day use....

Now I see the PC moving away from the personal computer and to more of a high performance workstation usage. This will used mainly by software developers, and engineers for CAD and other high performance work. while the Mobile stuff will dominate every man Computing. As for the mainframe more old legacy systems will go away but still have a market for the really high performance needs.

The difference is that home users never had mainframes in their house, nor had any reason to do so. Of course most home users really don't do anything that requires more power than a somewhat high end computer from 10 years ago. Operating systems have become more bloated and some programs have too. But in reality I would guess that most people surf the web and email each other. Which is a good reason why all of these new devices are doing so well. Most people don't need a lot of power for what they use a computer for. Obviously there are exceptions. Hard core gamers on the other hand are probably going to want the most high powered system they can get. I always used to laugh at stock traders in the 90's and early 2000's. They would buy screaming fast computers in the belief that they could somehow trade faster on them.

I agree that people who do a lot of video editing, CAD and such will still want workstations. But I still don't think that desktops are going to go away as fast as or in a similar fashion to mainframes. Most people never had a mainframe.

I do some video editing and play FPS on occasion. My fastest computer is a Phenom X4 9950 with a couple of SSD and SCSI drives, a decent VGA, etc that I got a few years ago. I prefer to do more on it than my laptop I have for work. It's an i7, but due to it being a laptop, it is slower at most things than my old desktop. Granted I could get a faster processor to cut video encoding times down. But I also have a X2 6400 that I also use from time to time to encode video at the same time. I also tend to sit at a desk when I use a computer. I'm also not that interested in using it when I'm on my couch. It'll be interesting to see how things go, but I think it's going to be a good many years until the PC is dead.

Re:Yes

[TemperedAlchemist]

No.

Entropy will do its work >:D

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not if Apple and Microsoft have their way and Linux continues to be relegated to the sidelines of the consumer desktop market. Walled gardens will be the death of the PC.

Re:Yes

[AlphaWolf_HK]

One day they woke it up, so it could live forever. It's such a shame the same will never happen to you.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Denial - the first stage of grief :)

Re:Yes

[CanHasDIY]

No part of mainframes has *anything* to do with desktops. It does not correlate in any fashion.

Desktops will always be in use in some fashion - miniaturizing technology only goes so far - so it's not a question of expense alone but also thermals and physical space. Since people tend to have to work on hardware you can't have it all be the size of a mobile SOC to do so or it becomes prohibitive. That's not just a "workstation" situation, but an "All PC's" situation.

Right; some tasks are better done with a full keyboard and a screen bigger than the palm of your hand.

Even if it's solely in a "docking station"* type capacity, desktop workstations will be around for as long as computers are.


* Speculative Future Vision (patent pending) engaged: Come home from work, the computer in your pocket communicates wirelessly with the display/peripherals in the room you're currently occupying, and activates them accordingly. Kind of like Synergy, but with a full suite of features and, of course, fine location awareness.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Going on 4 years now that I haven't replaced my machine, and I was like you replacing every ~18 months.

i7-920, not even overclocked (yet)

I did, however, just buy a new GPU (upgrade from GTX275 to a GTX660ti), but I could have easily lived without TBH.

Re:Yes

[dgatwood]

Even those $300 non-PC computers would be about $639 in today's dollars, which is still more than six times what the cheapest non-Windows netbooks cost today. And they weren't nearly as capable as PCs. Most of the cost savings (except for the CPU) came from ingenious hacks that reduced the cost of the hardware at the expense of maintainability and the ability to upgrade the design later. For example:

• Commodore used software emulation instead of a real UART, which limited them to about 2400 baud and made them particularly challenging if the baud rate on the remote device was off just a bit.
• The Apple II's NTSC output wasn't actually NTSC compliant (read "can't be safely recorded or broadcast") and remained so through at least the IIe. When they added PAL support, it required different graphics hardware.

Now you can certainly argue that those things didn't matter, and for most people, you'd be right, but the same argument that says that the $300 computer was equal to the $2,000 computer in the 1980s applies to touchscreen tablets versus desktop computers today.

Also, the only reason prices aren't $100k per CPU today is because of economies of scale. Today, one person could design a basic Verilog model of a 6502-compatible chip in a matter of days or single-digit weeks, and even at the time, it probably took double-digit engineer years. Today, an Intel chip takes engineer-millennia. The R&D involved is orders of magnitude greater, and therefore, the number of chips they have to sell just to break even is also much, much greater.

Re:Yes

[Kittenman]

... 2010's Mainframes are limited to a few Old Legacy Stuff (too expensive to move off) or some very detailed performance related stuff (Modern Mainframes) Mobile devices get more ingrained into the business and every day use....

Now I see the PC moving away from the personal computer and to more of a high performance workstation usage. This will used mainly by software developers, and engineers for CAD and other high performance work. while the Mobile stuff will dominate every man Computing. As for the mainframe more old legacy systems will go away but still have a market for the really high performance needs.

I make my living off Mainframes, you insensitive clod!

Re:Yes

[Sir_Sri]

I think this is it. A house will have a computer the same way it has a furnace or a water heater or electrical box. Things will plug into that computer, and there will be technicians to maintain it. It should be reasonably reliable.

Now the different with computers is of course the flexible capacity requirement (you don't need 4 furnaces for 4 people) but probably homes with have a blade rack type setup where you plug in as many computers as you need, up to 8 or 16 or something, and any more will have a niche case market. You'll have a jack in your wall for monitors which bluetooth or usb or similar to your input devices if you need them. And your wireless devices will talk to your house server seamlessly.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainframes were the cloud computers of there day. Everyone who was to access a computer back in the day had a terminal which gave them access to the mainframe. These "terminals" sat on people's "desktops" hell there where even some mobile terminals back in the day. Desktops started to replace the terminals for some workers and soon enough started replacing all the terminals. So go to talk to people who's desktop computer was a terminal to the mainframe at the home office. It was a slow process but eventual the roll of the terminal on the desk was completely replaced by desktop computers. Soon, enough desktop based servers attempted to take over mainframes last job. However the mainframe has some or rather had some huge advantages over PC based servers. Though with robust cloud and virtual machine based solutions the mainframe might finally be over.

Re:Yes

[multi io]

That is all.

"Forever" is a long time though.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

my wife doesn't care wether she's using the destktop, laptop, tablet or phone; they all just sort of mostly work.

This is because, like many people, your wife is not using the computer, but rather using a few services that are now computerized. For those people, yes the devices will likely merge. For people who actually use the computer the idea that the recent phone/tablet fad is the future is ludicrous.

Re:Yes

[gman003]

Eh, it'll last at least as long as my lifetime, barring the sudden spike in longevity all the Singularity folk keep yammering on about. Which is effectively forever as far as I, personally, am concerned.

Re:Yes

[AnttiV]

While I'm in general agreeing with you, I must say your numbers/specs are still *way* off. X3/X4 Phenoms with 4Gb RAM and 500Gb was not *nearly* "low-end" five years ago. Vista was released five years ago. Requirements for that was 1GHz 32bit CPU, 1Gb RAM, 40Gb HDD and a 128Mb video card. "Low-end" was machines that did NOT meet those requirements (I was selling systems at that point. Sold many that didn't meet those). 4Gb RAM isn't "low-end" even NOW. (Or then we have entirely different meaning for "low-end".)

Also, "even the gamers will be looking at only swapping every 6 or 7 years" will probably never be true. 6 or 7 years is forever in computer terms and gamers (no matter how casual you are, if you classify yourself as a "gamer") WILL replace their systems far, FAR more frequently. Even I - that myself consider not being a high-end gamer and only replace my graphics card only once per 4-5 generations - replace my system far more frequently. Remember that last "4 generations" of graphics card was about 2-3 years (about). I just replaced my GTX285 few weeks ago and it was only a tad older than 2 years. My Q9650 CPU is pushing four years and it probably has less than a year life in it in my use. (I play quite a lot, but I don't necessarily play the newest games and play only for fun.) I have yet to meet a person that consider himself a "gamer" that DOESN'T replace their desktops once in 5 years. (At least parts of it.)

I'd agree that if one buys a top-end machine NOW, it will only "need" replacement in, perhaps, five years. But after 6-7? It won't be in "gamer-hands" anymore. Perhaps as a "backup" machine, or a machine that is capable of running most games/reduced settings that you've setup somewhere else (other room, summer house, neighbor's, etc..)

Now, "normal users".. THAT I agree 100%. Those girl-next-door, grannies and uncles, cousins and co-workers who do not play. They don't need to replace their machines until those literally don't start up anymore. I know people who use (daily) computers that came with XP (10 years ago) or even Win98. Heck, a friend of mine used a Mac LC II (that's about 20 years ago) up until 2011 (when the PSU died) as her work-computer (she writes).

I don't think "desktop" is going away anytime soon. Augmented, perhaps. Changed, probably. But gone? No. I'd believe the death of laptops sooner than desktops (tablets/other mobile devices are replacing laptops more than desktops).

It's quite simple, really, when you think about it. "The Desktop" will live exactly as long as companies are producing games for it. After that, it'll take a few declining years for it to fade out, but that's basically it. It is (and always have been) games - and thus companies who create games and gamers who play them - that make or break a success of any computing product.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on how old you are.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignorance - the only stage of idiocy :)

Re:Yes

[PlusFiveTroll]

Anyone that had a 386 desktop then is likely to have a desktop now. Desktops aren't going away for power users and businesses in any time frame that needs worrying about either.

That said there are a lot of casual users that don't need the power of a desktop and are served well enough by a tablet. I have had a lot of customers replace (by attrition) their desktop machines with 17" laptops and a smaller amount get rid of an old desktop and go with an iPad. What we are starting to see in the market now is a shakeout of people that have a PC but don't really need one.

>All that is happening is that PCs won't be replaced until they die,

This right here is what manufactures are afraid of. Selling a device you make almost no profit on, that lasts a decade, and is reliable is the antithesis of the computer market up till recently. This is why all the big names are looking for a place in the commonly replaced and commonly broken tablet market. Maybe this whole post-PC thing is manufactures trying to scare people away from low profit sectors in to higher profit sectors.

Re:Yes

[Kjella]

As long as desktop hardware is cheaper than comparable laptop/portable hardware, it will have a niche. You can hook up all the docking stations and external monitors in the world to your tablet, but a desktop rig will have more storage, more memory, more GHz and better longevity (if only due to superior air flow) at a lower cost.

Ah, but desktops don't have the advantage of shipping volume, laptops do by about a 2:1 advantage. What does that mean? That Intel sets their development goals to make Haswell a better mobile CPU, not particularly a desktop GPU. Since you mention RAM as an example, I find 2x8GB desktop memory for 734 NOK (includes VAT, so please don't compare to US prices) and 2x8GB laptop memory (SO-DIMMs) for 749 NOK. What's the price advantage? Zero. Sure you can get 32/64GB RAM in a desktop that you can't in a laptop but that's a niche workstation market. You can get up to a 1TB SSD in a 2.5" laptop form factor and it doesn't get cheaper using a 3.5" desktop form factor, you just add empty space.

Sure a few things are better, you can't turn a laptop into a 10TB storage server and for a fully decked out 100W processor + 2x300W graphics cards in CF/SLI there's no laptop replacement. But those uses aren't enough to sustain the market share and the less people use desktops, the less support and higher premiums it gets. To cut costs you're pretty soon getting a laptop core in a desktop shell, which again cuts the "true" desktop market of dedicated desktop parts even more. I wouldn't not be so sure that desktop parts will always remain cheaper.

That's not even getting into the ability to customize and replace hardware without a dozen proprietary bits.

Ah, let me bring you back to the 80s, when the motherboard really was the motherboard full of daughter cards. Your network and sound and disk controllers and so on all had their own card, so you could mix and match and replace parts. I could actually go even further back, when people fixed solders and replaced chips on the individual cards too. What happened? Integration. More and more got on the motherboard and if the motherboard broke, get a new one. All-in-one volume and convenience beat flexibility and repair ability. Laptops are the same, volume and convenience of an integrated laptop means the market doesn't care or at least not enough.

Re:Yes

[Requiem18th]

No, actually, the *desktop* PC must pass, if simply because we will have better wearable/integrated computers in the future. The real question is, are those computers going to be user-controlled, general purpose computers? Here is hoping yes, they will, but the way governments are clamping down on individual freedoms in the name of the bottom lines of the entertrainment oligopoly and blasphemy laws, and considering how easily are so many users buying into walled gardens I think this is for once a legitimate question.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Forever is a very long time. I find it very unlikely that desktop computers as we know them will be around in a billion years.

From the song Flux by The Covenant:

Like torches in the aeon flow
even suns flicker and die
forgotten as the ages grow.
Eternity is not for you.

Re:Yes

[viperidaenz]

If 300W graphics cards aren't enough to sustain a market, why do they still exist and why are they still in development? Why do Intel keep producing "Extreme Edition" CPU's?
Why do they still make 3.5" hard drives? There is no common components between a 2.5 and 3.5" drive, why would manufacturers keep spending money developing hard drives that won't even fit in a laptop?

Because there is a significant market for it. There always has been and always will be a large market just above the "current consumer compromise"

Re:Yes

[fiannaFailMan]

Since I got an iPhone my laptop never moved from my desk for about a year. That's when it dawned on me that I was paying a very high price for the mobility of the laptop. When the laptop was no longer up to the tasks I needed it for, I got an iMac.

Re:Yes

[tolkienfan]

The PC industry started with a few tinkerers.
Then PCs became useful to regular folk.
These regular folk have never cared whether they could write software or hack the hardware, or even open the box.
They are moving on... and into a walled garden.

Few of us have anything to say about it, and we are a tiny minority.

Re:Yes

[slashmydots]

That is all.

You're damn right! Finally someone with a brain and a grasp on reality wrote an article. I can out-type anyone on my desktop 2:1, outperform any mobile device on games, general video performance, hard drive I/O, archive decompression, ANYTHING! Anyone trying to run their entire life off a tablet or something is a crazy person (or has a very boring, simple life).

Re:Yes

[bored]

Over time, this has turned out to be the best use of the tablet devices I have.

Once I started running RDP clients on them, it became apparent that many things were just better over RDP that the local tablet apps. Surfing the web for example is significantly better/faster using a windows PC. Even without the add blocking plugins.

Frequently that it takes 1/2 to 1 second to render pages on an iPAD2 that render instantly over RDP. Same with an android device or the touchpad I have..

Having this integrated environment is nice in other ways, I can sit down and do the heavy lifting with three monitors, keyboard and mouse, while being able to stand up walk away and do lightweight things (reading email) on the tablet without having to sync anything.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

2010's Mainframes are limited to a few Old Legacy Stuff (too expensive to move off) or some very detailed performance related stuff (Modern Mainframes) Mobile devices get more ingrained into the business and every day use....

Mainframe use has been going up, not down. They're taking over again.

Re:Yes

[viperidaenz]

So you just need to lop its head off with a sword to gain its power?

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

It'll be just like your stereo, or your tv. Everthing a mass of cables running in and out of a single receiver, which you haven't needed to upgrade since 1965. HDMI is for suckers, and surround sound is a mere fad. 525 lines of resolution is all that's needed,

Re:Yes

[gmhowell]

I make my living off Mainframes, you insensitive clod!

And some people make their living on restoring Model T Fords. Doesn't mean many people want to buy one at the showroom today or that it's a field ripe for growth.

Re:Yes

[jbengt]

I believe that GP was talking about PCs, as in Personal Computers, not "PC"s as in "IBM Compatible Personal Computers".

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as desktop hardware is cheaper than comparable laptop/portable hardware, it will have a niche. You can hook up all the docking stations and external monitors in the world to your tablet, but a desktop rig will have more storage, more memory, more GHz and better longevity (if only due to superior air flow) at a lower cost.

An iPod Touch is cheaper than any Desktop PC I have ever seen, and you it has HDMI out, and is plenty fast enough and has plenty of RAM for the kind of stuff everyday people do with their desktop.

It can show facebook and play music and stream 1080p video and play games (if someone ever makes a bluetooth controller for it). What more does a typical person need?

The only reason typical consumers need a desktop PC instead of using a $200 Android or iOS device is the software. The hardware is already sorted.

Re:Yes

[Idbar]

If not called PC, perhaps called something else. But the new technologies always come in discrete cards, to allow small step shifting towards it.

Without discrete cards, who's going to first test fast network cards, new video cards, that can be later embedded into newer, smaller devices? I think death of the PC would pretty much reduce the customer's options out there, hardware customization, but as I said, most importantly development.

Re:Yes

[jbolden]

I installed 8" hard drives in the mid 1990s. There was still a market on the high end. Sure there may be 3.5" drives for another decade or two but they will be an ever decreasing percentage of the market, then an ever decreasing percentage of storage in bytes, then finally a decreasing gross revenue.

Re:Yes

[jbolden]

Low end computers in the 1980s were cheap. The Sinclair ZX81 was $100 even back in 1981. The Vic20 which was a home computer was $300 and that was the mainstream home computer. The market was more diverse back then from a price perspective. You had people buying workstations like the IRIS for $50k for semi-personal use.

Re:Yes

[marcosdumay]

That docking station is a possibility, in that it has a non-zero chance of happening... But I wouldn't count on it either.

Part of the revolution we are living at the IT world is that computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. Now, why again would you want to have your home appliances useless when your mobile is not on reach? If it is to save money, forget it, because you won't.

Re:Yes

[Yunzil]

The PC isn't going anywhere, in fact I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have at least 2 if not more.

Hi, I'm Yunzil. Nice to meet you! I have exactly one PC. Unless you count the old ones sitting in the closet gathering dust.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm... no... "forever" is a very long time.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

The cheapest iPod Touch is $300. I can buy a desktop or netbook that is much more powerful and infinitely more capable for $250-$275.

Re:Yes

[flyingsquid]

Will This Counterexample Mean The End of Betteridge's Law of Headlines???

Read on for our exclusive take on this issue!

Re:Yes

[ultranova]

No, actually, the *desktop* PC must pass, if simply because we will have better wearable/integrated computers in the future.

But every advance these wearable/integrated computers get will get rolled back to my desktop PC, which, because it is connected to both mains power and to wired network and has a decent keyboard and display, will forever remain more powerful than the battery/wireless/size-limited wearable/integrated computer.

Your argument is as silly as claiming that the era of artillery will pass just because we have better pistols now, and for the same reason.

Re:Yes

[viperidaenz]

The advantage of a 3.5" mechanical hard drive over 2.5" is twice the usable surface area per platter and room to fit 5 of them in a single drive. The common 9.5mm high 2.5" drives only fit 2 platters. Thats why you see 1TB 2.5" drives and 3TB 3.5" drives.
Technology is developed and built on the larger 3.5" platters. It is then further improved and put on 2.5".

Re:Yes

[tompaulco]

I agree with you. I have a laptop and a desktop. I use the laptop at work because my desktop is too large to lug it to work and it is mine so IT wouldn't support it. At home, I much prefer my desktop. It has more RAM, a 10 times faster CPU, a 1000 times better graphics card, 3 times the screen space even including the second monitor at work, 4 times the disk space, and I could just keep going on. It is just a much better user experience. Plus I could go and upgrade memory, throw in a hard drive, plug in a faster CPU, or just build a whole new system from the motherboard up with the same power supply and case. Compared to my desktop, a laptop is like an etch-a-sketch that won't even erase when you shake it.
Sadly, the assumption that the desktop is going away and people are moving towards "smart" devices has led some manufacturers of decent laptops (like Dell) to stop offering the 17" laptop screen on some of their product lines. This is horrible for people who actually USE these machines for work and are not just watching videos or playing Angry Birds.

Re:Yes

[thoth]

The PC isn't going anywhere, in fact I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have at least 2 if not more.

I'll counter your worthless anecdote with mine: me. I have 3 notebooks (1 MacBookPro, 1 Sager Midern, 1 System 76), and 1 tablet (Nexus 7). No desktops.

Re:Yes

[Yvanhoe]

And the desktop PCs will become again what they were 20 years ago : a tool for programmers and tinkerers. The price will probably go up also.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, even tho eventually the 'desktop pc' will just be a monitor that stays at your desk. or the desk itself! Connected to everything else you own.

Re:Yes

[chrismcb]

In the pre PC world the vast majority of the population was just fine with a "walled garden" television or radio. So yes in a post PC world consumers will be happy consuming in a "walled garden"

Re:Yes

[jbolden]

Well I have a 1.5T 2.5" drive that's over a year old. But yes I understand. However all those arguments would apply equally well to the original 14" drives. Traditionally as we have moved from 14 to 8 to 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 the technology advances have shifted to the smaller drive with large production and that has led to faster speeds and lower cost per byte. I'd assume most technology innovations in the pipeline are already going for 2.5". SSD and hybrids strike me as the likely thing to push 3.5" into niches.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

That's parallelism for you.

Re:Yes

[Ol Olsoc]

Basically this, with a few reasons

As long as desktop hardware is cheaper than comparable laptop/portable hardware, it will have a niche. You can hook up all the docking stations and external monitors in the world to your tablet, but a desktop rig will have more storage, more memory, more GHz and better longevity (if only due to superior air flow) at a lower cost.

As I stare across at my 27 inch imac screen, I am reminded of some things that a lot of the "end of the PC" people don't think of.

If you are doing anything other than the rather numdane things, a pad is not that great.

If you are doing anything other than really mundane things, a smartphone is a joke

The form factor of a laptop is fine for some things, but cramped.

So we get back to that nice big screen. It's going to need to be there for serious work. If the screen is going to be there, might as well have the advantages that more real estate on the inside gives me.

And on emore thing the largely youg people are going to find out. Presbyopia! As my eyes have aged, that bigger screen real estate has become increasingly appreciated.

Re:Yes

[BanHammor]

Thinking you pay a price too big for mobility, and then getting a freaking iMac? Duuuude.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

my LOL customer Ms Pipkin has an Athlon triple

JEFFREY, IS THAT YOU??? WHAT IS LOL

-MS PIPKIN

Re:Yes

[bloodhawk]

The mainframe isn't decreasing in popularity and being marginalised at all. Just today's mainframes run on highend intel/AMD/Power based architectures. If you had said z/OS is becoming marginalised then yes, but the hardware side has merely transformed. Have you seen the number of virtual servers and size of some of the systems in place today? those are mainframes, managed in a similar fashion with just a different label. PC's will be the same, they may transform somewhat, perhaps they will be docking stations where you plug a phone size device into, but they will still be PC's in everything but name.

Re:Yes

[davester666]

It's called "The Rapture", and you won't be part of it, you godless motherfucker.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I look at some rooted android tablets (or unlocked from the get-go), and think, well, maybe not!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I refuse to be Raptured? Insofar as anyone can figure, there is no Internet in Heaven.

Re:Yes

[Chrisq]

That is all.

Or maybe no. Forever is a long time

Re:Yes

[bingoUV]

But every advance these wearable/integrated computers get will get rolled back to my desktop PC

Not if the "advance" is patented.

Re:Yes

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...forget about the TLB bug friend? When it came out the Barcelona chips had the TLB bug AMD basically dumped them on the market at crazy cheap prices. I was getting triple core kits for $175 and quads for $199 which mean i could sell them for $399-$450 and make myself a nice profit while giving the customer an insane amount of power. Hell Starmicro sells the Barcelona triples starting at just $53 so it really wasn't hard to make triple and quad systems for cheap. doesn't really matter WHAT Vista specs were BTW, its not like people were selling 1Ghz Vista systems. just FYI but I just didn't sell Vista at all, I either gave them XP32 if it was 3Gb or XP64 if it was 4Gb, had too many bugs when i was testing Vista for my taste.

And if you sold crappy systems? Well that's a shame, don't know what that has to do with what I was selling in MY shop. I keep one or two off lease systems for the poor folks but I don't count those as they are used. When i talk about what I sold on the low end I'm talking about the new systems, not some junker Billy Bob traded in. I can't believe you actually sold something that didn't even meet Vista Basic specs, if anything slower than 2.2GHz came into my shop i stripped any good parts and punt kicked it into the trash. Now on the poor boxes i won't accept less than a 2.8GHz P4, have a 1.7GHz I'm gonna be chunking in the morning as a matter of fact.

And as for gamers keeping 6 to 7 years? What game out now or due out soon is even gonna stress a 1035T, much less a Core i7? All you have to do is swap out the card and you are golden. hell I'm playing on a 4 year old HD4850 and it just chews through new games with lots of bling and never drops below 30FPS on my 1600x900 monitor. in 6 to 8 months the HD6850s will drop below $70 (I have to buy 3 at a time so me and the boys stay on equal footing) and we'll be able to get another 3 years easy peasy. Games have been more GPU than CPU bound for several years now and if the rumors are true about the PS4 specs then the next gen frankly won't be as good as I have now, at least with 2 out of 3 systems.

So I really don't see what your issue is, except maybe you are confusing "gamers" with "Must win teh benches LOL" geeks that use their PC as an ePeen types. Hell it was only last year when my boys Pentium Ds could no longer run the latest games and even then it was only a handful like LA Noire and Just Cause II. We've just about reached as far as its gonna go as far as games friend, we are already looking at companies putting out less graphically intensive games because the huge costs to make a AAA game means they just can't afford to cut too many people out of the market. Hell Crysis 2 only requires an Athlon X2 at 2.2GHz for the love of Pete!

But you are right about Joe average, I finally had to just build my GF a new system and say "Here hon,merry Xmas, now get rid of the dino because i'm tired of fixing it!" because she was still hanging onto a 3GHz P4. Know what my most popular build is for those types? One of the E350 SFF systems. Its quiet, gives them dual cores and hardware accelerated flash, its cheap and solid as a rock. for those that just do basic tasks its a great little system. of course being a geek I built my GF an Athlon X3, I figure if she is gonna hang onto it for years it might as well be a system i enjoy working on LOL!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

What is non-personal computer home computer?

Re:Yes

[LQ]

Indeed, this is a rare counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

If the headline had been "Is the Desktop PC Doomed?" then how would Betteridge work?

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of these claims also come from cloud computing proponents who gain the most from the death of the PC.

Re:Yes

[Half-pint HAL]

A Lemming-driven PC mentality? But Lemmings was ported to all the major platforms of the day. Personally, if Lemmings was going to drive the uptake of any platform, it wasn't the PC: the 2-player mode was only available on the Amiga. Now excuse me -- I must write to Sony demanding that they license the Lemmings franchise to gog.com . I want to play Lemmings!!!!!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I have refused to work on a laptop time after time, year after year at my work.
Everytime, my workstation has kicked butt with the laptops other people have recieved (for the same price, or more then my workstation costs).

Since I have this track record, I can say that:
You have gotten more for the money using a Workstation over a Laptop, if not the portability with a laptop is required.

There is always people telling me that this is the year laptops will be faster then my workstation.

Re:Yes

[knorthern knight]

> An iPod Touch is cheaper than any Desktop PC I have ever seen, and you it has HDMI out, and is
> plenty fast enough and has plenty of RAM for the kind of stuff everyday people do with their desktop.

> It can show facebook and play music and stream 1080p video and play games (if someone
> ever makes a bluetooth controller for it). What more does a typical person need?

Howsabout a decent *PHYSICAL KEYBOARD*? Tablets are OK for playing back movies/music, and reading Fecesbook. But when you want to type something longer than a tweet or a Fecesbook status message, it gets really painful really fast on a touchscreen device.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Gamers are ubiquitious and power gamers are not rare anymore. There will be enough of a market of people who want overengineered hardware to maintain a PC market. And that is just gamers. Plenty of professionals are going to need the best of what technology can provide beyond the merely portable if only because it will give them a huge productivity advantage over those who try to use the mundane. That means more money for them for a small investment in less portable hardware.

You can't tell me that people will not choose the money. People do not in real life work that way.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not even a niche. It is market advantage due to being more productive/profit when portability is not a factor. Due to that it will not go away. You can always pack more power, more cooling, more raw hardware (ram, cpu, gpu, storage, bus), more data throughput, more input devices, etc etc etc into a physically bigger box.

When portability doesn't matter the bigger box WILL win. Because we have to work in offices and use computers for production purposes, non portable computers will not be going away anytime soon.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Circle: Mainframe = Centralized Apps; PC = Look at all my Apps; VDI = Centralized Apps. Maybe we should never have tossed the Mainframe?

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Eloquent and Accurate.

Re:Yes

[N0Man74]

...for a fully decked out 100W processor + 2x300W graphics cards in CF/SLI there's no laptop replacement. But those uses aren't enough to sustain the market share and the less people use desktops, the less support and higher premiums it gets.

The people that are setting aside desktop PCs for laptops, tablets, and phones were not the same people buying those high end systems anyway. Performance systems were always a niche, and I don't see that particular niche going away anytime soon.

Re:Yes

[flirno]

As long as we live in a society based on competition (games, companies, not just keeping up with the Jones's but exceeding them) there will be a large portion of the population, a market demographic if you will, who will want to leverage to their advantage desktop computers for the advantages they proffer (in business, in recreation, in government) .

It is not as if magically portable devices have technology advances and desktops do not. They both advance simultaneously. So while portable device advance so do desktops. The more we can pack into a small device means the more we can pack into a big (less mobile) device. There is no catching up in real time here. Specific uses to which one device or another are applied may evolve over time but that is just one facet of a bigger Venn Diagram.

Re:Yes

[CanHasDIY]

Now, why again would you want to have your home appliances useless when your mobile is not on reach?

No one ever said they would be; use a little imagination, man.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that had a 386 desktop then is likely to have a desktop now

Two words. Docking station.

The entire corporate world is moving towards laptops and docking stations. They want a 'mobile workforce' and people want to work from home.

The desktop while it will still be around, it is going to be a rare thing. The PC? Not going away anytime soon. I have no less than 7 PC's. ALL mobile, 3 that fit in my hand. I came up thru the 386 path btw...

A PC is a 'personal computer'. It is for me and does my work. Tablets are nothing more than PC's without a keyboard and mouse.

The netbook craze a couple of years ago shows what people want. They want portable and light. The ipad fits both and adds a layer of 'easy to get software'.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Artillery brings dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, get that future tech worked out, and show's over, Synergy.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as Anon so as not to lose Modpoints; The reason that 8" drives and so on were abolished for smaller ones was twofold, firstly Desktops started allocating smaller space to HDD, secondly, there was the variation in speed between the innermost part of the platter and the outermost, which could easily be circumvented with using multiple smaller discs with a better yield at the manufacturing stage. 3.5" drives have been a sweet spot for a long time with good reason, they are more reliable, easier to make and still small enough to fit 8-12 in a standard desktop case. In the 8" days we didn't have the problem of quantum effects, but now we most certainly do, so if the size of HDDs was to permanently go down to 2.5", it would return back up to 3.5" as soon as we start encountering quantum problems that we cannot seem to get around, hopefully at the double digit Terabyte level, although likely much sooner.

Re:Yes

[calzones]

After all these millennia, we still use hammers and wedges and still apply thought to "paper" using ink. We like to use our hands to act on other things in order to produce an effect of our imaginations for the world. We like to do this at work benches and desks, etc.

I expect any tool worth exploiting effectively will continue to exist for the rest of humankind's existence as we know it.

Will it become Minority Report style? Perhaps. But that is still arguably a desktop. Could it just be your mobile device wirelessly projecting it's computing capacity onto some larger "desktop"-oriented ergonomically different interfaces? Perhaps, but that is still arguably a desktop.

In other words, it doesn't have to look like a box with a typewriter and a screen to be a desktop pc. The act of working on digital crap at a desk work station will live for a very long long time.

Re:Yes

[jbolden]

I agree with both points, except for there was a pass through of 5.25 hard disk drives. The change to 3.5 came more from small form factor desktops and portables (i.e. the predecessors to laptops) i.e. smaller cases. I agree we have serious quantum effects but quantum effects and density issues were problems with microprocessors for many years while miniaturization still happened. I think it is likely they will be overcome in the 3.5 -> 2.5 migration, assuming there isn't a HDD -> SSD migration which eliminates 2.5 drives.

Re:Yes

[fiannaFailMan]

More money spent on iMac = less money spent on PC support and less time spent pulling my hair out to get the damn thing working.

Re:Yes

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh..Thoth, buddy? I said PC and NOT desktop. A PC has traditionally been ANY X86 unit that runs either Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux, and frankly from the units you named all you bought was three desktops in a laptop form factor, that's all.

Now personally I never understood WTF people were thinking with the whole "desktop replacement laptop" fad, as laptop parts will ALWAYS be slower, more expensive, and practically impossible to upgrade so you just have to toss instead, but if that makes you happy whatever. Personally I tell my customers to spend as little as possible on the laptop and use the difference on a desktop as I've found whether it costs $400 or $1000 a laptop will typically last 3-5 years and then disintegrate whereas once the desktop has been upgraded as far as it'll go and been found lacking it can always been moved to a secondary role, such as HTPC, kitchen appliance, file server, media tank, whatever.

But I do have to say I do find it funny that you quoted the part where I didn't say desktops to claim that I said desktops..okay, whatever floats your boat pal.

Re:Yes

[doccus]

I think a better question is will "old style flatscreen TVs" live forever..as desktop PCs and Macs, whatever, are becoming all around entertainment units and workhorses both.. And I sure get no fun typing on these "virtual" Keyboards' ...the one I am using now with my iMac has a 1/8 " travel. I got rid of that horrible flat one that macs come with.. And really, can any of you say you'd EVER prefer using an ipad or notebook for graphics work? I use my Mac for Mmusic, TV, Graphics, as a DAW, and just general puttering around at home, where I don't have to squint at a tiny screen or rub all over the screen of a tablet, which always seems to be at a poor angle for a touchscreen interface.. No, despite the fact that we always hear the desktop's eulogy sounded out, i think they all jumped the gun on that one...

Re:Yes

[KingBenny]

mhm, the only ones i hear it prediciting are CEO's trying to push their decade-old 'new' technology. I wouldnt give up my home diy-box for the world. I don't know how much a touchscreen keyboard costs if it has to work just as fast and efficient as an old cheap plastic one either. I don't see the box dying out any time soon really

Re:Yes

[BevanFindlay]

"525 lines of resolution is all that's needed"? That's myopic in at least two senses of the word...

Re:Yes

[crutchy]

apparently in heaven you don't need porn because of the overabundance of hot naked horny angels you can experience porn forever... where do i sign up for this so called "rapture"?

Re:Yes

[crutchy]

in the future we won't have desks

Re:Yes

[jellomizer]

Mainframes is one of the few technologies we can see a life cycle trend with. I hear many of the same arguments when the mainframes were going out. Mainframes were very well balanced systems, 10 year old mainframes can still kick the butt of modern PC based Servers for some tasks.

Now with mobile devices with different UI interfaces we just cannot imagine not using our PC's

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I would gladly take 5½" HDD if it would fit 8TB on it. Price of that to 150-200 and I would buy two for RAID and third for remote backup disk.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainframes aren't legacy. Most large corporations still run mainframes for core business. There are economies that come from having everything in the one place, and "problems" that come from not doing so. Plus they have reliability and up-time you wouldn't believe. Don't write them off any time soon.

Re:Yes

[AbominousSalad]

I disagree. In my experience, more people figure out how to tap some kind of creativity with a PC as each year goes by.The apps get easier to create with, and the generation who grew up with PCs are having kids now - those kids will be encouraged to follow their creative and intellectual dreams with the PC as their best tool.

So, I disagree only because the PC is still coming very much into its own. Honestly I believe (really do) that this anti-PC rhetoric is a terrified response from ill-meaning shepherds, freaked out because books like Being Digital proved true.

Re:Yes

[Requiem18th]

But the era of artillery DID pass since the aircraft carrier. Artillery is limited by line of sight so aircraft carriers dominate the seas now. And then again if carriers are ever supperceded by something it would be better submarines. Until we get into space wars when it will be artillery all the way again.

Things change.

I did consider the argument that desktop computers will always be more powerful than portables because, like you say, they'll have better network access and power sources.

BUT

That does not mean you will have to have a computer *at your desk*, it simply means that you need a server. Either a home server or a remote one hosted by some provider likely sponsored with ads.

The argument that you need a conventional display and keyboard *is silly*. We already have mind reading input devices although they are in their infancy. Unless a catastrophe sets back civilization we will have completelly integrated input/output devices in 50-60 years tops. They'll link with your pocket computer which will be smaller than an ipad yet more powerful than your current desktop equipment.

Of course, your server at home will be several orders of magnitude more awesome and *maybe* even nearly sentient, but it's not going to be at your desk but in a closet or basement.

Re:Yes

[tolkienfan]

I agree to a degree. Many more people are using PCs to be creative.
But further and further from the nuts and volts.
Many are content to write some html and javascript, or maybe some Java or whatever. But all those things can be done in a walled garden.
It may not seem it, when you hang with this crowd, but few people in the general public would care if new PCs prevented the installation of an additional OS.

It really depends what you think of as a PC. They are changing, and it's not all good.

Re:Yes

[AbominousSalad]

I wasn't even thinking of programmers. I was thinking of visual artists, musicians, writers, etc. For every hacker who wants to make a garage project video game, there are musicians and artists who need Fruityloops and the Gimp in order to help produce. Then there are the scholarly types who are attracted to research... their work is less dependent on a PC, but only to the extent that they're unaware of apps that can make their job easier.

Re:Yes

[tolkienfan]

All of those things can be done in a walled garden.

Re:Yes

[AbominousSalad]

Sure, if the young prodigy, and everybody they know, is a moron who either thinks a graphing calculator is the ideal way for little Jimmy to learn to be a musician/programmer/whatever, or if they and everybody they know has never heard of a PC before. People act as if the things will be un-invented. The new tool is going to sell faster because it's the one nobody has yet - it's new.

The very possibility for people - the Slashdot audience - every last one of which knows we will be buying (or building) between 1-4 new PCs in the next 10 years - to say that PCs are going to bamf their way out of history, is hyperbole on the scale of an asteroid panic caused by shoving a telescope up one's neighbor's asses.

Are these guys kidding?

[mcgrew]

Nothing lives forever. The PC will die eventually... but not any time soon. I can see fewer and fewer desktops in the home, by notebooks and tablets, but there's little you can do in an office that doesn't demand a PC.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[ericloewe]

Workstations (i.e. where anything important or revenue-generating happens) will always be desktops in one way or another.

What will probably happen is that your average office desktop will get smaller. We're already seeing this, with some desktops using laptop parts, some going as far as using the same power brick as the company's laptop's (HP does this, others too, I suppose).

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[xtal]

Talk to someone that works in a technical capacity. You'll take my 3 30" monitors from me over my dead body..

Now, will they go back to the minicomputer era pricing? Probably.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[partyguerrilla]

Take the iMac for instance; it uses NOTHING but laptop parts.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take the iMac for instance; it uses NOTHING but laptop parts.

Because everyone knows that 27-inch screens and 3.5" hard disk drives are laptop parts ...

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Antipater]

Nothing lives forever.

Yes, now. At first we were kept in balance by birth rate. Few of us were ever born, less than a handful each year. Then, I think, the Universe decided that to appreciate life, for there to be change and growth, life had to be short. So the generations that followed us grew old and infirm, and died. But those of us who were first went on. We discovered the Vorlons and the Shadows when they were infant races and nourished them, helped them and all the other races you call the First Ones. In time most of them died, or passed beyond the rim to whatever lies in the darkness between galaxies. We've lived too long, seen too much. To live on as we have is to leave behind joy and love and companionship, because we know it to be transitory, of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion; it may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably won't even last until the heat death of the Universe.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[CubicleZombie]

I work in a technical capacity, have 2 big nerdy flatscreens, and my favorite keyboard and mouse. But it's not a desktop PC. It's a laptop in a docking station. That's how it's done in every gig I've had in recent years. I have identical setups in cubicles in two different cities and my home and only the laptop and I have to move between them.

The #1 problem with the arrangement is the requirement for whole disk encryption on the company laptop. It really slows it down. Performance is always worse on a laptop but it's dismal with disk encryption.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing lives forever. You mean like fire, stairs, toilets, weight-based clocks, all sorts of garments, all sort of farming tools, tables, chairs, axes, knives. Sometimes we invent things that evolve, but ultimately will be recognizable for millennia. Who knows if a keyboard, box and monitor will be around as a oft-used set of tools for virtually forever.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Hatta]

there's little you can do in an office that doesn't demand a PC.

Anything you can do in an office with a PC, you can do with a VM with a thin client.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[jedidiah]

Cramming a 3.5 inch drive into a monitor without making the monitor larger?

They must be using some form of Gallifreyan dimensional warping technology there.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[gman003]

I thought it used 2.5" hard drives. Or am I thinking of the Mini?

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[jedidiah]

...and mainframes. Let us not forget mainframes that are supposed to be long dead by now.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take the iMac for instance; it uses NOTHING but laptop parts.

Because everyone knows that 27-inch screens and 3.5" hard disk drives are laptop parts ...

And that custom made system board, the large fans, the processor, the keyboard, the mouse, and other things.

Yup... all laptop parts...

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[grimm20000]

+1.. That is what we use at work. I even have a dual screen. So much easier to manage for the IT Department.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[jedidiah]

> Anything you can do in an office with a PC, you can do with a VM with a thin client.

At which point you've got sufficient computing to just compute locally. Chances are your "terminal" isn't going to be any cheaper either. This stuff has been done and tried and abandoned once or twice already by now.

It's like 3D movies...

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're already seeing this, with some desktops using laptop parts, some going as far as using the same power brick as the company's laptop's

Lenovo kind of does this with their small form factor desktops, only the external power supply is incredibly large.

Relevant captcha: "adaptor"

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Farmer Tim]

Definitely 3.5", unless ifixit employs small children.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Fishchip]

What he's getting at, and other manufacturers' all-in-ones do the same thing, is it's more or less a laptop with a giant screen. Laptop-grade hard drive, SODIMM for memory, mobile versions of graphics chipsets. Makes sense, really, they're cramming a computer into a thin space just like a laptop, so why not use technology already developed for this purpose?

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[garyoa1]

Well it is nothing more than a laptop on a stand with no cover. However they do use full size drives. I know, I had to replace mine. I found it quite interesting that they used duct tape and glue to hold it together. (imac 20 intel)

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[AvitarX]

I just purchased a "famous brands" desktop with an e-450.

Technically a slight upgrade from my last desktop (my laptops are better, but I use the desktop as a home server.

most office workers could use it as their work machine (with sufficient ram), these are being sold for far less than the cheapest laptop.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "desktop" will eventually split into two pieces:

The first is the keyboard/mouse/monitor, which would end up becoming more of a thin client.

The second will be a server. It would have some of the following:

1: Think OnLive, but on the LAN. The high-power rendering is handled on the server's GPUs, then streamed back.

2: SAN functionality. Since machines are starting to get 10Gb on the motherboards, having iSCSI, or even FCoE isn't too farfetched. This also lets the SAN check the virtual drives for viruses or other suspicious stuff, which can easily hide on a client OS. Of course, snapshots and backups become easier, as well as encryption.

3: An ability to work as a private cloud, allowing one to access data or sync their device from anywhere there is a reasonably fast Internet connection.

4: A virtual machine server. VM1 holds the banking stuff, VM2 has the WoW instance, VM3 holds what the kids use for browsing, VM4 is for the pr0n. All separate from each other, with images on a deduplicated filesystem that does occasional snapshots.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

The #1 problem with the arrangement is the requirement for whole disk encryption on the company laptop. It really slows it down. Performance is always worse on a laptop but it's dismal with disk encryption.

Your company has shitty laptops, shitty encryption software, or both.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

The iMac uses a standard 3.5" hard drive. The latest model also has room for an additional 2.5" SSD.

SO-DIMMs are used in other desktop form factors too, not just all in ones (take a look at book-sized systems). However, laptop sized memory cards aren't necessarily slower than the 240-pin desktop counterparts..

The CPU is still desktop grade as well.

Saying the iMac is mostly laptop components is either a lie or a poor assumption.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[PlusFiveTroll]

Other then ignoring all the benefits of centralized management of course. Err, and ignoring the insane speeds of SSD arrays coupled with deduplication. Err, and the fact processors aren't getting faster but getting more cores that normally sit idle on a desktop. Err, and ignoring much faster network speeds and inexpensive switches. You're right it's exactly like it was in the past. Which is why VDI and terminal servers are a disappearing market.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have a future as a writer. Call your book 50 Shades of Brown.
 
Captcha: smeared

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be using some form of Gallifreyan dimensional warping technology there.

No need to. The Reality Distortion Field takes care of the problem just fine.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[gmhowell]

I found it quite interesting that they used duct tape and glue to hold it together. (imac 20 intel)

I think you mean 'Speed Tape' and 'high performance polymer adhesive'.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[chrismcb]

You are right. The desktop won't live forever. Consumers will use it less, but producers will need it for some time. As better input devices come into existence, and better voice recognition, the keyboard will go away. Once the keyboard goes away the last big piece is a monitor.
I don't think the "google" type glasses are on the horizon, so producers will still need a large display area. Just not necessarily a monitor.
Sometime in the near future your smart phone (err smart small device) will be powerful enough to drive a producers workstation. That will probably happen first. Then the keyboard will disappear. Eventually the large monitor will as well.
The desktop will die. But it won't be replaced by a table/smart phone alone. At least not for the producers.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Billly Gates]

The PC wont die. Until I can type full page papers at 70 WPM in a word processor as good as Word, can multitask in human terms as I can see and easily switch between apps on the screen, have a start menu, and have software that doesn't suck that I will switch.

The PC won over the mainframe because of one important thing. Graphics! When the mainframe guys laughed at us we showed them a bar graph from Lotus 123 and asked if their 380 could do this? The answer was no.

What does the tablet do? Nothing ...

It costs less. That is about it.

I am nto switching until I have a real keyboard, start menu, and decent software, and a good screen. Other than that it is an expensive toy and not an important asset.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[gronofer]

Yeah, it's amazing how short the typical person's timeframe is when using a word like "forever". I really can't see PCs surviving the heat death of the Universe, since there would be no way to power them (and I don't think hypothetical alternative universes should count, since they would have a completely independent time scale).

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, did you hear of such a little tweak, called AES-NI? I'm doing it on a bunch of laptops and it really helps the performance (I'm typing this on a full-disk-encrypted Linux system with an SSD, which uses AES-NI, and without it performance (on an SSD!) was pretty much nonexistent).

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before enabling bitlocker on my company laptop, I asked the company to replace the HD with an SSD. Even encrypted, everything is so much faster now.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[dywolf]

The pc will not die until you see virtual reality interfaces not only becomes the norm, but realistic.

we're talking Minority Report (movie) style, wearable computers, full voice interaction (that is real, and not silly/embarrassing)so you can dictate rather than type your essays to your computer like you would a stenographer/secratary, etc.

and even then, I doubt it.

I dont believe pc's will get super expensive either. its not likes pc's have to use XX hardware and tablets/phones have to use YY. if that happens and pc's get expensive it wont take long at all until someone breaks the price barrier by making a desktop with YY parts.

and there wont be software lockout cause there are ALWAYS people who will resist being told what they can and cant do on a system/OS, and they will hack it, and you'll have linux or win7, or whatever else you want, running on it in a short time.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[mcgrew]

The PC won over the mainframe because of one important thing. Graphics!

PCs didn't have graphics until about 1990, and they were mostly gaming PCs. Almost every office had at least one by then, and as now there were few mainframes. I had a monochrome Hercules graphics card in my home PC around 1987 (IBM XT bought used, running DOS 3.3), EGA was just starting. I imagine there were a few graphics-capable PCs in offices then, but not in ours. Graphics didn't reach most offices until Windows 95 came out.

If graphics would have killed the mainframe, Apple would be the dominant platform, because they had graphics since around 1980. The IIe I used at the library then had excellent graphics.

The network is what "killed" the mainframe, which isn't really dead. Big companies, governments, universities all still have mainframes and were always the market for them. Until networks, the only was to share data was sneakernet or the terminal.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[History's Coming To]

{pedantry} Show me an example of a clock that's not ultimately weight based....well, technically mass based, but all masses are in gravitational fields, so...

Even atomic clocks rely on transitions in Caesium which involve a little E=mc^2, and therefore a change in mass. {/pedantry}

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[mcgrew]

I was working on a Dell for a friend last month, one thing wrong was the CD had quit working. Opening it up I was pretty surprised to see that it was essentially a laptop inside a desktop case -- everything in it from the motherboard to the disks were laptop parts.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[RespekMyAthorati]

Nothing lives forever.

Yes, now. At first we were kept in balance by birth rate. Few of us were ever born, less than a handful each year. Then, I think, the Universe decided that to appreciate life, for there to be change and growth, life had to be short. So the generations that followed us grew old and infirm, and died. But those of us who were first went on. We discovered the Vorlons and the Shadows when they were infant races and nourished them, helped them and all the other races you call the First Ones. In time most of them died, or passed beyond the rim to whatever lies in the darkness between galaxies. We've lived too long, seen too much. To live on as we have is to leave behind joy and love and companionship, because we know it to be transitory, of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion; it may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.

As of 10:40 AM PST Wednesday, this is marked "Troll". Who in the hell decided that?
You may not enjoy reading this, but that doesn't make it a troll. The guy responsible should be marked "Troll Modder".

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Glasswire]

The #1 problem with the arrangement is the requirement for whole disk encryption on the company laptop. It really slows it down. Performance is always worse on a laptop but it's dismal with disk encryption.

Your company has shitty laptops, shitty encryption software, or both.

Yes, get disk-encryption software that supports the AES-NI hardware based crypto that are built into the last 3 generations of Intel Core processors (if you're driving two screens off your laptop, you probably have one of these). Should make your drive encryption much less painful.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Billly Gates]

The XT had graphics. They were just green. You can do bar charts, play Xaxzon (spelling), tetris, and even run some mouse drive things in ugly monochrome. A mainframe can only output text. Not even a barchart. That is what brought the PC in as well as cheap software development tools.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

PC has already died few decades ago when PC-clones overthrown it from its market position and IBM was forced to abandon PC architecture control because Compaq reverse engineered PC BIOS for others.

IBM never got success to post-PC personal computers like PC Jr and IBM AT or IBM XT. PC was just "stolen" by PC-clone manufacturers and they developed PC to be totally different than what PC was.

PC is just 1981-1987 period personal computer what brought whole personal computer market under one standard of CPU architecture.

PC has been dead for decades and people still continue mistake PC to personal computer defitinion.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how wide my lap is, you insensitive clod.

Re:Are these guys kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

By my count it's been done 5 times.

Hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

We're going to see tablets that connect to monitors and keyboards. You work on them at your desk, then move around with them like a laptop. Or at least that's what I dream of. The iPad is close but not quite what I'm looking for. I think the MS's surface might fit the bill.

Re:Hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows? No one has had a chance to use one yet.

I suppose you'll be getting a Lumia 920 as well.

Looks like the shills are posting anonymously now

Re:Hybrid

[grenadeh]

That's completely retarded. So what you're saying is we're going to replace laptops, the superior device, with a crappy device, used to to do the EXACT same things the EXACT same way using slightly different connectors? Oh wait nevermind, tablets can't do the same things. Desktops will never be replaced. Laptops are simply not reliable and not repairable or modifiable by most people, even computer technicians who know how to replace laptop components would not willingly do so on their own.

Re:Hybrid

[dgatwood]

Laptops are simply not reliable and not repairable or modifiable by most people....

Maybe you should try spending more than $300 on a laptop next time. I just replaced my previous laptop after more than five years of reliable service, except for one dead hard drive, which was trivial to replace. And the only reason I replaced the machine at all is that it is an anachronism that won't run some modern software....

Re:Hybrid

[grenadeh]

Not really. Even a thousands dollar laptop is still a laptop, and still garbage. You must not be familiar with hardware if you think a laptop is anywhere as stable when it comes to heat management or airflow as a desktop.

Re:Hybrid

[grenadeh]

Also, look anachronism up. Improper usage. It makes perfect sense for a 5 year old laptop to not run modern software.

Re:Hybrid

[mcgrew]

We're going to see tablets that connect to monitors and keyboards.

At which point it's no longer a tablet, it's a PC.

Re:Hybrid

[PhotoJim]

With the exception of bleeding-edge games, if you upgrade the RAM in a 5-year-old machine you can probably run almost everything modern. It's just that people often don't do this.

My desktop is five years old - it's a Core 2 Quad with 4 GB of RAM (all it can take) and it still runs fine. It runs Vista and Ubuntu and would happily run Win7 if I bothered to upgrade it, but I've not yet had a need.

Re:Hybrid

[dgatwood]

Proper operating systems spin up fans and, if necessary, throttle the CPU to keep things well within a safe range. Any computer that crashes under load was probably assembled wrong.

Re:Hybrid

[bfree]

So a tablet with a hdmi port and usb is a PC? Even when it's not connected to the monitor and keyboard/mouse?

The main problem with the present crop of tablets for doing this is the software it is running, which is probably driven by the obsession with capacitive multi-touch. There's also the problem of Apple requiring you to cludge around with third party adapters to get usb or hdmi (and I've no idea if they handle a mouse) and Google's Nexus is even more useless in terms of ports. There are still plenty of tablets though with usb-host and hdmi.

If just any mobile gpu manufacturer would provide decent Free drivers so people could get hacking we really could see the year of Linux on the ?Desktop? (or at least a year of it before one or more of Apple/MS/Google adopt the best concepts and claim they invented it). I suppose it's possible MS might already be aiming for this sort of usage with their forthcoming Windows tablets but until they are actually released (in volume) who knows.

Re:Hybrid

[tepples]

So a tablet with a hdmi port and usb is a PC?

To me, a tablet is a personal computer as long as its owner isn't locked into the operating system publisher's own repository. So Windows 8 (x86) tablets are obviously PCs, and Android tablets are PCs, but iPad and Windows RT tablets aren't.

Re:Hybrid

[AnttiV]

Why? How does that magically alter the device? Assuming by "PC" you mean "desktop", because tablet's literally ARE PCs (personal computers) already...

If you connect a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse to a Galaxy Tab, why is it suddenly a desktop? Is a laptop computer a desktop if you attach a wireless mouse to it? Where is the line?

If you have a desktop computer, use it to connect and control (via WiFi) the tablet, does the tablet become a desktop? Because at that moment, you are using the tablet with keyboard, mouse and an external monitor? (You can setup this so that the tablet need not be in the same room, or - heck - even same country at all.)

Is it the monitor? If you connect your phone to a TV via HDMI, does the phone become a desktop? Is a laptop computer connected to a secondary monitor a desktop? Where do we draw the line?

What is the iMac? It's only "a monitor" that you use via two wireless (probably) devices.

Personally, I draw the line in that point where you can or can not pick up the actual computer (and use it on the go). (iMac is a desktop because you can't use it anywhere you want.)

For many, many people a tablet that connects to an external monitor (via any means) and has a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard is enough of a computer that they can use it as their daily driver. They read emails and surf facebook. Perfectly doable with a tablet. If you need to be somewhere else, you just pick up the small slate and go. Does it change from desktop to tablet when you pick it up from the table?

If a Tablet with a keyboard, mouse and monitor is a desktop computer, where is the line between these devices? At which point does the tablet become a desktop?

Re:Hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows? No one has had a chance to use one yet.

He didn't say it will, he said it might, i see you're unfamiliar with the English language, idiot.

Looks like the shills are posting anonymously now

Whoa a Microsoft might do something, yeah that suggesting could only be made by a shill. Go back to your mom's basement and work on losing that virginity, neckbeard.

Re:Hybrid

[couchslug]

Laptops don't use standard form-factors, which deliberate choice ensures planned obsolescence and renders them easily "beyond economical repair" if they break.

They are carefully designed to suck as much as practical while being fast and shiny.

I'm fine with fixing laptops, but it requires Ebay organ donors to be worth doing. I buy Thinkpads for their longevity and ease of repair.

Re:Hybrid

[viperidaenz]

You must not be familiar with hardware if you don't realise mobile CPU's consume much less power and produce much less heat than their desktop counterparts. Event my 7 year old laptop has good thermal design with a single fan providing adequate cooling for both the CPU and GPU via a couple of heat pipes and a relatively large heatsink.

I do admit though, there are a bunch of laptop designed by engineers with their head in the sand who put the air intake on the bottom where it is usually covered by what ever the laptop is placed on. Perhaps they invested in the companies that produce "laptop cooling trays"...

Re:Hybrid

[viperidaenz]

The linux kernel already runs the majority of smartphones and a big chunk of tablets.

I pronounce 2011/2012 Year of the Linux Mobile Device

Re:Hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

... because tablet's literally ARE PCs (personal computers) already...

= "... because tablet is literally ARE PCs (personal computers) already..."

What are ARE PCs?

Re:Hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see it that way, It's still a tablet, it just has peripherals on it. I don't consider plugging a laptop into a doc morphing it into a PC. The difference? I can take the laptop out of the dock and it still works. If I unplug the PC, it doesn't.

What about UPS you ask? Well, if I duct tape a UPS and a monitor to my PC, it doesn't make it a laptop. Is an all-in-one with a battery a laptop? It's really a problem of defining the distinctions of the class of computer.

Now on the other hand, a laptop is just a PC that's an all-in-one with a battery, and a tablet is just a more compact version of that with a touch screen. A smart phone is the same thing except even smaller and with cellular. My car has a computer in it, but I don't call it a PC.

I can see a time where everything is on what we would now call a tablet, and you dock it into what resembles a desktop, but it's really just some stand alone screens. That's when it becomes dangerous for Microsoft. That's why they came out with a Tablet that runs traditional Windows apps. When people start wanting that, Apple will be at a disadvantage.

Re:Hybrid

[grumbel]

We're going to see tablets that connect to monitors and keyboards.

I doubt it. While such devices already exist, I don't think they will see any wide adoption anytime soon. I think the real future is all cloud/network based. I mean why would you ever want to limit your data storage to a single device when instead you could just store the data on the network? Every picture you make gets automatically uploaded and becomes accessible to any other device you have. Wanna see your picture on the TV? Just flip on the TV make some funky gesture to zap it over there. No need to connect things with wires, as it's all wireless. Even your applications will probably all be in the cloud and when HTML5/Javascript isn't enough for an app, you'll live stream a native x86 app over the network right onto your ARM tablet, OnLive-style.

For those concerned with privacy, there will probably be a private-cloud, which is simply some network storage and CPU that you stick into some corner of your room. And with some help of IPv6 that storage will probably be accessible from anywhere in the world.

I fully expect that we move away from the idea that devices are the place where you store your data. The device you hold in your hand will be nothing more then an interface to interact with data stored somewhere else. Also you won't only have a tablet, you will have multiple and every screen you have will be able to interact with the cloud, you TV, your desktop, your picture frame, your table and even your fridge.

Re:Hybrid

[mjwx]

We're going to see tablets that connect to monitors and keyboards.

At which point it's no longer a tablet, it's a PC.

Exactly.

Whats the difference between a tablet and a cheap PC with an LCD screen.

But I have a slightly different prediction, rather than becoming a PC, tablets will become a peripheral to the PC. Basically Windows 9 will have a "move to tablet" feature where you can move whatever your doing into a connected Android tablet (possibly even a WP8 tablet for the 3 or 4 people who bought them).

Also we'll probably see cheap LCD panels integrated into desktop cases or even keyboards in the near future.

Re:Hybrid

[mcgrew]

Basically Windows 9 will have a "move to tablet" feature where you can move whatever your doing into a connected Android tablet (possibly even a WP8 tablet for the 3 or 4 people who bought them).

You could do that now over wifi and/or bluetooth. It wouldn't be any different than my tabletless setup at home -- two PCs cabled into a router, a notebook connecting with wifi, and a bluetooth dongle on the Linux PC to get pictures and sound from the phone. It didn't take anything to set up and works flawlessly. (The notebook is W7, one tower XP and the other tower kubuntu).

Re:Hybrid

[History's Coming To]

It makes perfect sense for a 5 year old laptop to not run modern software.

If you're in sales, marketing or lazy programming, then yes. If you're a user then no, but hey, the users don't have marketing diplomas, so what do they know?

Re:Hybrid

[Zero__Kelvin]

" Is a laptop computer a desktop if you attach a wireless mouse to it? Where is the line?"

There isn't one. It's wireless, you dope!

Re:Hybrid

[Zero__Kelvin]

"What are ARE PCs?"

Save that shit for International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Re:Hybrid

[bemymonkey]

"So a tablet with a hdmi port and usb is a PC?"

If it runs a proper (i.e. not for smartphones) operating system, sure. All those Windows 8 tablets that are coming along will be full-blown PCs - restricted only by their crappy specs (RAM, mainly... 2GB for the Cloverfield Atom SOC based devices and 4GB for the i5 based devices). Still waiting for the announcement of a Windows 8 tablet with i3/i5/i7, 8-16GB of RAM and a 90+Wh battery case... now THAT I would buy.

But yeah, they're all PCs. They'll all run a full-blown desktop OS...

Re:Hybrid

[bemymonkey]

The line is the software. Full blown Linux, Windows or OS X? PC. Android, iOS or similar? Toy.

And i say this as an absolute die hard Android fan who owns an Android phone with HDMI out and bluetooth input devices, and uses them regularly...

Re:Hybrid

[backwardsposter]

I don't think he is saying that a tablet isn't a PC. In fact, it technically is even without a monitor. I assume you meant in that case it's a desktop PC, which I think was his point as well.

Since you said PC and not just desktop PC I was thinking, when will we move past personal computers? I haven't given much thought, but it has to be when the computer isn't personal anymore, but your account is. Would people ever be comfortable using any dumb public terminal but carrying tiny drives or authentication sticks with you? I forsee this as an alternative to personal computing, but no sure how likely it actually is. If everything were to move to the cloud you could just plug in something you carry around on your keyring. Or storage gets to be so small then that's what you carry with you.

Not sure what could change what you use at home at all. Unless at home you just have the keyboard+monitor and a fast wireless connection and you connect to the fast super cloud. That wouldn't be a PC.

Not sure any of these are happening anytime soon....or at all. But what is a non-personal computer?

Re:Hybrid

[mjwx]

Basically Windows 9 will have a "move to tablet" feature where you can move whatever your doing into a connected Android tablet (possibly even a WP8 tablet for the 3 or 4 people who bought them).

You could do that now over wifi and/or bluetooth. It wouldn't be any different than my tabletless setup at home -- two PCs cabled into a router, a notebook connecting with wifi, and a bluetooth dongle on the Linux PC to get pictures and sound from the phone. It didn't take anything to set up and works flawlessly. (The notebook is W7, one tower XP and the other tower kubuntu).

Quite true, but I meant integrated into the UI out of the box (I.E. in the right click context menu).

Re:Hybrid

[bingoUV]

Why do you need to complicate things so much? If you need (something like) the top of a desk to use your machine, it is a "desktop machine". Simple.

For mouse, you need around 1 foot x 1foot flat surface. The top of a desk provides (more than) that, most other surfaces don't. So yeah, adding a mouse makes it a 1 square foot desk top device.

Keyboard, you can manage on your lap, but the top of a desk is much more convenient. Again, a semi-desktop device.

External monitor / TV : typically too large to keep anywhere but the top of a desk, so yes, connecting via HDMI to an external monitor / TV makes the device a desktop device.

Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Dan East]

I don't see how. Typically, a fan or the PSU goes out first, and given enough time the HDD begins to fail.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[jedidiah]

...or some component might become rediculously obsolete before the rest of the machine. That's why desktop PCs can live forever. You can just plop in a new NIC or network card.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[__aaeihw9960]

That was my first thought these things will never go away, because they're just so freaking easy to upgrade on the cheap - when asked about the last time I purchased a new PC, my answer is 2003. This is because that is the last time I purchased an entirely new rig. Between 2003 and the present, though, I have replaced everything in the machine, along with the cables, screen and case.

Is it an entirely new pc? Well, that depends. At one time, or another, each of these pieces interacted with a piece of the original machine, or a piece that interacted with a piece of the original machine (I think the most is 2 generations of that). David Wong was brilliant when he wrote about the axe paradox. I have no answer to that question.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many desktop PCs even allow you to replace the CPU or processor!

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those can be replaced. But you might end up with the 300 year old axe paradox eventually.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Anonymous Coward]

NIC or network card? Either one?!?~

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Anonymous Coward]

by PCU, I'm assuming you mean CPU?

central processing unit.

Processor.

gg

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant exactly what he said - PSU as in Power Supply Unit, one of the things that fail most often in a computer. Don't know where you got "PCU" from.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[viperidaenz]

But how do you upgrade when they change the damn socket every a new one comes out.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[green1]

This has always been my problem. Last time I decided my computer needed more RAM I found out that it was now special order to get the appropriate type of RAM for the motherboard I had, but that was ok, because I had maxed out the motherboard already, So I needed a new motherboard, and new motherboards weren't compatible with my existing processor, video card, hard drives, power supply, or case.
Similar experience on the computer before when trying to upgrade hard drives and discovered the BIOS didn't support a larger drive, so again, new mother board, meaning new processor, RAM, video card, power supply, and case.

Just the other week I upgraded my RAM on my existing machine to max it out, and I'm once again at the max the motherboard supports, so if I decide to upgrade anything more I need a new motherboard, processor, and that likely means a new case and power supply. Additionally, new motherboards don't generally have IDE connectors, so I probably need to replace my older IDE hard drives with SATA ones, and new motherboards don't usually have PS/2 connectors, so I'll need new keyboard and mouse. Worse yet my SCSI card needs a PCI slot, and new motherboards don't often have those anymore, and given how hard it is to find adapters for those I'll probably need a new scanner too (and 11"x17" scanners are hard to find and very expensive!). And that's the minimum, who knows what else won't be compatible.

Sure desktops are easy to upgrade, but only in the first year or so of their life, after that it might as well be a sealed box for all the good it does you to try to upgrade.

That said, I still think desktop PCs, or at least the interface part, are here to stay. I love my tablet, and it's completely replaced my laptop, but if I want to get serious work done I still want a full keyboard that isn't attached to the monitor, and a big, high res (that's a different rant) monitor, and a real mouse. I'm ok if the unit itself fits in my pocket, as long as I can get it hooked up to a full size user interface.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[BanHammor]

AFAIK, the slot interfaces have been stable for a few years now: DDR3, LGA1156(or AM3 if you like.), PCI-Express. New versions come out, but I've been coasting with this setup for quite a while now.

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[viperidaenz]

The first i3/5/7's were LGA1156/1366, they moved to LGA1155 and LGA2011 for Sandy Bridge in 2011. AMD now has AM3+ and FM2

Re:Will the Desktop PC Live Forever?

[bemymonkey]

Buy CPU, RAM and mainboard as a bundle. With hardware prices these days, that's not all too bad - 300€ buys you a nice Ivy Bridge quad core bundle with gobs of RAM. Overkill for most people, of course... there's always a Celeron Dual Core (Sandy Bridge) bundle with 8 gigs for RAM for ~100€ for people with a smaller budget, or AMD (can't really recommend anything specific there though).

Historical anaolgy

[mccrew]

I am reminded of Stewart Alsop's famous quote about mainframes: "I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996." Mainframes are going stronger than ever.

Discuss.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think "chains" is a more appropriate analogy. Desktops will live (in one form or another) because managers can't see their people working if they're not chained to a desk.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[betterunixthanunix]

Mainframes did not die because they were good for the market they served -- profitable for the vendor, utilized productively by the customer. PCs are different -- utilized poorly by most customers, and not as profitable for the vendor as they could be (oh, if we could just find a way to not allow people to run their own software...). That is why PCs are in greater peril now than mainframes ever were.

You'll still have a computer on your desk, with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse hooked up to it in 20 years. The difference is that you will need to get permission from the vendor before running software on that computer, and you will not have the chance to use your computer to create disruptive technologies. Middle schoolers with a passion for programming will only get to exercise their passion in the tightly controlled environment of their school's computer lab, using the language their teacher demands they use. Programmers will use $10k computers with special licensing structures that most individuals cannot afford.

The issue is not the form, it is the philosophy.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[Lodragandraoidh]

Pretty dystopian view of things. Even if what you said comes to pass, I have faith that someone somewhere would find a way around the problem.

I don't really see that outcome, as history teaches us that while there may be perturbations in the flow of progress, it still continues to move forward. Businesses are seeing the value of open systems - deploying more and more Linux into their network, and chaffing from the limitations imposed by 'black box' vendors - are seeing the business value of having options by casting off their vendor chains. In cloud computing - the freedom of general purpose computing is clearly a positive, as it now separates the management of hardware, from the operating system and applications - providing even more flexibility.

While most consumers will be perfectly happy with the functionality of the tablet computer - there is still a very large minority of people who will pay for the flexibility of a general purpose desktop computer:

1. Hardcore Gamers -- for gamers that play insanely complex simulations (FPS/Flight and combined arms combat simulations), there is no substitute for being able to build and tweak out their own game machine. Console game systems come nowhere near the capabilities of a tricked out game system; and for those who are highly competitive, having the technological edge is worth paying for.

2. Technologists and Scientists - a number of people who program or otherwise work in depth with computers will want to have access to computer resources in real-time for their own personal projects at home. In the old days this was known as 'console access'. It better be able to run all sorts of complex simulations, crunch large amounts of numbers, and compile their latest monster program in nothing flat.

3. Independent Developers - hobbyists and other small scale/independent developers currently can't afford the cost of server grade computers to do their development on. Given the need to provide professional grade systems, at consumer grade prices - this group desires a desktop PC that can provide the best bang for the buck. These are also the same people driving innovation in the marketplace.

Even as small as this group is - they are worth multiple billions of dollars in revenue. If no one caters to their needs, all that revenue would be left on the table. I'm banking that doesn't happen. Given the drive that these people provide - particularly the small developers - for the economy, I don't see it being ignored for very long without serious impacts to the bottom lines of the larger companies who make their living off skimming the proceeds of that work.

Maybe the discussion is all wrong anyway - maybe the form factor will change; maybe it won't be called a desktop (microserver maybe?) - but the functionality of a high performance workstation will exist one way or the other - and I would argue it will be an open system for practical as well as price reasons.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[Kjella]

Middle schoolers with a passion for programming will only get to exercise their passion in the tightly controlled environment of their school's computer lab, using the language their teacher demands they use. Programmers will use $10k computers with special licensing structures that most individuals cannot afford.

Yeah uh huh, because device manufacturers in the future won't need developers to write apps to sell their devices. All the SDKs will go away, companies will stop giving away free developer tools and all interfaces will only be available under NDAs *rollseyes*. Oh I'm sure there'll still be a war on jailbreaking and DRM with even more crypto signed shit you can't touch, but beyond that I think they'll all be chanting developers, developers, developers because they make apps, apps, apps that bring profit, profit, profit.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[betterunixthanunix]

Even if what you said comes to pass, I have faith that someone somewhere would find a way around the problem.

Don't hold your breath -- many people do not see it as a problem, and some even see it as a good thing (after all, there will be fewer viruses!). It will not be easy to find a way around, either; the law as it exists today would make it impossible to deploy any real fix. When ISPs and banking websites start requiring "features" that are only available on such locked down systems, it will all be over. People who deploy PCs that can connect to ISPs and banking websites in such a world will be in the same category as people who sell illegal cable TV equipment.

Businesses are seeing the value of open systems - deploying more and more Linux into their network, and chaffing from the limitations imposed by 'black box' vendors - are seeing the business value of having options by casting off their vendor chains

Except that businesses are willing to pay for that, and willing to pay a lot. Red Hat is considered a bargain because of their pricing structure, which is one of the reasons they have been so successful. Businesses will pay a premium for flexibility, and they will not complain if their systems enforce such a licensing structure.

As long as things are interoperable, businesses will not complain.

Hardcore Gamers -- for gamers that play insanely complex simulations (FPS/Flight and combined arms combat simulations), there is no substitute for being able to build and tweak out their own game machine. Console game systems come nowhere near the capabilities of a tricked out game system; and for those who are highly competitive, having the technological edge is worth paying for.

Easily solved: create a restricted boot environment that requires the user to insert a smartcard into their system just to boot up. Then gamers can build whatever they want, with whatever hardware they want, and all they need to do is buy a "security module" that gives them access to the Internet (for online play). The best part is that the security modules can be designed to burn themselves out after a month (or whatever -- a day, or an hour, or whatever else), thus ensuring that gamers must pay a recurring fee to someone. Couple this with a TPM so that people have cryptographically enforced "accounts," and maybe create encrypted instruction sets, and you have a new way for gamers to pay to play -- which they will probably do, as long as the prices are not outrageous.

Yes, this failed a few years ago. It failed because there was no big shakeup in computing, nothing to motivate people to give up what they have. Now we have a big shakeup (the "app store model"), a strong demand for improved security, and another decade of experience in deployed DRM. The proposals did not die, they are just on hold. Ultraviolet is already deployed, and Microsoft is pushing for restricted boot environments.

Technologists and Scientists - a number of people who program or otherwise work in depth with computers will want to have access to computer resources in real-time for their own personal projects at home. In the old days this was known as 'console access'. It better be able to run all sorts of complex simulations, crunch large amounts of numbers, and compile their latest monster program in nothing flat.

My fiancee works for a corporation; they let her bring her laptop home from work if she wants to. She needs to use a smartcard to log in or access anything, so frankly, I think this is a problem that was solved already. Scientists and engineers will not be wanting for computing power on weekends or "vacations."

Independent Developers - hobbyists and other small scale/independent developers currently can't afford the cost of server grade computers to do their development on.

Here is what the powers that be have to s

Re:Historical anaolgy

[jbolden]

And how is that going to happen? We are far further away from that than anytime during my lifetime. We have an enormously diversified hardware manufacturing base using a huge range of equipment. We have about 1/2 dozen OSes selling 10m+ year and another 30 or so, doing 1m+. Freedom is doing better now than it ever has.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[jbolden]

DRM as it is actually being implemented isn't going to require your locked down world of closed systems. Because closed systems (capability based systems) are far more secure than permissions based systems they can run unsafe permissions (or even no permissions systems) as guests. You have to be careful on permissions systems because applications aren't really effectively locked in their sandbox. But on capabilities systems... no one has to be careful. So DRM runs on a secure subsystem and the open modifiable system runs as a guest. That doesn't stop you from doing anything other than tampering with data from the secure side of the wall.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[chrismcb]

"I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996."

It was, then was promptly plugged back in.
What is this command to "discuss?"

Re:Historical anaolgy

[Billly Gates]

It aint gonna happen. Most college kids today buy Macbooks as well as IPADs. Why? Because they can't write papers or do spreadsheets for their accounting nor statistics classes on a silly phone or tablet.

PC vendors can't do it. If MS dares to be this retarded with Windows 9, we will just keep using Windows 7 as corproate America ignorantly and defiantly still wipes Windows 7 off pcs and puts XP on 11 years later! With so many of us they wont be able to EOL it!

PCs will be around for a very long time and MS tried to lock them down and failed every time. They wont become expensive as tablets are toys. No office suite programs, no productivity, or anything of advantage.

The difference is in the mainframe/Unix/VMS mini days was that those silly toys we call PCs had real software that rivaled the mainframe and you could do things like compile your own programs or make cute bar graphs or doodle in MacPaint while the mainframe could not do that. I see nothing a phone can do that a PC can't yet?

It is a fad for hipsters making phone calls as you will see WIndows 8 fail. There is so much legacy crap out there that no rightful corporations or individual like you nor I would go along with it. Windows forever baby!! ... or Windows 10 will reverse it and not lock down. If not than maybe Firefox will have a freeware OS and environment that isn't locked? There is still hope out there as the free market will not tolerate it!

Re:Historical anaolgy

[mjwx]

While most consumers will be perfectly happy with the functionality of the tablet computer - there is still a very large minority of people who will pay for the flexibility of a general purpose desktop computer:

With future Android and Windows versions we are probably going to see the traditional PC/Laptop merge with the tablet. Essentially, many modern Android tablets can already connect to a KB and external monitor (my 1 yr old Acer Iconia tablet has a full sized USB 2.0 port and mini HDMI) which makes the biggest difference between my Tablet and Laptop the OS (Android 4.0 on the tablet, Windows 7/Linux on the lappy). As tablet hardware improves, this will be addressed. In 2-3 years we'll be buying tablets that can dual boot Windows, Linux and Android (and even hacked version of IOS. even with Apple suing everyone and sundry over it) that can be used as an independent tablet or docked to a monitor and KB/Mouse set up to be used as a traditional PC.

But in regards to the Desktop specific market, it's not going to disappear. As you pointed out people need desktops for specific tasks, gamers, devs, scientists and others who require a metric crapload of processing power. With great processing power come great cooling requirements and laptops/tablets just cant cut it there. In 3 years I doubt there will be a tablet equivalent to my current gaming boxen (Phenom 2 944/16GB RAM/Geforce 570/512 GB SSD) ignoring my 3 TB of spinning disk let alone the dual Xeon systems I get for the GIS analysts (servers in a whitebox basically).

One option you didn't consider were many businesses that want a non-portable computer. They buy 5000 SFF low power desktops because they are slightly cheaper and don't ever need to be removed from the building in their life times.

Just one minor nitpick

Console game systems come nowhere near the capabilities of a tricked out game system

Game consoles come nowhere near stock, off the shelf PC gaming systems. When the PS3 was released, it's graphic processing was 2 generations behind my gaming PC (PS3=Geforce 6 series, PC = Geforece 8 series). We're now 7 generations beyond that. The GF 640m in my lappy would be at least twice as powerful as the PS3.

Re:Historical anaolgy

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainframes have been nearly replaced in most areas relating to high performance computing. The ubiquitous cluster serves quite well now in many applications that used to require a mainframe. Other kinds of computing which required a mainframe previously have moved to more commodity based hardware. Mainframes will always have a place, there's always legacy code to run, blah blah blah but the real story is that they're dead. IBM being the only notable exception to this and it's hard to tell how many mainframes they actually sell anyway.

Return of terminals

[Keruo]

I'd like my cell phone to act like a thin client.
Just pop it into charging dock and it gives you browser and email on big screen(s) and rdp client to access applications on server for those things your phone isn't powerful enough itself.
The dock could even have external GPU for extra power.

Re:Return of terminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Just pop it into charging dock and it gives you browser and email on big screen(s) and rdp client to access applications on server for those things your phone isn't powerful enough itself.

Why not, you know, just throw a CPU and RAM into the 'dock' and have a real PC instead?

Re:Return of terminals

[Extremus]

Or having a tablet you could use with a proper video screen, keyboard and mouse. Actually, I believe that is the whole point of Windows 8: two different GUI environments intended for two working environments.

Re:Return of terminals

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Motorola tried that, but nobody was buying the docks.

Re:Return of terminals

[Desler]

Because that would make sense?

Re:Return of terminals

[Keruo]

Because that wouldn't allow me to use the device like a smartcard and login to every system with entering my unlock key/pattern.
I'd have to separately configure email for that PC, install software, update software... why the extra device?
All that stuff is already on my mobile.

Re:Return of terminals

[Anonymous Coward]

Motorola tried this, no one bought it.

Re:Return of terminals

[Kjella]

I think we're going there eventually... I mean the CPU, GPU, RAM etc. keeps getting better - even smart phones have a gigabyte of RAM these days. They won't be doing anything heavy but for light workloads, the hardest is probably watching movies on YouTube but the latest generation of phones can already decode and stream 1080p to a TV like for example here. How much more power would the average non-gamer really need? I've been thinking about replacing one of my parents' boxes with a zbox nano which is pretty much as minimal as you get but in reality it's still overkill for their needs. As long as they got to use a big screen and a big keyboard a smart phone would be plenty.

Re:Return of terminals

[bonehead]

If all you need a PC for is your calendar and email, then, sure, your idea sounds great.

At the last company I worked at the engineers all got new workstations. Super high end stuff, basically the fastest desktop machines money could buy at the time. And Autocad performance was still just in the "OK, but meh...." range for the stuff they were working on.

Do you want to be the one who has to explain to them that from now on they're going to be doing their work on a phone?

Good luck with that.

Re:Return of terminals

[kiddygrinder]

you can already do this, they tried to sell my wife this kind of setup when she bought her Motorola

Re:Return of terminals

[jedidiah]

A PC can run better software and can also run the same Debian style software management tools that are on your phone.

Re:Return of terminals

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean like this ubuntu phone prototype?

Android on the phone to be used normally, plug into the dock, ubuntu starts up, running on your phone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzc0uMXGFBY

Re:Return of terminals

[Frag-A-Muffin]

I'd like my cell phone to act like a thin client.

Just pop it into charging dock and it gives you browser and email on big screen(s) and rdp client to access applications on server for those things your phone isn't powerful enough itself.

The dock could even have external GPU for extra power.

Motorola tried this. It was slow, ugly, useless and slow. It was just discontinued by Google (who own's Moto's Mobile biz now).

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/motorola-webtop-lapdock-google-smartphones-95491

I assume you didn't buy one?! :) Or didn't even know about it?!

Re:Return of terminals

[mikecase]

I think you're right. Another generation or two of mobile processor improvements and a way to connect your device to an external screen/monitor/mouse via a wireless connection, and you'd have something really special. You'd have a computer suitable for web/media consumption/basic office document processing, and you simply take it with you from terminal to terminal.

Re:Return of terminals

[CanHasDIY]

I'd like my cell phone to act like a thin client.

Just pop it into charging dock and it gives you browser and email on big screen(s) and rdp client to access applications on server for those things your phone isn't powerful enough itself.

The dock could even have external GPU for extra power.

Motorola tried this. It was slow, ugly, useless and slow. It was just discontinued by Google (who own's Moto's Mobile biz now).

Redundancy aside - So, it's not that it's a bad idea, but that Motorola did a piss poor job of implementing it?

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/motorola-webtop-lapdock-google-smartphones-95491

I assume you didn't buy one?! :) Or didn't even know about it?!

I knew about it, and had they made a version that fits my model of phone (and doesn't cost almost as much as a damn laptop), I'd have bought one in a heartbeat.

Re:Return of terminals

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you need a PC for is your calendar and email, then, sure, your idea sounds great.

At the last company I worked at the engineers all got new workstations. Super high end stuff, basically the fastest desktop machines money could buy at the time. And Autocad performance was still just in the "OK, but meh...." range for the stuff they were working on.

Do you want to be the one who has to explain to them that from now on they're going to be doing their work on a phone?

Good luck with that.

So, _hypothetically_, if the PC industry regressed back to the point in time where the only real need for a PC was niche business software, and a narrow range of personal hobbies, would anyone still have a problem calling THAT a "post PC world"? I think I would have a hard time getting people to admit that is a regression, as if the 90's never even happened.

"the fastest desktop machines money could buy" I don't know why you'd bother saying this. If there's no reason to buy any other kind of PC, they're relegated to a very slim market.

Re:Return of terminals

[gmhowell]

There was an article on slashdot about that thing recently. It seems that from a technical perspective, it was subpar, lacking RAM on the phone. From a business/cultural perspective, it also sucked. It was overpriced and required a data tethering plan from your cell provider. Doomed to fail.

Re:Return of terminals

[viperidaenz]

Why would it cost much less than a laptop? It contains everything a laptop does - just a lower power CPU, less RAM and a smaller storage device. The expensive parts, like the screen, the battery and the R&D that went into designing it are still there.

Re:Return of terminals

[chrismcb]

I'd like my cell phone to act like a thin client.

It IS a thin client. Or do you have one of that bricks from the 80s?

Re:Return of terminals

[erice]

If all you need a PC for is your calendar and email, then, sure, your idea sounds great.

At the last company I worked at the engineers all got new workstations. Super high end stuff, basically the fastest desktop machines money could buy at the time. And Autocad performance was still just in the "OK, but meh...." range for the stuff they were working on.

Do you want to be the one who has to explain to them that from now on they're going to be doing their work on a phone?

Good luck with that.

Why are you doing the grunt work on the desktop? I'm an electrical engineer and it has been a dozen years since I worked any place where the real work was done on the desktop pc (actually workstation). Even then, were were always running jobs on other machines becuase the one on your desk was busy. Since then, the model has been to run the real work on the servers in the machine room. The desktop pc was only for basic office tasks, email, and user interface to the server apps.

In the earliest case, these were actual desktop pc's but laptops in docking stations quickly became the standard. This solved the problem of having to provide and manage both a desktop pc and a laptop. A phone in a docking station would seem to be the next logical step since, once gain, it cuts down on the number of systems that must be managed by or for each user.

Re:Return of terminals

[CanHasDIY]

There was an article on slashdot about that thing recently. It seems that from a technical perspective, it was subpar, lacking RAM on the phone. From a business/cultural perspective, it also sucked. It was overpriced and required a data tethering plan from your cell provider. Doomed to fail.

As I said, those examples are signs of a bad implementation, not a bad idea.

If not for all those things you mentioned (only 1 crappy phone was compatible, typical telco price-gouging mechanisms), I'd likely be using one to type this very post. Personally, I thought it was a neat idea and is probably a precursor to the future of computing, where the actual computational device fits in your pocket and interacts remotely with the various peripherals you use day by day.

Heavy Iron will live on

[badford]

Having 3 big arse monitors connected to a giant, lint-filled box humming noisily under my desk will always be a part of my life.

I have ipads, androids, smartphones, netbooks and ultrabook and a bunch of game systems. don't matter.

Re:Heavy Iron will live on

[pla]

Having 3 big arse monitors connected to a giant, lint-filled box humming noisily under my desk will always be a part of my life.

Kudos, you've won the thread. No, really, you made the single most important point so far...

Screen real-estate.

The "computer" itself may (and realistically, will) get smaller and smaller and smaller, until we wear them like cheap costume jewelry. The display device will become something like Google Glasses, or a spiffy holographic projector, or perhaps even a direct neural interface in the long run. But your phone just doesn't make a good working environment (and I mean that in the "good" sense, not the office-drudgery sense). At some point, you will want to sit down, turn on your 3d immersive holographic desktop environment, and get things done.

So really, I suppose we have a convergence rather than an extinction... Desktop PCs will do just fine, because every phone will work as one. On the subway, it will give you a nice small privacy-protecting interface. At the office, it will fill a wall or entire cubicle with what you need to work on. And at home, it will project por... Er... Whatever form of entertainment you prefer to engage in.

Will that mean the PC has died? No. It will mean your phone now has the power - The display power (CPU power has already largely become a moot point for the vast majority of uses) - Of what you would have used as a desktop PC instead.

Yes, in zombie form.

[tpstigers]

And they will all be using Internet Explorer 6.

Re:Yes, in zombie form.

[DeeEff]

Ah, I wanted to mod this up but pressed the wrong modifier instead, I'm posting to get rid of it.

Re:Yes, in zombie form.

[antdude]

Even with Linux, UNIX, Macs, other non-Windows/etc.? :)

Re:Yes, in zombie form.

[Billly Gates]

Sadly you are correct as IE 6 and java applets are the 21st century version of COBOL. COBOL is what keeps mainframes still around and IE 6 will run from citrix terminals for many decades running ancient apps with Java 1.4.2.

Those 2 are the pinnacles of all that is holy in the standards war for PHBs and will never die. IE 8 is in a similar role too

Re:Yes, in zombie form.

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains everything! AT&T are ZOMBIES!

Concept versus form factor

[betterunixthanunix]

The form factor is not going away any time soon. Eventually it will be replaced, I do not know with what, but it is likely that such a thing will not happen for a long time -- maybe not even within our lifetimes.

The concept is already dying. The idea that you can own the means of your own computing, and not have it be controlled or dictated to you by someone else, is on its last legs. We have been watching it die a painful deal for the past few years, and by 2020 personal computing as a concept will be forgotten by most of society.

Re:Concept versus form factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of society wasn't interested in the concept in the first place. In the mid 90s many people were buying computers solely because of the buzz of "the internet" then they'd unbox and connect all the pieces together, then promptly stick an aol coaster in the cdrom drive and off they went to "the internet."

That was the majority of people. Before that they weren't interested in them outside of their workplace where they were seen as basically a typewriter+adding machine. They are still simply a box to many people that they only use to browse the web and email, which can be done fairly easily in most form factors, without the stationary box, the desk, desk chair, monitors, or the processing power available in desktops now, etc. So for those people is the Desktop dead? yeah, but it was for them with the laptop era 10 years ago already, and now the tablet era/phone era.

Most of society never needed desktop PC's in the first place, it simply was the only form factor "the internet" was available on. Thankfully that was the case, because it's nice having cheap powerful desktop hardware for those of us that actually use it.

Gaming

[alphax45]

For now nothing beats a desktop for a gaming PC. I just built a new one and got Steam. Nothing else like it right now.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

Unless you have a PS3 or Xbox 360 and buy games from PSN or Xbox Live. Same thing.

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you don't mind shitty controls.

Re:Gaming

[Mashiki]

Yeah, except that developers have been fleeing consoles and coming back to the PC market for the last 3 years because it's a declining market. More so because PC's are a booming market not only in the Americas but in Asia. And it'll probably be another 2-3 years before consoles catch up. Let's not forget that as it stands, PC gaming is limited by consoles right now...6 year old hardware.
 

Re:Gaming

[JakeBurn]

I could go into the 100's of reasons why your comment is just full of fail but I'll just sum it up with LOL

Re:Gaming

[kiddygrinder]

it's no-where near the same thing, i have a ps3 that i occasionally turn on for tekken but it has nothing i would turn it on every day for.

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy Humble Bundles on PSN / XBL?

You can run top-of-the-line games that look much better on a desktop than a console could ever put out -- especially with a 10 year refresh cycle? I just point to Borderlands 2's "old" physics and laugh at your console.

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the same. For most people it's probably similar. I had a 5000 dollar build and can say for certain, not the same. it's lie telling an audiophile that all speakers are the same and mp3's and records are the same quality. They are if you aren't capable of discerning the difference. Not to mention that even between the 2 consoles you used as examples that's not true. PS3 smokes the xbox graphically.

Keyboard and Mouse trumps controller all day.

Well, unless you're throwing a temper tantrum.

Re:Gaming

[tepples]

I agree that the mouse and keyboard are superior for FPS and RTS. But how should one control a platformer or fighting game with mouse and keyboard?

Re:Gaming

[tepples]

You can buy Humble Bundles on PSN / XBL?

Do Humble Bundles have single-machine multiplayer games, or does one need a separate PC and copy of the game per player like for Minecraft?

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

and low rez games with more jaggies on the edges than the grand canyon, slowdown, jitter, and they might cook themselves to death sitting idol

totally same thing

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Consoles wont catch up. My PC which was upgraded late last year outperforms the Wii U by miles. Sony said they're not putting much effort into hardware development, so it'll probably be better than the Wii U but not by much and the 720 might be roughly the same. Anyone that has a better computer than I has a next-gen system without a doubt.

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently saw Borderlands 2 on a PS3. It looked like ass and controlled even worse. Seriously, the visuals on it were so far behind PC games that it almost seems a cruel joke that the developers made a console release.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

Oh sure, if you're one of those PC fanboys who only plays FPS's where everyone is bunny-hopping and sniper shooting each other's heads from across the map, then you might miss the mouse. But there's nothing stopping you from hooking up a mouse and keyboard to your 360 or PS3.

There are also genres besides FPS, you know.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

#define low rez, we aren't in the "consoles only do SD" era anymore, and besides, most PC owners aren't running at super high resolutions either.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

If you've got reasons, give them. Steam, PSN and Xbox Live are pretty much the same thing.

So go on, give a reason other than:

1. I play headshot focused FPS's so I need a mouse for easy headshhots.

2. I play RTS's and DOTA clones

3. The graphics are slightly better.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

You can buy Humble Bundles on PSN / XBL?

The entire bundles, no, but some of the games from them, yes.

Besides, those bundles aren't really all that "indie" anyway, as I've said before on Slashdot. Also, PSN and Xbox live have their own small publishers who do "indie" games.

You can run top-of-the-line games that look much better on a desktop than a console could ever put out --

Not really all that much better. I've seen the comparisons, and they don't justify the price differential in hardware. You're just trying to justify the money you spent on hardware, rather than games.

especially with a 10 year refresh cycle?

Hasn't happened yet. So don't be claiming it has.

I just point to Borderlands 2's "old" physics and laugh at your console.

Then why are you playing Borderlands 2 then? And if you aren't playing it, how do you know that it has "old" physics.

Besides, aren't cross platform games reducing the system requirements, making PC gaming more accesible?

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

And what sort of screen what that PS3 hooked up to? Did you check the settings?

And if you're a PC gamer, you're going to have trouble if you play games with analog sticks because you don't have the necessary skillset/experience to use them well.. Just like if you put me in front of a macro'd to hell WoW character I couldn't play it effectively.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

it's lie telling an audiophile that all speakers are the same and mp3's and records are the same quality.

And 1000 dollar digital cables make the sound better, yes we all know how that's a fallacy. And MP3's at a high enough bitrate are BETTER than records.

Keyboard and Mouse trumps controller all day.

Only if you're a player of headshot centric FPS's. There are game genres other than FPS's you know.

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphics are slightly better if you're running mediocre hardware.

Fixed.

Re:Gaming

[JakeBurn]

Lol, so you start your rebuttal by listing three reasons why your first post was trash and completely miss that you stated a ps3 with psn or an xbox with live was the same thing as a gaming PC with Steam. That is definitely NOT the same thing as claiming psn and live are the same thing as Steam.
Let's ignore the fact that most things on Steam cost less and multiple times a year I can get things like SR3 for 80% off.
Let's also ignore the multitudes of modding communities that extend the value of games I bought for years and still keep things fresh.
If I have a PC:
I can load maps on one monitor and play a game on another monitor.
I can turn my game off and write code for work.
I can use Skype, TS or Ventrillo and mute the horrible in game comms. Even if I lied to myself and said the in game stuff wasn't so bad I still would have to mute the legions of 8 yo kids screaming into their mics in order to hear my friends.
I can use either console's controller for ported games
2TB of storage versus 320gigs(or 20gigs if you bought early)
The 'slightly better' graphics I'm running include:
DX10 and 11 vs DX9
20% increase to resolution
Ambient Occlusion
Shading at least two generations past console.
1Gig or more of video ram versus 256Mb PS3 and 512M for xbox
Tesselation
Parallax Occlusion Mapping
16X AA versus most games not having AA at all on consoles and only those from the last couple of years having any at all.
Considering you're a console guy you might just be innocently ignorant as to why your chosen platform is far inferior but my oil change is done and I have to stop educating you now.

Re:Gaming

[CronoCloud]

Let's ignore the fact that most things on Steam cost less and multiple times a year I can get things like SR3 for 80% off.

So you're cheap. You did know that PSN and Xbox live DO have sales, discounted games and cheap games all the time.

Let's also ignore the multitudes of modding communities that extend the value of games I bought for years and still keep things fresh.

Yes, yes, the whole. "lets mod a a game from 2002 and play it forever because I don't have any money left over for games after spending so much money on my hardware" argument. That's not an advantage....it's the reason developers are going cross-platform. They want to make money, and gamers who soley play counter strike for a decade aren't buying games.

I can turn my game off and write code for work.

Ah, the whole "my PC is not just a games machine" argument. Which I find funny considering that back when I was young some people bought Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines SOLELY as game machines and treated them as souped up consoles So you can code on it, most people don't, most people don't even bring work home....their computer is for mail, pictures, facebook and youtube. That's why some people are using their phones or tablets as their primary computing device...they don't need a PC. The dedicated device also costs less. Tell me, how much did your computer cost? It's a trade off.

Some of us also run Linux, and use a PS3 for gaming to have to deal with Microsoft products as little as possible.

I don't know if you've actually used the in-game communcation systems in console games, butI'm beginning to think that PC devs slack off on their comm systems compared with console devs. Console voice chat sounds as good to me as skype does.

2TB of storage versus 320gigs(or 20gigs if you bought early)

PS3 hard drivers are user replaceable with standard laptop hard drives, the PS3 manual tells you how and doing so doesn't void your warranty.

The 'slightly better' graphics I'm running include:

So you're a graphics whore. Isn't gameplay more important than graphics. Heck, according to all the indie fanboys on slashdot we should be playing 2D games. And how much more than $300 did those graphics cost you. And what kind of resolution are you running to have a 20percent increase. 1080p is 1920x1080 you know. Yes I know that not all games use 1080p, but still even 720p is 1280x720. It wasn't that long ago that the most common screen resolution was STILL 1024x768. There's probably laptops still being sold with 1280x800 screens.

Considering you're a console guy you might just be innocently ignorant as to why your chosen platform is far inferior

Yes, if you're a graphics whore, you might think inferior, but that's not the most important thing when the games are the same.

I've tested out your argument, I've played both the PC version and console version of various games over the years and while the PC version usually (but not always there have been console ports with graphical improvements over the PC version) looks slightly better. the gameplay is the same, and it's not worth paying the PC price premium for the same game.

No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[santax]

Let's face it, the pc is very efficient in some things. Like text processing, image editing, programming, all tasks that depend heavily on user input are preferable done on a pc or laptop. A device that has decent input options. Typewriters replaced handwriting and the pc replaced those, the pc will be viable until someone comes up with a clever way to do those input tasks in a matter that is just as reliable as a keyboard/mouse but faster. That someone will become really rich btw. Till that day, I'm keeping my pc.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[grenadeh]

Here's to the neurohelmet.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[sstickeler]

I wonder if the effort put into user friendly UIs will start to diminish as the focus shifts away from home users.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[santax]

No last thing I want is to get my thoughts spelled out on a screen when my secretary is bending over to reach for my pen/calculator/notebook/mobile, that I accidentally dropped. In front of her. For the 5th time. That hour.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[Farmer Tim]

The neurohelmet will never work as an input device simply because there's no way of filtering the desired content from the wow nice tits subliminal thoughts.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[Anonymous Coward]

The neurohelmet will never work as an input device simply because there's no way of filtering the desired content from the wow nice tits subliminal thoughts.

Only a moron thinks that's how a mind/machine interface would work.

If your brain can tell the difference than it's possible for a sufficiently detailed scan of your brain to tell the difference. The question is how detailed does the scan have to be, and do the benefits outweigh the costs associated with implementing them?

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[AnttiV]

But it would work perfectly for surfing porn, because "wow nice tits" is exactly what you'd want...

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[Kjella]

No last thing I want is to get my thoughts spelled out on a screen when my secretary is bending over to reach for my pen/calculator/notebook/mobile, that I accidentally dropped. In front of her. For the 5th time. That hour.

If it's the fifth time that hour she's reading it and she's still bending over, it might be time to take a hint...

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[viperidaenz]

That depends if you're a lawyer who specialises in sexual harassment suits.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sounds like you're not providing a proper vision care plan for your employees... either that or she's illiterate.

Re:No, but it will be around for quite some time.

[Farmer Tim]

Only a moron would think such a sophisticated technology would work flawlessly from the instant it was invented.

The Post PC world

[Anonymous Coward]

The claim is not that PC's will disappear from the marketplace and go the way of the slide rule. Many, if not most people will still be using one for quite awhile, and there will be a decent sized market for new and improved versions. It's just that the PC (including Mac as well as Windows desktop and notebook) is no longer a focal point for either technical or entrepreneurial innovation, and arguably has not been for at least 10 years. With the advent of smartphones and other mobile devices, the importance of PC's for innovation becomes even less.

Re:The Post PC world

[WaffleMonster]

It's just that the PC (including Mac as well as Windows desktop and notebook) is no longer a focal point for either technical or entrepreneurial innovation, and arguably has not been for at least 10 years. With the advent of smartphones and other mobile devices, the importance of PC's for innovation becomes even less.

I'm terribly sorry.. it seems I have been asleep for the last 10 years... even worse I don't own a smartphone or a tablet!

If not too much trouble would someone kindly fill me in on all that innovation I have been missing out on?

what the hell is 'serious work'

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to computers, and what's a 'real computer', there's a definition of 'real work' that tends to be used in discussions like this that ensures a circular mode of thinking that ends up with work at a desk being some core mode of real computing.

Computers can do almost anything. Absolutely. Fucking. Anything. People who sit at a desk and work with computers are a subset of that, and framing compromises around what they can do is so insanely limiting I can barely believe people still state it.

To me, desktop computers are limiting because I can't take them in the field and record with them. or photograph with them. or draw in-situ with them. or carry them to the top of a comms tower. Desktop computers are fraught with compromises to anybody whose work doesn't revolve around the early niches computers found them in due to their bulk and power requirements.

Of course the Desktop PC will live forever despite its limitations, because it also has a very well entrenched use, but equating that with 'real work' or 'serious work' is limiting in itself.

Re:what the hell is 'serious work'

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd call "serious work" something that one gets paid a living to do. "Blogging" and "social media" all of that other useless bullshit is what most people use computers for, and are not what I'd call "serious work".

Re:what the hell is 'serious work'

[joe_frisch]

I'd say serious work includes: engineering design, simulations, software development, graphic design, photo / video processing, accounting, process control / automation, financial trading, and a bunch of other things I'm certainly missing. In all of these occupations having a large screen and powerful processor improves efficiency, and the cost of a desktop computer is small compared with the annual salary of the employee.

I can see mobile devices as useful for jobs where you need to constantly move around - sales, inventory, inspection, on-site management etc, but my feeling is that those do not represent the majority of computer users at work.

Re:what the hell is 'serious work'

[sgbett]

I do everything on a laptop (15"MBP). I haven't used a desktop for around 5 years now. LAMP and Rails development might not be considered 'serious' enough though ;)

I really thought I would miss it, turns out I was wrong. I would hate to be tied to a desktop now.

Desktops will stick around though I'm sure.

The newest and greatest

[ADRA]

tape killed records (effectively), CD's killed tape, InternetAudio is killing CD's
VHS killed BETA, DVD killed VHS, VideoDisc killed nothing, BluRay clipped but hasn't kill DVD
HD killed SD, 3D didn't kill anyone, 4K has yet to kill anything
PC's killed the MAC classic / UNIX workstations, Laptops clipped (desktop) PC's, Netbooks killed nothing, Tablets have yet to kill anything
really dumb cell phones clipped POTS, dumb cell phones killed really dumb cell phones and pagers, Smart phones killed dumb cell phones
digital video cameras killed film video camera's (effectively)
Video killed the radio star

Re:The newest and greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital video cameras killed film video camera's what?

Re:The newest and greatest

[Attila Dimedici]

Tapes did not kill vinyl records, CDs did. Vinyl records lived side by side with tapes until CDs came out. CDs filled the same product use as vinyl records. When recordable CDs became reasonably priced, they killed tapes. I remember when CDs first came out. Everybody had a tape player and a record player.

Re:The newest and greatest

[aristotle-dude]

Digital video cameras killed film video camera's what?

Mojo. It stole its mojo.

Re:The newest and greatest

[viperidaenz]

Pretty much all hollywood movies are made with digital cameras now.

Re:The newest and greatest

[chrismcb]

Interesting list. But InternetAudio (what the hell is that?) didn't kill CDs it was the iPod and ilk.
VHS wasn't really newer or better than Beta.
PCs existed long before the Mac Classic, and was a bit more popular than the Mac

Re:The newest and greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart phones killed dumb cell phones

Sure they did. That's why the vast, vast majority of mobile phones in use in the world aren't smartphones.

Re:The newest and greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

Pocketses.

A few words from beyond!

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can have my desktop computer when you take it away from my cold, dead hands!" Charlton Heston

Re:A few words from beyond!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your proposal is acceptable" The Bug

desktop PC

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a desktop PC (don't have one at home or at work)???

Re:desktop PC

[viperidaenz]

I have one at home and two at work. They're those boxes that hang off the end of the wire going to the moving picture frame that sits on a desk.

Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is a laptop with a WUXGA 17 inch screen, quad core hyperthreading beats-audio, and all that other great entertainment stuff.

But I want it to be super-thin and ultralight weight all but maybe 2 pounds tops.

Big screen, lots of power, feather light.

That way I can both work and stay entertained on-the-go without it weighing so much that its just too much trouble to have to carry it. As it is I have a machine with these specs already, but it weighs 7+ lbs. Its a brick to carry around NYC.

Nobody has made anything really light with this kinda power unfortunately.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Desler]

That's because all the things you want are power hungry and heavy.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[AliasMarlowe]

What I want is a laptop with a WUXGA 17 inch screen, quad core hyperthreading beats-audio, and all that other great entertainment stuff.

But I want it to be super-thin and ultralight weight all but maybe 2 pounds tops.

Big screen, lots of power, feather light.

That way I can both work and stay entertained on-the-go without it weighing so much that its just too much trouble to have to carry it. As it is I have a machine with these specs already, but it weighs 7+ lbs. Its a brick to carry around NYC.

Nobody has made anything really light with this kinda power unfortunately.

In fact, try finding any laptop PC with a WUXGA display (1920x1200). There may be a Macbook thing available with WUXGA, but the PC laptops were down-specced to FHD (1920x1080) instead. This is posted from my 8+ year old laptop with a 17" WUXGA screen. I had hoped to replace it with something of higher screen resolution by now, but that plan got thwarted by the stupid manufacturers. Luckily, its pathetic processor (1.7GHz Celeron) and RAM (1GiB, not expandable) are still adequate for Xubuntu.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Anonymous Coward]

_I_ am power hungry and heavy. The laptop should be my lean-mean sidekick.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[wierd_w]

Barring a major innovation in battery (or compact power generation) technology, this "dream laptop" can never exist.

Add to that, very efficient cooling/very efficient semiconductor tech.

The "lots of power" you want comes at a cost of increased power consumption. Increased power consumption means "very heavy battery", and "roasts your balls like christmas chestnuts on a campfire."

You need a very, very dense energy storage/generator that is also lightweight, and very efrficient cooling to remove the thermal exhaust of that power use.

There is research being done on all the needed areas, but it will be some time before such a creatue can exist; and by that time, your needs will have grown anyway.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Anonymous Coward]

honestly, i really don't care about the battery at all. whever i go, i find an outlet and plug in. i'd only need a battery good for maybe 10 minutes tops in the event that i should have to unplug and carry my laptop from one room to another.

you got me on the cooling part tho

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think it is time to announce my entry into the Testicle Thermal Shield market. My first product, the TTSMark12 offers R-12 thermal protection (equivalent to 3 inches of fiberglass) -- It can also enhance your "package bulge". The TTSMark24 doubles the thermal protection, but can only be worn with "loose-fit" pants.

Products safety warning, do not continue to use product if the outer packaging has been breached, the resulting itching may result in your being arrested for "indecent gestures"

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[wierd_w]

No silly!

Waste heat from high end laptops is an untapped market alright, but NOT for thermal insulation!

Imagine... (glitterly cliche disolve effect)

Are you a college student burdened by oppressive student loans that prevent you from owning even a simple microwave?

Do you own a cheap knockoff PC instead of an expensive macbook pro, like the rich kids in the fraternity?

Do you subsist on hotdogs, ramen, and undrinkable beer? (Camera pans to a stack of crushed old milkwakee cans.)

Well does cyber solutions (a limited liability corporation) have the product for you!

Introducing, the College Convector!

Using state of the art convenction oven technology in conjunction with the crotch roasting thermal exhaust from your no-name ball blistering and clearly non-apple laptop, the College Convector turns making pizza in the dormroom from a wild fantasy into a funfilled reality!

Imagine, using your Countless hours playing World of Warcraft to perform actually productive activities!

Like: Cooking a pizza, Making cookies, Making brownies, roasting a chicken, and SO MUCH MORE!

For only 3 easy payments of $29.95, Cyber Solutions will send you not only the College Convector, but also our patented water-chilled beef coozie, ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Act now, supplies are running out!

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[scarboni888]

Yeah... and I want a pony.

Re:Nobody makes the Laptop I wish were here

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like someone needs to suck it up, and spend a couple of days in the Gym.

do we still have mainframes?

[alen]

PC didn't kill off the mainframe, just more PC's and cheapo servers took a lot of the market as well

just like mobile won't kill off the PC

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[afgam28]

And no one said it would. This is a really dumb article which totally misses the point of what the term "post-PC" means. If you click the first link in the article, it says it in black and white:

It started last year...when (Steve Jobs) said that PCs are going to be "like trucks" in that they'll still be around and useful for certain work, but only a smaller percentage of the users will need one

Somehow the author (and submitter) have taken that to mean a world "without desktop computers".

Sure, desktops will have their place for a long time. But we're living in a post-PC world right now.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[jedidiah]

Steve made a shitty analogy.

Most people like trucks. They are more useful. They have even been morphed into family cars that were a Detroit cash cow for awhile.

No. PCs aren't trucks. They're just regular cars.

Steve was just trying to denigrate PCs to distract from the fact that he's a scooter salesman.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[afgam28]

No, he made a useful analogy and a very accurate prediction. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world due to its post PC devices.

Oh and in case you didn't notice, GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out because they focused to hard on trucks.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a really dumb article which totally misses the point of what the term "post-PC" means.

Just because Job's didn't know what the term "post" means, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to live by his definitions. He hasn't been declared a saint yet.

It's a peak-PC world. Peak, not post, but that means no huge profits for a growing company like Apple. Apple is post-PC, because no one is going to pay 10x for PC just because it comes in brilliant colors, ever again. Once smart phones become cheap commodities and they can't make huge profits from them, Apple telling you phones and pads are post and something else is the new black.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[veg_all]

Most people like trucks. They are more useful.

That must be why "most people" drive trucks nowadays.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[blackraven14250]

Yet the F-150 and Silverado are the two best-selling models in any category in the U.S, even ahead of the Camry. Go figure.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[LordLucless]

They do; or at least, many do. The GPs point was that SUVs are essentially trucks with a prettier body.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Psicopatico]

We're not in a post-PC era. We're in a post-phone era.

PCs didn't substantially change in the last 10 years or so.
Phones did.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha, that's hilarious. They are the most valuable company in the world because people voluntarily give them money for last year's hardware for this year's prices. They sold their first tablet without a front-camera despite a month or two away from unveiling their video conferencing headline feature; people are too blinded by the glitz and glamour to realize they're being ripped off. If you look online, you'll see that their content selling division is absolutely dwarfed by the profit margin on hardware sold (literally less than 5% of their annual profit)

Their desktop/laptop line only just recently overtook Windows Vista -- the *WORST* selling Microsoft OS version.
Their cellphone line only overtook Blackberry in Smartphone market share about a 1-1.5 years ago, and are a distant second to Android. They never beat Samsung in smartphone units moved, and still haven't.

GM & Chrysler didn't have to be bailed out, just like how the banks didn't need to be bailed out. If someone was saying "HEY, FREE MONEY, BUT ONLY IF YOU NEED IT", how many people would scam that?

So, no. They didn't make an accurate prediction -- at least not yet. They're just selling high margin products to a small percentage of the global population. In my office alone of 3-4 people with a presentation room, there are 5 laptops/desktops. If you go to a coffee shop, you'll see at least 1 laptop on every 2-3 tables.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand this discussion. Would it be possible for you to clarify it using a Car Analogy?

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[afgam28]

You might not like Apple's products (and neither do I), but that doesn't mean that we're not in the post-PC era. Just look at the numbers. Apple's iPhone/iPad revenue dwarfs their Mac revenue. In fact, the iPhone brings in more revenue to Apple than the entirety of what Microsoft sells.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/19/apples-iphone-is-now-worth-more-than-all-of-microsoft/

Yes, part of that is due to high profit margins. But it's also due to the fact that a significant amount of computing is now done on iDevices and their clones, including Android devices. This is exactly what Jobs was predicting with his idea of the post-PC era, and he was right.

The concept of a post-PC era is a useful one, and Apple demonstrated its usefulness by making tens of billions of dollars from the idea. But so what if there is always going to be a non-zero number of traditional PCs? It's a pointless argument and doesn't have any useful implications.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is the most valuable company right now because they make throw away luxury devices. PCs are designed to last for 4 - 8 years (the standard length of 1 to 2 Windows Dev. cycles), iDevices are designed to last 2 - 4 years. As a result of this shortened life cycle most Apple users tend to alternate between their device purchases from one device to the next every year (although people with more then 2 devices tend to by each additional every year and a half).

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because Job's didn't know what the term "post" means, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to live by his definitions.

Job's what? Anyway, who's Job?

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Nemyst]

GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out because they made shitty products, simple as that. There was a point where the basic premise of buying a new car was "anything but American", with Ford slightly better off than the other two. Funny how that reflected into bailouts eh?

In that perspective, unless HP, Dell and co. change, they likely will get in the same situation. I know more and more people who avoid Dell computers because of bad experiences (laptops failing a year or two after purchase). HP's managed to kill off many of its lucrative and renown markets like calculators. They're replicating all of GM's and Chrysler's missteps and it's going to cost them dearly.

Unlike cars, however, computers can be easily bought custom with no brand screwing things up. This is why PCs will be a lot more resilient, so long as there is a market for pieces.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[mjwx]

No, he made a useful analogy and a very accurate prediction. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world due to its post PC devices.

Oh and in case you didn't notice, GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out because they focused to hard on trucks.

Nope, much like most of Job's analogies, this one was terrible.

Also when most of the world hears "truck" we think of something with more than 2 axles.

My gaming PC is like my Integra, fast, sleek, pretty, 0-100 in 6 seconds and handles like an absolute dream. This is like telling me there's no market for high powered sports coupe's because the 1.4L Toyota Camry exists.

Bollocks I say, although Honda is no longer making Integras, Nissan is still selling truckloads of 370 GT's (OK, considering you can fit one, maybe two 370 GT's on a truck this may not be the best choice of words). Toyota have just introduced the 86 (pronounced "eight six") at the low end (A$32K), a sports coupe competing a the same price point hot hatches, average sedans and weak SUV's. Right now, you cant find a new 86 in Oz for love or money.

My desktop PC is like an Integra, I find Ipad's to be like a Peewee 50.

Re:do we still have mainframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

...but only a smaller percentage of the users will need one

Then they're not 'users', are they?

In fact, this looks like a tautology. If we expand the scope of "users" from "Product A" (ie: PCs) from ten-fifteen years ago to "Products A and B and C and..." (PCs and tablets and smartphones and blabla) today, then of course the percentage of PC users will be smaller as before.

Compromises

[Anonymous Coward]

but all these devices are fraught with compromises, whether it's computing power, screen size, or, well, a really expensive price tag."

Or the worst keyboard layout anyone could (not) think of! And you're stuck with it. And if you'll get an external one, what's the point of mobility again?

Why does it matter?

[camcorder]

I don't see why does it matter at all. New technology always wipes out the previous one, time it takes depends on marketing and social changes of people's life. Since people started to be mobile every now and then, mobile devices are rampant now, and I would not think that smart phones that ubiquitous if Telco companies didn't offer data services. On my first desktop i was playing games and now if I want to do that I have plenty of other options to choose from. It's just that technology has entered people's life so much that there's a more market so different gadgets pop-ping up.

I'm sure one day your e-identity (via biometrics or NFC tags) will follow you and you'll have devices all around your environment which can authorize you and bring your data there, so you won't need to carry a separate device. Devices handy could be even a public service at some level. So you'll be able to use any phone you'll around and only that one will ring when you're around. Might look futuristic, but one day it's going to be your identity and data to be mobile, not your devices. Then we'll have desktop "PC"s all around again. Even with cloud computing we're getting there.

Re:Why does it matter?

[epyT-R]

yeah you know what? the day I need to use biometrics or some other bullshit involuntarily used to 'authorize' me to my devices and the vendor strings that pull them, is the day I quit using tech altogether.

It matters because the concept of empower the user is being replaced by trapping the user into a platform. It's not just about the form factor, it's about the concept that spawned the PC. This is what really separates all those other gadgets from it.

Re:Why does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

New technology *always* wipes out the previous one,

What a crock of shit. So nail guns, power screwdrivers and chainsaws etc. have wiped out or will soon wipe out hammers, screwdrivers and saws/axes?

Hint: Many times the old technology co-exists with the new and will continue to do so indefinitely because it is simpler, or lighter, or cheaper, or more convenient for *particular* uses and always will be.

Some technologies date back to before the beginning of recorded history and continue to be widely used today, despite 'better' new technology versions existing for hundreds of years.

Re:Why does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, when that happens, I'm going to buy a poor persons identity and use that to do my connectivity and research.

I don't think they get it

[93 Escort Wagon]

Admittedly the "Post-PC World" comments involve quite a bit of hyperbole - but this was never about what happens in businesses, at least in those cases where someone's entire day involves inputting stuff into a computer (whether that's as a programmer, a web developer, or an office jockey). The concept of the post-PC world is more about what's happening in the personal lives of everyday individuals (which doesn't include most Slashdotters).

The majority of people that have owned a home computer don't really use it for much more than browsing the web, email, and viewing photos or videos. For those folks, a tablet or a phone works just fine - and nowadays even their TV will let them watch YouTube or Netflix videos. They don't need a PC - heck, a PC is actually more inconvenient for their purposes than these other options are. And even if they take photos... they're probably just uploading them as-is directly to Facebook or Flickr.

So yeah, the PC won't exactly be dying anytime soon... but fewer and fewer individuals will be owning one.

Re:I don't think they get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you get it.

Except for taxes, accounting... that your "everyday individuals" are still discovering can be handled much more easily on a PC.. tasks which still don't handle well on a mobile device.

The concept of a "post-PC" world was always just that.. a concept.

The real news in this supposed "post-PC world" is that people who never touched a computer before are now getting introduced through the gateway "drug" that is mobile computing.

Re:I don't think they get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Admittedly the "Post-PC World" comments involve quite a bit of hyperbole - but this was never about what happens in businesses, at least in those cases where someone's entire day involves inputting stuff into a computer (whether that's as a programmer, a web developer, or an office jockey). The concept of the post-PC world is more about what's happening in the personal lives of everyday individuals (which doesn't include most Slashdotters).

The majority of people that have owned a home computer don't really use it for much more than browsing the web, email, and viewing photos or videos. For those folks, a tablet or a phone works just fine - and nowadays even their TV will let them watch YouTube or Netflix videos. They don't need a PC - heck, a PC is actually more inconvenient for their purposes than these other options are. And even if they take photos... they're probably just uploading them as-is directly to Facebook or Flickr.

So yeah, the PC won't exactly be dying anytime soon... but fewer and fewer individuals will be owning one.

In decline and not likely making a comeback == post X, what is hard to understand here...

The only people reading it as post == total annihilation of X, are people getting all butthurt and defensive over their desktops.

Re:I don't think they get it

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Bullshit. Total bullshit.

First, you offer no evidence of what the majority of people do or don't do do with their PCs, only your - somewhat sneering- opinion.

But most importantly, your claim that "most people's" interests wrt to computers is so unchallenging and undemanding that they'll have no reason to own a PC (and there will therefore be fewer and fewer PCs) is actually an attempt to predict the unknowable future. There can and will be apps which require the significant computing resources of a "desktop" to do things "average" people are interested in. There is no natural causal link between a program "average" people find interesting how much CPU power and UI responsiveness that program requires. The chief things blocking the "average" user's ability to make a movie easily- something the average user might be interested in the way the average musician is interested in expensive instruments, amplifiers and sound processing equipment- is an understandable UI and working process, and more powerful local graphics processing, specifically we lack real-time rendering.

It's likely that people WANT to do a wider variety of creative things with computers but , in contradistinction to your assertion, the computers just aren't powerful enough yet.

What's more, as they do become more powerful, NEW things to do will start to appear as a result. Things we haven't even thought of yet which will leverage that power.

Humans need a certain form factor to do complicated creative work and that form factor is not a tablet or phone. If anything, it's going in the opposite direction with bigger phidgets acting as user interfaces.

The future definitely includes access to server-based super-computing , but that's not the same as saying a local powerful machine with complex large, non-virtual user interface devices commanding it are somehow going to be obsoleted, especially since they're not even here yet.

Re:I don't think they get it

[stephanruby]

The majority of people that have owned a home computer don't really use it for much more than browsing the web, email, and viewing photos or videos.

I don't know. I still like to do email on a PC. The keyboard on my phone/tablet is not that great for every type of correspondence. And if I write emails on my Google TV, this means everyone in my household gets to read them. And my Chrome Box/Chrome Book are great for email, but Hulu keeps on pausing after each commercial which makes it useless for that purpose.

Re:I don't think they get it

[Anonymous Coward]

PCs aren't getting faster at the same rate phones are.

The day will come when the gap is small enough that buying a phone and periphrials for your phone will be a viable alternative to buying a desktop/laptop PC. This is similar to how buying a laptop and docking station/external monitor is a viable alternative to a tower and periphrials.

Then Desktop PCs will be related to a subset of their current tasks like: poor-man's server, gamer's e-peen rig, and hacker's DIY computer.

Re:I don't think they get it

[PlusFiveTroll]

Might have to call bullshit on you instead. If you are in IT you're not an average person when it comes to computers. Averages are best gathered from millions of purchases that occur over the years. And what the averages are saying is PC sales are flat. New PCs sit around and idle nine hundred and ninety nine million ticks out of a billion. These dream applications you talk about aren't hear yet, and believe me, all the big PC makers want them to exist so they sell more boxes. For now the PC market will shrink as a whole of the technology market (even if it stays the same size) because a computer you buy now can easily last 5+ years. In the mean time they'll be buying tables that they can take and use where they need to, and break them along the way leading to more sales.

PC's are no longer a growth market, non-growth markets don't make they headlines, CEO's don't get big bonuses for non-growth markets, stocks don't make people rich in non-growth markets. Maybe sometime in the future when Magic Technology 2.0 comes out and opens a new horizon in the market then getting a new desktop will be the trendy thing to spend lots of R&D on. Between now and then a lot of development time will be spent on the portable side of computing, analysts will talk non-stop about it, headlines will toll their virtues, etc, etc.

Re:I don't think they get it

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Look what are yo saying? That tablets and phones will get faster? As fast as desktops one day? See my point? Desktops are the size they are because the larger screens are better, the larger more robust mice and keyboards are better, the larger graphics cards that then require the outsized fans and therefore the large cases are better. The larger motherboards are more sophisticated. Shrink all that down and put it on a phone one day? Fine but the little fiddly interfaces of a 7 inch tablet will still be what they are because humans aren't getting any smaller. The debate is not about the literal size or even technology of the CPU .. it's about where that CPU is.. my place or theirs? One day we'll have biological computers a thousand times smaller or more than today's computer and they'll be everywhere in everything. You know what you call that future ? Desktop everywhere. Little shrunken desktops everywhere. The debate is about where the computer is and who controls it and who is giving money to whom for what. I buy computers , I control those computers, I program and customize them to suit myself and my needs and their data is my personal and private possession. That's the working definition of "desktop" for me.

Re:I don't think they get it

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I came on too strongly. It's not that there's no sense to what you're saying, it's that it doesn't portend the future.

Sales on PC are flat because consumer income is non-elastic. If you buy the 500 tablet, you don't buy the 500 desktop. But like cars, everyone HAS at least one desktop and will continue to have a desktop and continue to upgrade or buy new desktops.

You cite facts in a discussion without supporting links .. that's less than confidence inspiring , as I am sure you know btw.

Sure tablet and the cell phone bill sucking at consumer's wallets each month leave less room for PC purchases. That's where the danger to the PC comes from- the siphoning off of resources ... sooner or later in everywhere but America the regulatory bodies will begin to limit what the cell carriers can charge for what.

To a degree, people are dumping cable TV to pay for smart phones. There's only so much room in the budget for monthlies so that leaves money for the five year PC cycle.

Once everyone has a functioning PC, then the market is saturated. All markets saturate- everyone has a working car- and from there in it's all about disposable income and time in the form of pent up demand as those durable goods age. PCs provide a service that is not replaced by and cannot be replaced by smart phones or tablets because of the form factor, the ergonomics.

Smartphones largely provide read-only access to information anywhere and that's novel ... right now. They also provide the ability to communicate in text a little .. ask for something specific or chat with friends. That's new and novel and the PC cannot substitute. But they serve different functions despite both being computers and one is not taking over the other.

my smartphone is on top of my desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile devices killing off the desktop PC any time soon maybe not, but sometime -soon- the desktop PC will be... a mobile device - so, the desktop PC will live forever, and will be mobile !

Re:my smartphone is on top of my desktop

[green1]

Only if it docks to a full size screen and keyboard. And if so, yes, it will replace the desktop PC.
I don't think the tower under your desk is here to stay forever. But I also don't think the idea of a big screen and real keyboard/mouse are going away any time soon.

Re: building

[menno_h]

I just built a new one

I predict a future wherein we buy smartphone-sized computer casings and put the CPU, memory, post-SSD storage stuff, etc in there with tweezers. (Anything smaller would be impractical.)
We then connect these to screens and keyboards. There is no way I'm going to exchange my keyboard for a touchscreen, I have to feel the keys.
After a while, when we are all illiterate and , we get voice-controlled computers that we don't understand but upon which we are completely dependent.

KVM

[labnet]

The cornerstone of of any creative work:-
  CAD
  Photo / Video Editing
  Document Creation / Coding (to a lesser extent)

still require KVM:-
  Tactile Keyboard (touch typing requires the feeling of the edge of keys for long term typing)
  Mouse (because it more precise than fingers which occlude the display)
  Large Hi Res MultipleMonitors.

+ USB to interface with odd devices such as cameras, serial busses (RS232, RS485, CAN Bus, MIDI, etc etc), tablet inputs etc.

So while it does not need to be a big black box under your desk, the 'Personal Computer' will be with us for a while yet, until the boffins can tap replace the KVM/IO configuration.

Re:KVM

[Robert Zenz]

HEY! Coding is also a creative work, very, very, very creative work...aren't you browsing The Daily WTF?!

Laptops instead of PCs at offices

[Anonymous Coward]

At my current job(software developer), I'm actually having to actively fight to get a PC. Currently I have a laptop that is maxed out at 4G of RAM and I'm expected to run virtual machines on it... Everyone at my work uses laptops except for a few servers. I don't get it. They pay such a premium and 70% of the laptops don't leave the office. Some of the developers take home their laptop, but don't actually use it because running virtual machines on them are horribly slow (and they have newer laptops than me)

I'm trying to explain that if I need to work from home I can use a VNC + a virtual machine installed on my home computer and with that then use a PC at work for everything...

I'm sure they pay more than $900 for each laptop.. Yet, the PC I built at my house 12 months ago for $600 is much more powerful than even top of the line laptops. Example: How many 8-core laptops do you see? How about RAID'd across 2 harddrives? 64M cache on blazing fast 7200RPM drives?

Everything must be compromised for laptops to conserve power and price.. If you need any amount of computing power, a laptop is useless.

Re:Laptops instead of PCs at offices

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the cache on the hard drives or on the raid controller?

Cause I thought the onboard cache wasn't used when doing raid.

Re:Laptops instead of PCs at offices

[viperidaenz]

You can't not use the hard drive cache. Its used by and managed by the controller in the hard drive. If the cache wasn't used you'd never get any higher burst speed than that delivered from the platters, which is currently maxing out around 150MB/s, PATA/SATA 1 speeds.

Yes, But perhaps a new OS.

[bobs666]

I am no Apple fan, but there UNIX core OS make that a much more stable base for games. I would hope a free or at least open OS would be the future.

It still amazes me the group think that gave us the MS-PC for business. Why do people use a gaming platform for work. Any group with an IT staff, shame on them from using such a OS. I understand smaller groups have to wait for more access to support.

Many smart corporations have left the PC all ready. the two examples I know off the top of my head are Google and the German Government.

Re:Yes, But perhaps a new OS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because apple sues you if you try to build your own system.

Re:Yes, But perhaps a new OS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, what? I've tried Linux before, and while generally stable, is equally stable trying to get games to run on my Windows box.

If anything, I've had more trouble with a Linux machine with updates borking the OS and whatnot!

Re:Yes, But perhaps a new OS.

[exomondo]

I am no Apple fan, but there UNIX core OS make that a much more stable base for games.

How exactly? If you're familiar with modern PC gaming hardware you'd know that the primary cause of instability is the graphics driver, can you explain how you expect that would change just because you're running a UNIX system?

It still amazes me the group think that gave us the MS-PC for business. Why do people use a gaming platform for work.

You just suggested using a UNIX system (the basis for most mainframes and servers) as a gaming platform but you find the use of a 'gaming platform' (not sure why you typecast a Windows PC as a gaming platform) for work confusing?

Many smart corporations have left the PC all ready. the two examples I know off the top of my head are Google and the German Government.

No they haven't, what are you talking about? Google employees use Mac and Linux PCs, the German government most certainly uses PCs or perhaps you're referring to the failed attempt to move to Linux?

Re:Yes, But perhaps a new OS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just utter "linux" and "stable" in the same sentence? Sure, it might be stable but the moment you update anything, stability will become a serious issue.

Portable + dock.

[metrometro]

We'll have a phone-sized computer that can dock and provide a complete desktop experience from any compatible monitor / keyboard / charging setup. The upshot is that you can port your life around from place to place without actually carrying much hardware, with enormous rewards to the hardware firm who controls the most popular standard, because it'll be in every workplace, hotel, school...

This has been tried and sucked. Same as tablets circa 2004. This will require some tight standards and UX design to make the transitions from mobile to desktop really stable and seamless, which points to a certain control-obsessed fruit company having a decent shot.

Given hardware trends, we're less than 5 years away from a mass-market phone-sized desktop replacement.

Re:Portable + dock.

[Anonymous Coward]

"which points to a certain control-obsessed fruit company having a decent shot."

At this point, Android is far ahead in the endeavor. Android already supports mouse control - and its fairly usable (I use it as a remote when docked and connected to a TV). iOS does not. Also, various Android manufacturers have some experience playing with this concept already (docks/shipping with keyboards/even alternative inputs like pen input). And finally Android already supports writing single applications for multiple display sizes via fragments. It seems like this could easily be extended to convertible devices.

On the Apple side, they have both mobile and desktop experience, but they are separate and distinct. The approach is (seemingly) never the twain shall meet. Further Apple encourages tablet specific apps instead of writing one app that supports both. It's almost like Apple sees phones, tablets, and macs as not two, but three different platforms.

From Microsoft - they have Office to leverage. If they can convince people that they only need one machine as both a PC and a tablet they might yet break into mobile computing because MS can offer something that runs Office. This may not increase their sales - consumers would buy Windows8 convertible tablet instead of a Windows8 PC and an iPad/Android tablet - but it would at least reduce the risk of eventual Windows abandonment if Android grows into the desktop space or Apple figures out how to merge its markets.

Re:Portable + dock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Add Thunderbolt to a phone and now you can dock with an external GPU. Photoshop and CAD can now be done with ease. Oh, and everything is backed up on the cloud anyways. So dropping the phone into th water is only a minor setback. Purchase new phone and sync data back to it. Life is good. Now if you excuse me, I have some documents to review from my wireless KVM in first class.

Re:Portable + dock.

[Dan East]

Devices with USB On-The-Go (Samsung Galaxy S III for example) already support USB keyboards, mice, storage, hubs, etc (which I usually use bluetooth for keyboard and mouse, but you said "dock"). That model has HDMI output as well. So what you suggest is already possible.

The main limitation is that apps aren't 100% keyboard aware (for example, apps still bring up onscreen keyboard from time to time even when I have a physical keyboard connected, and a lot of the intricate keyboard combos that facilitate "power user" type speed editing and application interaction are missing), and mouse use can be a bit clunky because it is basically just simulating a single touch. So it's totally a matter of software support at this time, but even that is headed in the right direction.

Re:Portable + dock.

[metrometro]

Office is key. A phone that runs a real, full filesystem etc version Office AND has a one-plug docking solution that always works would indeed get MS back in the mobile game.

They will. And won't.

[zmooc]

None of the - stupid - 10 reasons mentioned are unique to desktop PCs. Power and possibilities of smaller devices and desktops are converging. While Moore's law still is more or less correct, it is increasingly less the case for my desktop PC. It's simply fast enough. So is my 8 year old P4 for most tasks. At the same time, smartphones become faster at an incredible pace.

Therefore I believe it probably won't take quite that long before even the typical slashdotter won't have a desktop PC anymore. Why would you still have a desktop PC if your phone has more than enough power, storage and (wireless) connectivity? You will have a monitor, sure, and a keyboard and a mouse, but those are not unique to Desktop PCs. In fact the only things that's still missing from the equation is proper ubiquitous wireless video. But we're getting there.

Sent from my Android tablet using a normal keyboard, mouse and monitor.

Re:They will. And won't.

[jedidiah]

I am still waiting for "mobile devices" to catch up to the cheapest possible new PC I can lay my hands on. ARM based devices are impressive enough as long as you cripple them well enough so that it doesn't become obvious that you are running something on par with a PC from the 90s.

Beyond that, they fall on their face very quickly and quite spectacularly.

That's why you need things like transcoding servers, special print servers, and "the cloud".

Even the Sun is on a deadline.

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

So, no, the PC will not live 'forever.'

On the go

[Chemisor]

It seems to be a trend these days to do things "on the go". The boss likes to know that you are working all the time, even when you are not at the office. You want to pretend you are this active guy who lives outdoors and has never sat down in a chair (because that's the type of guy that women claim to want want). Eventually we'll all realize that it is much more convenient to use a desktop on a nice big desk with a comfortable chair than it is to balance a tablet, keyboard, and mouse on your wobbly knees sitting in a lawn chair. We'll also realize that most of us are not "on the go" all the time. Most of us stay in one place and only go places for recreational purposes that do not require computing devices.

Mobile and desktop can coexist...

[erp_consultant]

What sometimes gets lost in the mobile furor is the fact that many (most?) people that are buying mobile devices already have a desktop and/or laptop computer. This might not be true in some of the 3rd world countries but in 1st world countries I believe that it is true. Yes, mobile will be increasingly popular but for content creators nothing yet rivals the versatility of the full sized keyboard and large (or even multiple) screens that the desktop offers. For some tasks a mobile phone or tablet is great. Things like checking email, watching a movie, etc. But if you have to do a lot of typing or precision drawing then the small screen doesn't cut it. Granted, most people are content consumers rather than creators so the mobile use case works well. However, someone has to create the stuff that we consume so the desktop is going to be around for a long time to come.

Display space

[Barlo_Mung_42]

My main battle station uses two 22" display, one 24" display and one 15" display giving me 6486 horizontal pixels. I use them all. When I can do that with a laptop that I can easily carry with me I'll think about it.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

Macbook pro with retina display
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/20/3104640/macbook-pro-retina-display-three-external-monitors

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

http://blog.macsales.com/14241-macbook-pro-15-with-retina-display-can-run-3-external-displays

Actually, 9600 horizontal pixels, beats your battle station and you can definitely carry it, it's the thinnest quad core laptop on earth. Please think about it.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

> My main battle station uses two 22" display, one 24" display and one 15" display giving me 6486 horizontal pixels. I use them all.

Hell, what for? My main coding machine is a netbook running Linux (with running XP in a virtual machine for testing). It gives me a whopping 1024 pixels wide display, and I don't use them all.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

An acquaintance just got a pair of thunderbolt displays and a retina MacBook Pro. 8000px wide, and a minimum of 1440 tall (Though the mbp only has 1920x1200 maximum useable resolution). Expensive, and I hear that it taxes the GPU viciously. But next year the GPU will be better, and you could use a pair of those cheap Korean 27" display instead, and maybe even hang something off the HDMI port.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

Protect your virginity? No a laptop likely wont be as good at that.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

My MacBooK Pro and my two 27" Thunderbolt displays gives me 2560+2560+1920 =7040 horizontal. If I switch the MBP to full retina res that jumps to 8000.

Re:Display space

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the screen inches: pixels are nice, but reading 1mm-high letters on a laptop is not my idea of fun.

What I'd like to see happen

[jenningsthecat]

...is for my mobile device to have the entirety of my 'computing life' contained in it - even all the stuff like CAD applications and drawings, microcontroller development environment, etc, that I CAN'T normally use on a mobile device.

Mobile devices should plug into docking stations that provide the HMI necessities currently provided by desktops - large/multiple monitors, 'real' mice and keyboards that actually support a day's serious work, USB ports, extended and backup power, wired network connections, etc. The docking stations would become ubiquitous, and I'd be able to do mouse-keyboard-and-graphics-intensive work wherever I go. As I see it, the computing part of our lives is too integral to NOT be portable in its entirety; but a device that I can put into my pocket won't have a practical, heavy-duty HMI of its own until 'Minority Report'-style interface hardware can fit into an Altoids tin. So in the meantime, I'd like to put all of the computing power and data into my pocket, and connect to the bulky HMI hardware only as and when necessary, 'cause there's still a lot of useful stuff to be done on a pocket sized device, at least in a pinch.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid an ugly little thing called 'The Cloud' is going to ensure that this vision never sees the light of day.

Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[eyegone]

Laptops seems to be moving in the "media consumption" direction, becoming less and less useful for actual work all the time.

Try to find a laptop with a 16x10 display. I get that 16x9 panels are less expensive, but it blows my mind that no one makes a "premium" business laptop with a 16x10 display. (I specifically exclude Apple from the business category here, due to the lack of things like docking stations, dual external display support, etc.)

It's incredibly frustrating for those of us who need to do real work while travelling.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

(I specifically exclude Apple from the business category here, due to the lack of things like docking stations, dual external display support, etc.)

Umm...

1) MacBook Pro displays are 16:10
2) Dual external display is supported.
3) Docking station, really? Really? I've used docking stations on other laptops such as IBM ThinkPads. Nothing of value is lost due to the lack of native docking station support.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[kiriath]

I'm not sure precisely what you need to do with your computer, I can do anything and everything I could do on a PC on my Mac computers, and I am more stylish to boot. =D

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

I specifically exclude Apple from the business category here, due to the lack of things like docking stations, dual external display support, etc.

Some of the MacBook models support connecting multiple thunderbolt displays. And since the thunderbolt display acts as a dock itself (and then some: additional USB ports, fw800 port, gigabit ethernet port, thunderbolt port, security slot, built-in camera and microphone, built-in speakers) Apple has some great options for you, and it can all be done over a single port on the MacBook.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

I specifically exclude Apple from the business category here, due to the lack of things like docking stations, dual external display support, etc

While Apple Bashing is fun, some people only make a fool of themselves. All the new Macbook pros will drive 2 27" monitors (along with the internal display) and the retina macbook pro can drive 3 monitors (1 HDMI). Thunderbolt alone is the best docking station invention ever, no more proprietary docks, just a thunderbolt and you get everything. One data cable plus power cable equals both of your requirements.

If the different between 16x9 and 16x10 makes you unproductive, nothing will make you productive. Get external monitors and be done with it.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

You are able to connect two Thunderbolt displays through the one cable on the MacBooks. Your Ethernet, USB and other things are left plugged into the displays so it's just the Thunderbolt cable and power cable you disconnect from your laptop, which is just about as easy as a docking station.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Operate multiple high end video cards in SLI.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about it... The one thing I hope catches on is the 4k resolution. That way we can have decent res laptops again... Most are x720 or x1080. Very few x1200. I have heard of some people swapping out the parts and having a good time of it... http://www.lcds4less.com I personally have not been brave enough to try a swap out like that...

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

macs support dual external display with a special driver and external usb video cards. ive done this before myself. the external vid cards arent powerful maybe enough for typing and not even full screen video.

Re:Laptops are actually becoming less useful

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably not what you want to hear, but there is a company still making laptops with good quality 16x10 displays and it's apple. Macbook pros have stuck with that nice quality 1440x900 display for years as standard.

price and volume

[slew]

I probably won't come as a surprise, but as the volume of desktop computers goes down, and the volume of mobile devices goes up, the price tags will likely converge more so that there is only a small mobile premium. The only limiting factor will be the screen size that differentiate a mobile device from a desktop device.

If someone can solve this problem with some sort of projector or retinal imaging (not retina display, but imaging directly on the retina) technology, that last difference will go away.

Re:price and volume

[PhotoJim]

Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.

I just put a Blu-Ray burner into my 5-year-old desktop machine. The burner cost me less than $60. To upgrade my Core i7 laptop to have that capability would cost the better part of $200, and it would be a slower, more delicate burner, too. This desktop has also had its video upgraded (twice) and its RAM upgraded (once). It also takes cheap SATA drives so I could throw a 3 TB drive in there for a little more than $100. 2.5" 1 TB drives are still slightly hard to find and larger ones do not exist as mass-produced objects yet. Meanwhile, we're knocking on the door of 4 TB 3.5" drive availability.

I think we're at the point where few home users would want only a desktop machine, but I appreciate the advantages that a desktop machine provides and will certainly be replacing mine when the time comes. A laptop is not a substitute for a desktop, for my purposes.

Re:price and volume

[slew]

Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.

Repairability of desktops is really going down (if you haven't noticed). About the only thing replaceable on the motherboards are CPU, DIMMs, and storage (and often the RTC/cmos battery). Optical storage is on its last legs and will soon be gone like the floppy. Hard drives are probably next in line (functionally replaced by cloud storage). Eventually, the CPU will become so commoditized that it will be the SOC which will be the whole motherboard: you swap the whole thing out if it breaks. At that point the DRAM might as well be on the motherboard as well, since DRAM will be most of the motherboard cost.

At that point the most common desktops will be just like Mac Minis, and the old "ATX-like" desktops and their replacement components will be the niche/expensive developer/hobbist market that they were originally. Then you won't be able to make the "cost" argument anymore as likely individual piece-part prices will be higher than a brand new consumer-class machine.

I'm old enough to remember when technically inclined people went down to Walgreens to test and get replacement tubes for TVs and Stereo Amps to avoid being gouged by the TV repair shop and I can assure you that price and availability of replacement parts for old consumer products can change much faster than you think they will.

Re: building

[betterunixthanunix]

I predict a future wherein we buy smartphone-sized computer casings and put the CPU, memory, post-SSD storage stuff, etc in there with tweezers.

...and I predict that you will not be able to connect that to any other computers, until you insert a special smartcard that burns itself out every thirty days. You will not be able to connect to the Internet, you will not be able to do your banking, you will not be able to share your birthday pictures with Grandma unless you buy access rights. Should you find a way to connect to another computer without making such a purchase, you will have become a criminal hacker, facing five years in prison for violating 60 different laws.

The death of PCs has nothing to do with form factor, and everything to do with the concept and purpose of PCs. We could have had computer access in every home via mainframes, by having terminals with x.25 connections. Of course, we would have had no innovation, but then again, why would the industry giants want to allow for disruptive technologies? The PC is one of the few examples in human history where entrenched interests were completely blindsided by a couple of commoners trying to help each other out (and now that those commoners are in positions of power, they recognize that they must prevent such disruption in the future).

Just like the answering machine...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

We'll never delegate our private voice messages to the cloud. That's why we all still have an answering machine next to our landline in the kitchen.

Re:Just like the answering machine...

[viperidaenz]

That's why voicemail is dead? Your answering machine can't take a message when you're using the phone line.

Re:Just like the answering machine...

[LinuxIsGarbage]

And you can't use voicemail to live screen the call as they leave a message to see if you want to interrupt and answer.

Re:Just like the answering machine...

[viperidaenz]

The first google result says yes http://support.google.com/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115083
The second google result says yes http://www.aitelephone.com/unlimited-toll-free-voice-mail-call-screening.html
In fact, pretty much the whole first page of "voicemail call screening" says yes.

Re:Just like the answering machine...

[LinuxIsGarbage]

In those two cases you still have to interrupt what you're doing and essentially answer the phone. Ask your SO how well that would go over while you're being laid. With an Answering Machine it will automatically play it through the house.

Re:Just like the answering machine...

[viperidaenz]

I'd rather not be interrupted.

My eyes are failing!!!

[cvtan]

So I'm not going to watch TV/movies/slideshows (or do gaming) on a cell phone unless they are 27" across. Besides, Verizon is annoying.

Not a "personal computer" if it is not yours

[betterunixthanunix]

If you do not control your computer, if you cannot run whatever software you feel like, if you need to ask permission to do things, then it is not a "personal computer." It does not matter if it has a keyboard, mouse, and monitor; we can make a thin client with a connection to a mainframe that has such an interface, but that would not be a PC either.

Re:Not a "personal computer" if it is not yours

[HeckRuler]

Yeah yeah, we've all heard about Doctrow's rant about the upcoming war. I think it's a little over the top.
But this article and discussion is actually about the form factor and not about who has the rights to execute what code.

While, yeah, keyboard/video/mouse is the age-old classic and simply the best interface we have right now. And you sit at a desk for this.
But I want something I can carry around to different desks. Something hand-held with a simple interface while on the go, BUT CAN ALSO interface to that k/v/m combo at a desk. And that thing would not be considered a "desktop PC".

(And replacing the KVM/IO configuration is the realm of direct neural interfaces that tap right into your brain, which is more sci-fi than fact right now.)

Re:Not a "personal computer" if it is not yours

[tepples]

But I want something I can carry around to different desks. Something hand-held with a simple interface while on the go, BUT CAN ALSO interface to that k/v/m combo at a desk. And that thing would not be considered a "desktop PC".

An Android tablet docked to an HDMI monitor and Bluetooth keyboard fits that description. An iPad does not, nor does a Windows RT tablet, but an Android tablet does.

Re:Not a "personal computer" if it is not yours

[HeckRuler]

Great, and once they can run Dwarf fortress, Photoshop, Valgrind, Audacity, TrueCrypt, and display full video at a reasonable speed then it will be a valid replacement. I'll also need the ability to store all my stuff, run whatever programs I want, display to multiple screens, connect to some quality speakers (which could be over the HDMI if anyone would freaking MAKE them).

I was going to chuck in battery requirements, but I'm ok with it living on grid-power while docked, which is where it runs the heavy programs and sucks the most juice.

But yeah, props to the Android for doing what others cannot.

Desktop is needed now

[eexaa]

...and will be for quite some time, because we don't have any more convenient platform to do actual work.

I mean, did anyone try to do programming, system administration and/or serious graphics or writing on iPad and alikes?

And it's not about screen size, it's basically ONLY about having input devices that don't make your wrists rot away if you use them more than 2 hours daily.

PS. do you count traditional notebooks (15" and bigger screens) as desktop computers? (I do.)

Re:Desktop is needed now

[TubeSteak]

PS. do you count traditional notebooks (15" and bigger screens) as desktop computers? (I do.)

No.
15" is still a jigsaw puzzle of bits and pieces with a best-effort coolings system.
17" can be considered a desktop replacement, and is sometimes cheaper than a 15" laptop.

But really, a laptop is not a desktop.
Even the slimmest non-mini desktops have more options and cooling power than a 17" laptop.

Re:Desktop is needed now

[thoth]

I mean, did anyone try to do programming, system administration and/or serious graphics or writing on iPad and alikes?

How powerful do you think the systems were back in the 70s, when unix and c were created? Today's iPad, with its touchscreen keyboard, would be a massive improvement over printouts...

Re:Desktop is needed now

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, in the same way that hitting yourself repeatedly with a brick is better than using an iron bar.

Sort of

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I think, currently at least, what you're describing is more of a 'desktop' machine, not a workstation. Then the question is what did Soulskill mean when he said "desktop", did he mean "cheap commodity non-portable machines" or did he mean "ALL single-user machines with a console that aren't portable"? If the former, then I agree, they'll slowly be relegated to being no more than docking stations ultimately.
OTOH if people are talking about actual WORKSTATIONS? Yeah, those aren't really using laptop parts. I mean when I do a build I need 8 gigs of RAM, lots of fast drive space, and 4 fast cores. None of that has squat to do with laptop parts. Laptop chipsets, processors, memory, and disk drives simply aren't going to meet my requirements. At best maybe I could get by with a very high end laptop, but I can easily buy an equally powerful workstation and an 'ultrabook' for quite a bit less money than that...
Now, one day maybe I'll be able to easily just farm out the number crunching and storage to say AWS or something, but what about my displays? I've got 2 23" 1920x1024 LCDs on my desk and that's one place where no mobile device is going anytime soon either. Obviously if we can put all the CPU power out in the cloud I can end up with a thin client, which could be eventually the same hardware that goes into a tablet basically, but I think we're a good 10 years from that being the norm.
Maybe I wouldn't try building an empire around commodity workstation or desktop hardware right now, but its not a closed chapter, and I suspect there's always going to be a niche for stand-alone machines.

Re:Sort of

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh..the consumers? They'll still want desktops, they just won't replace as often. Look at my LOL customer Ms Pipkin, she had a couple of aging P4s, one for her and one for the kids, and she recently replaced those with an Athlon triple for the family and a quad for herself. her BF who lives in the next town over got irritated that when the grandkids were over she couldn't get on for her daily chat so he had me find her a nice little C60 netbook which she uses now on the couch or when she is working in her sewing room and wants to be able to watch the news and keep up with her chat program.

So at least in my area I'm just not seeing this "post PC world" people are speaking of, if anything people have more PCs than ever. All my customers are simply using the tablet and smartphone as a supplement, not a replacement, such as reading eBooks in bed or checking their emails during commercials. You are still talking about hundreds of millions of units a year being sold with X86, that is nothing to sneeze at, its just that we are gonna see some consolidation like we did at the end of the dotbomb because you have too many players on the field, that's all. I figure we'll end up with 3-5 OEMs and about that many ODMs selling parts Just like how eMachines, Compaq, and Abit were bought out or closed so too will the herd thin and then you'll see they'll be just fine, if not making insane profits like Apple.

Re:Sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop has 8 gigs of ram. 4 fast cores and hella fast drives (968Mbs a second read speed) and can drive 4 external monitors to boot.

Then again it's a Vaio Z so pretty sure that falls under high end laptop.

(And yes. I do run 4 27" HP monitors with it)

Re:Sort of

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Eh, most people just don't want to build their lives around their PCs and never really did. The 90's were the golden age of the desktop machine, we went from Amiga 1000's to Pentium 4's and everyone and his brother had to have one. That will never be the case again. I do think eventually the basic desktop will vanish into the cloud, and into tablets, TVs, and phones, or whatever gadgets replace those. The generation that's just getting into school now, they're as at home in the world of iphones and ipads as today's college kids are into nettops and game consoles. My friend's 3 yr old is 3x better at messing with a tablet than any adult. He's 5 now and he makes us all look like idiots. He barely even knows what a keyboard is...

Re:Sort of

[hairyfeet]

If that is the case i hope you have a big fat wallet, because it'll all be appstores and content charges up the ying yang.

Why do you think MSFT is gonna shit a billion down the crapper on winRT? because of the appstore, they want to be the keeper at the gate just as Apple is. it always amazes me when people talk like its a good thing when we can already see the media companies gouging people for a buck a song and $2.99 an episode.

this is probably the only time I'm glad the mobile carriers are greedy douchebags as their constant raising of prices on their data plans will be the wakeup call for a lot of people I'm hoping. The LAST thing we need is the PC replaced by locked down appstores and content tollbooths, and that is EXACTLY what will happen if we do end up in a "post PC" world.

Re:Sort of

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Oh, don't be so sure that the world will simply continue the way it started on that score. People want stuff that works. That doesn't mean it all has to come from some walled garden.

Re:Sort of

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh Apple and MSFT together hold a pretty damned big chunk of the market and we've even seen some of the new Android devices come out locked down. Don't forget Google wants an appstore too because it lets THEM be the keeper at the gate and get a cut of every sale.

So again WHY do you think so many are pushing the "post PC" mantra? because the big corps are dreaming of the day when everything has a tollbooth with dollar signs in their eyes. Remember a few years back when the head of Sony said you should be charged by the play? while it hasn't gotten THAT bad yet you can see by the pushing of the appstore model they are dreaming of a day when NOTHING will be free, it'll all be charged up the ying yang for and the big three, Google, Apple, and MSFT, will get a cut of every sale. Great for them, sucks big hairy donkey nuts for the consumer.

Perhaps few are upgrading...

[Nexion]

I purchased a dual core 2ghz computer with 2gigs RAM and a Nvidia 8800 around 2005. I looked at getting a new system and priced it at around 1600$ for what I wanted. Thing is, my computer does fine for all I use it for, including a bit of Skyrim. I just dropped 8gigs into it as an upgrade and am pondering getting a 3ghz+ four core for about 90$. That will push out my purchase of a new system at least a few more years. I own a laptop and an iPhone as well. The iPhone doesn't replace a laptop, and the laptop doesn't replace a desktop. Oh, in the same time that I've had that destop I have purchased 5 iPhones, yes... FIVE iPhones. I don't have to upgrade my desktop every two years, it doesn't get accidentally dropped in the ocean, crushed or flung across the room. Perhaps sales figures are just that, eh?

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop PCs are cheap:
    Rebuttal -> Mobile device prices are also cheaper than ever. Did you see the video ads in Entertainment weekly? They sliced an Android phone into a magazine page to use it as an Ad viewer. Mass production counts for a lot.

Desktops are more powerful
    Rebuttal --> But I can carry a mobile device with me and use it wherever I am - I have more opportunity - and many mobile apps rely on servers that are much more powerful than desktops.

You can plug a ton of peripherals into desktops
    Rebuttal --> I can use bluetooth and turn on only the devices that \i want, minus the clutter of wires you see around your typical PC.

You get extra screen real estate with desktops
      Rebuttal --> I can send my video signal over Widi to a 50+ inch TV set - and sit on the comfy couch rather than the office chair.

You can play (real) computer games on desktops
    Rebuttal -> most games these days run on consoles (pirating killed off all the good PC games) besides,
    I like Angry Birds and they didn't cost as much as a typical PC game.

Fixing a desktop is easy
    Rebuttal -> It's easier to carry your mobile to the store to get it fixed. Or just replaced (when it's time)

You can use creative software efficiently on a desktop
    Rebuttal -> Depends on the creativity you want - it's hard to be creative sitting on your ass at your desk.
    Go to where the action is happening and watch the ideas flow.

You can recycle a desktop as an NAS deviceor a fish tank
      Rebuttal -> My Android tablet is much more power efficient than my Atom based NAS.
      And I can recycle it as a media centre or use it as a screen + camera for my front door.
      Not to mention that, since the mobile is smaller, there's a lot less to recycle.

Desktops are secure and they last a long time
      Rebuttal -> Most interesting mobile devices haven't been around long enough yet to have a problem with durability.
      There are quite a few dinosaur PC's around that people keep "just in case" but that serve no useful function.

You can build your own desktop
      Rebuttal -> But it still looks beige or black metal and plastic -- you can accessorize your mobile devices much more

Long live the desktop!
    Rebuttal -> Rex mortus, vivat rex -- don't hang on to your PC until it's too late !

Re:No

[rbprbp]

"You can use creative software efficiently on a desktop Rebuttal -> Depends on the creativity you want - it's hard to be creative sitting on your ass at your desk. Go to where the action is happening and watch the ideas flow." We are talking about Photoshop, Illustrator etc..., not Instagram or whatever the cool app of the day is.

Re:No

[CanHasDIY]

Wow. Just... just wow.

Every time I think I just read the dumbest fucking thing ever posted to the internet, another douchbag troll comes along and one-up's the last guy.



I would say congratulations are in order, but I would really prefer to not encourage the behavior.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

... and one-up's the last guy.

Who's one-up and why is he the last guy?

Gaming will ensure PCs are not going anywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Until I can play WoW (on ultra) on my mobil phone attachted to my 42" 1080p display I think I'll be keeping my PC.

Why the compromise?

[Admiral Llama]

I fail to see the difference in real terms between a desktop PC and a laptop with a keyboard and mouse hanging off of it. Likewise you can hook up a mouse, keyboard and external monitor to Android. You can also buy an Android tablet for a quantity of dollars down in the double digits. The high end classes of computing will always get eaten from below as the low end matures. The higher end stuff will always remain as a niche product, but for the masses it is always a race to the bottom.

Portability is a plus, but the main factor is cost.

Re:Why the compromise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see the difference in real terms between a desktop PC and a laptop with a keyboard and mouse hanging off of it.

A laptop has portability and lessened power consumption.
A desktop tends to be cheaper for the same specs, has a higher potential for raw power (processor, memory, graphics, etc), and is significantly easier to upgrade.

It just depends what you want.

This is a silly...

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how great your laptop and phone become, they typically represent all the power that can be stuffed into that size, at that point in time. Some folks will just not see those devices as enough. And they will need something bigger - its called a PC. There are some folks who need more power than what can be stuffed into a PC - they usually opt for this thing they call a "server". Oh, and then there are some other people who need more than what a server can offer, and they go out an buy a mainframe.

Re:This is a silly...

[neminem]

As a longtime buyer of devices commonly referred to as "desktop replacement", I would argue that at any given time, you can get laptops that perform at least like 95% as fast as a top of the line desktop - you're just sacrificing some weight and some battery compared to a more standard laptop, and a -tiny- bit of speed compared to an equivalent desktop, and of course the cash. They're still much lighter and infinitely more portable than a real desktop, though.

I'm not arguing your main point, of course, just one of your examples. In fact, if anything it helps your main point: I feel like we'll pretty much always have -all- the various form factors of computing devices we have now, and will just gradually add additional ones. They all have their benefits and drawbacks, from tiny mp3 players to tablets to netbooks to traditional laptops to desktop replacements to desktops to servers to mainframes, and any number of devices in between any of those.

Re:This is a silly...

[neminem]

(Ok, maybe slight exaggeration on 95%. Maybe more like 80%. Powerful enough to play most new games at reasonably good graphics settings, though, which is the primary test for most people.)

Re:This is a silly...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes sense to me....

Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[tepples]

I think we'll actually approach the point where you only have one "computer" and that what you carry is the user interface and cache.

In practice, you're going to need a lot of cache, especially if you want to go offline. And this means you're going to have to have a lot of processing on your user interface devices so that they can act on cached data while not connected to a high-speed, high-volume network. Current cellular technology (LTE, which can be thought of as 4G lite) is high-speed but not high-volume, with single digit GB/mo transfer caps being the industry standard. So even though you'll likely have one shared set of documents among all your devices, they'll all need to be "computers" for the foreseeable future.

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates said it best

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we'll actually approach the point where you only have one "computer" and that what you carry is the user interface and cache.

In practice, you're going to need a lot of cache, especially if you want to go offline. And this means you're going to have to have a lot of processing on your user interface devices so that they can act on cached data while not connected to a high-speed, high-volume network. Current cellular technology (LTE, which can be thought of as 4G lite) is high-speed but not high-volume, with single digit GB/mo transfer caps being the industry standard. So even though you'll likely have one shared set of documents among all your devices, they'll all need to be "computers" for the foreseeable future.

Unlimited 4g plans are making a comeback. Two of the "big" carriers are offering unlimited 4G (Sprint, T-Mobile), smaller carriers like MetroPCS also offer unlimited 4g plans. I think soon you'll see AT&T and Verizon succumb to the pressure.

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that you're right about the near future. However, we're not horribly far from using VNC over wifi most places we want to do much, and most of what we want to do doesn't take that much bandwidth. So, the storage required for the total porn collection, probably not, but for the photo album to be transparent, and the video to be transparent when on the grid, and documents and email and code and logins to be completely distributed is probably within the next decade.

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Bill Gates.

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to, but I think he's married.

Re:Processing power needed in "UI devices"

[shutdown -p now]

Flash memory is cheap. And devices can sync over WiFi or similar in a P2P fashion, without involving any central servers and clogging up your Internet pipe.

The problem with Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

An OS that only runs Apps is so limited compared to a real OS that's not even funny.

Early days

[shmlco]

"...but there's little you can do in an office that doesn't demand a PC."

Today. I wrote about this not too long ago, and think people miss the point regarding the "post-PC" world. It's not, you see, that tablets are going to replace existing methods of doing existing work on existing computers.

It's that more and more existing methods and jobs and tools are going to be restructured and modified and rethought so they can be done on tablets and pads and other mobile devices. Instead of sitting at a desk plugging in data, that data will be scanned and entered into tablets the field. Instead of sitting at a desk reading reports, you're going to be sitting in a conference room or in a cab or train or plane reading reports.

And it's a self-reinforcing cycle. More and more sites and apps will be created and modified for tablets, which makes them even more useful, which induces more people to convert sites and build apps, which makes tablets and mobile devices even more useful, and on, and on.

Keep in mind it's early days. I mean the first iPad shipped just over two years ago, in 2010. Where was the desktop personal PC at that age?

http://www.isights.org/2012/04/ipads-in-business-time-to-stop-laughing.html

Re:Early days

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind it's early days. I mean the first iPad shipped just over two years ago, in 2010. Where was the desktop personal PC at that age?

The iPad is just a big iPod touch (which is over years old) in the tablet form factor (which is well over a decade old), yes that makes it more useful but it's not as though the concepts and platform were completely foreign until 2010. Average consumers - the target users of personal computers - certainly weren't using the PC's predecessor(s) unlike the case of the iPad where laptops, smartphones and iPods were all used by the same target customers of the iPad. So the comparison of PCs to the iPad doesn't really work.

Re:Early days

[mcgrew]

Keep in mind it's early days. I mean the first iPad shipped just over two years ago, in 2010.

MS had a tablet computer ten years earlier, although it was a flop. Ten yeras after the first microcomputer shipped, IBM was selling millions of PCs.

Re:Early days

[shmlco]

MS had a large, clunky laptop without a keyboard that ran for a couple of hours per charge, and that depended upon mobile users trying interact with a OS and applications written for the desktop.

It has as much relation to modern tablet designs as a CRT-based Osborne does to a MacBook Air.

Re:Early days

[shmlco]

"... certainly weren't using the PC's predecessor(s) ..."

So true. It's not as if average people ever used timeshared terminals, microfilm and fiche, or dealt with reams of computer printouts...

You can quibble all you want, but the fact remains that the modern tablet is still in its infancy both in terms of use cases and in terms of market penetration.

Your desktop is an app

[MikShapi]

Anyone using a mac to do any work already knows this.
He knows this because he's running Parallels or VMWare Fusion with Windows (and MS Office for windows) in it.

Back in 2006, before the iPhone launched, a phone was a device. Today - irrespective of whether you're using Android or iOS, it's an app.
A music player was a device too. Today, it's an app.
A GPS was a device. Today it's an app.
A camera was a device. For more and more people who approach photography casually, it's an app.

A desktop is headed that way too. To make a desktop app run on your pocket device, here is what needs to happen:
1. Technical barrier 1 - enough oomph. That's 4+GB RAM and enough CPU cycles. It's virtually there.
2. Technical barrier 2 - wireless peripherals. Bluetooth keyboards and mice abound. Displays are a couple of years away.
3. IT Security & usage pattern barrier - to many workplaces, an employee's /in/ability to carry his computer out of the office is a benefit - less data security headache. These guys will be the laggards in adopting this. It's not a value proposition to them.
Others who give you a laptop will split between those who want to equip you with a full workstation (so you can fire up visio in an airport) or that will assume an employee shouldn't need to buy his own wireless monitor at home - they will still give you a laptop.
And those that give you blackberries and their like today. They will give you a phone that can become a desktop.
4. the x86 legacy - running an x86 VM on an x86 is cheap. running an x86 VM on ARM is resource-consuming. This will go away.

Microsoft aims Windows RT to be an OS with a windows OS kernel for ARM, with all the theoretical capability of being a grown-up desktop OS if it needs to. Your visual studio will have an ARM compile target, and your favorite app vendor will give you an ARM binary. Legacy stuff will get emulated (remember rosetta?)

Apple can compile to either target but will not let you use the "wrong" device for the wrong task, and have a clear idea of what should work on ARM and what should work on x86.

Intel are pushing the atom to compete with ARM on power-use and turn it around, allowing your phone to just run a straight x86 OS.

Android has a major risk here - on-boarding a grown-up desktop OS into a phone-based VM can be a killer app if done right, and Google have no grown-up desktop OS. Nobody is employing 50 people in an office who do their daily tasks on either Android or Chrome. If Microsoft leverage their inertia with legacy offices running XP/win7 on black dell boxes sitting under a monitor to drive in their mobile platform, Nokia may hurt Google a bit. That's a lot of intertia.

There's a lot happening. It pays to pay attention.

Re:Your desktop is an app

[viperidaenz]

1. Technical barrier 1 - enough oomph. That's 4+GB RAM and enough CPU cycles. It's virtually there.

The latest multi-core ARM processors can't keep up with 10 year old desktops. They're similar to an x86 from the mid 90's.

Prediction

[wjousts]

The desktop PC will die the year after the "year of the linux desktop".

i.e. It'll never happen.

Re:Prediction

[EmagGeek]

Yeah, but a white knight will ride up just in time and deliver "Duke Nukem, The Next Universe," and the PC Gaming platform will be saved.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't live on forever, however no current technology is a threat to its survival. Maybe some neural interface or other esoteric interface or whatever could change the nature of how complex work is done with a computer, but handheld touchscreen devices are not going to kill off the 'PC' form factor.

The biggest real fear I have is that the increase of Tablet and Phone computing will push PC back towards 'niche' in the spectrum and thus we will suffer stagnation and price increases. So still possible, but you'll have to pay more to make it worth the companies' time to bother with you.

In a post-lemming world

[tepples]

In a post-Lemming, post-Apple v. Samsung world, what platform allows people to run both major-label applications and homemade applications that haven't been approved by the operating system publisher?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

The same one that suffers from lots of malware.
People who care about creating their own programs: 0.01%. (and that's being generous.)
People who care about not getting malware: 99.99%.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

Both PC's and Android. In fact, it is only iOS that doesn't allow it.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[tepples]

In fact, it is only iOS that doesn't allow it.

And Windows RT/Windows Phone 8. And the game consoles.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[CanHasDIY]

The same one that suffers from lots of malware. People who care about creating their own programs: 0.01%. (and that's being generous.) People who care about not getting malware: 99.99%.

Malware volume is directly proportional to a systems market share; grow big enough to be noticed by the criminals, and they'll start focusing on breaking your stuff.

Naivete is cute.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

Malware volume is directly proportional to a systems market share; grow big enough to be noticed by the criminals, and they'll start focusing on breaking your stuff.

The facts don't support your theory. When iOS was the market leader, and Android the minority, it was still Android which was getting virtually all the malware.

Naivete is cute.

You think you're cute?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[geekoid]

False.
Prestige and money are far bigger drivers.
Your statement assumes the people, design, architecture and security model are all the exact same for each system..

They are not.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

Oh look, a malware apologist.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[gmhowell]

And on Android devices, doesn't it vary by OEM?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Microlith]

Ah, look, an idiotic reply. So what you're saying is that the only reason I want the ability to do as I see fit on my computer... is to install malware? And that what I really want is to give full control of my PC to other people? And that no one should ever have the choice?

Yeah, you're an apologist. Almost authoritarian.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS was never the market leader. You must still have RDF poisoning.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

Ah, look, an idiotic reply.

It was a mirror of yours.

So what you're saying is that the only reason I want the ability to do as I see fit on my computer... is to install malware? And that what I really want is to give full control of my PC to other people? And that no one should ever have the choice?

No, I'm saying exactly what I said. Nothing more nor less. Those are things YOU are saying.

Yeah, you're an apologist. Almost authoritarian.

You're an apologist. Almost a criminal.

See what I did there?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[jbolden]

what platform allows people to run both major-label applications and homemade applications that haven't been approved by the operating system publisher?

Both Android and Apple. Just get developer SDK and you can install what you want.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[tepples]

Just get developer SDK

And by then, you've inflated the price of an iPad from $499* to $796 to include a three-year subscription to the developer SDK, and you'll probably need to replace your current computer with a Mac in order to run Xcode.

* Assuming 3rd generation, Wi-Fi only, smallest storage.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[jbolden]

If you don't own a Mac and have a developer license then you likely don't know enough about iOS to develop your own applications for it. How many Objective-C developers on PC, more than 0?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Microlith]

It was a mirror of yours.

No, 'twas not. Mine pointed out how you were basically apologizing and defending lock down. You suggest I defend malware. I do not. But I can see how someone who is willing to surrender all authority to a corporation like Apple would miss that.

Those are things YOU are saying.

No. By suggesting that the only possible conclusion for having the option to do as I see fit with my computers is to have it end up infested with malware, you make (perhaps without realizing it) the argument that what is truly desired is to surrender all control to someone else who will "keep you safe."

You're an apologist. Almost a criminal.

See what I did there?

You demonstrated that you have no grasp on the argument at hand, and are attacking me for criticizing a corporate-authoritarian stance?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[phantomfive]

You think you're cute?

I am cute!!!
Oh, wait.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

By suggesting that the only possible conclusion for having the option to do as I see fit with my computers is to have it end up infested with malware, you make (perhaps without realizing it) the argument that what is truly desired is to surrender all control to someone else who will "keep you safe."

I didn't make any suggestion about you or your options. I pointed out the fact that Android has lots of malware on it and iOS does not. And I pointed out the fact that most people care about that, and few care about writing their own programs. All factual. The only thing you have is strawmen: declaring that I said things I didn't.

That's why I made fun of your posts.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Ol Olsoc]

Malware volume is directly proportional to a systems market share; grow big enough to be noticed by the criminals, and they'll start focusing on breaking your stuff.

That old chestnut is overcooked by this time. If a computer is vulnerable, they will build malware for it. Given that a lot of Mac users run completely bareback, it's vulnerabilities should make it much more attractive. you are still talking about million sof coomputers out there just waiting to be exploited.

Security through obscurity is almost as funny as when a MAC virus is found, apoligists line up to yell "SEE? SEE?"

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Ol Olsoc]

Ah, look, an idiotic reply. So what you're saying is that the only reason I want the ability to do as I see fit on my computer... is to install malware?

No - that's just one of the features.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[mjwx]

The same one that suffers from lots of malware.
People who care about creating their own programs: 0.01%. (and that's being generous.)
People who care about not getting malware: 99.99%.

That's why so few people are using Windows?

You're wrong again.

People will use the platform that allows them to do what they need to do. Platforms that lock them in, put up barriers to doing things and when a user does something their own way they tell them "they're holding it wrong" will not be the successful platform.

Malware on Windows doesn't matter and Malware on Android is not a big issue (sorry, I know you like to make out that it's endemic, but it really affects less than 0.001% of users) so it goes doubly so for Android.

However more people are jumping off IOS due to Apple's restrictive nature. I mean if I want to transfer a text file from my phone to my work PC I have to jump through half a dozen hoops on IOS (one of which probably requires hacking my phone) but on Android I just plug my phone in and copy/paste. I cant email these files to myself either, they're over 7 MB so the email filter at work will drop it out of hand.

People still use Windows because it allows them to do what they need to with a minimum of fuss, and so it will be with mobile devices.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

People will use the platform that allows them to do what they need to do. Platforms that lock them in, put up barriers to doing things and when a user does something their own way they tell them "they're holding it wrong" will not be the successful platform.

And Apple's collapsing sales figures bear that out, don't they?

However more people are jumping off IOS due to Apple's restrictive nature. I mean if I want to transfer a text file from my phone to my work PC I have to jump through half a dozen hoops on IOS (one of which probably requires hacking my phone) but on Android I just plug my phone in and copy/paste. I cant email these files to myself either, they're over 7 MB so the email filter at work will drop it out of hand.

You save it to the cloud and retrieve it on your PC via browser, takes about 30 seconds. This process requires hacking your phone? Plus, your employer's antiquated email server settings are hardly Apple's fault.
 

People still use Windows because it allows them to do what they need to with a minimum of fuss, and so it will be with mobile devices.

Minimum of fuss? Have you ever used an OS other than Windows for any length of time?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

Malware on smartphones is hardly an issue.

He's talking mostly about desktops and workstation, i.e. OSX vs. Windows

Re:In a post-lemming world

[mr100percent]

Both Android and iOS can do this. Apple gives away the developer tools, you can compile your own apps and even distribute them to 100 other people ad hoc. You only need App Store approval for distributing it to the public in a non-enterprise environment.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[CanHasDIY]

Malware volume is directly proportional to a systems market share; grow big enough to be noticed by the criminals, and they'll start focusing on breaking your stuff.

The facts don't support your theory. When iOS was the market leader, and Android the minority, it was still Android which was getting virtually all the malware.

We're talking about computers, not phones. Don't move goalposts, that's just childish.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[CanHasDIY]

Prestige and money are far bigger drivers.

Right - and what prestige or money is there to be gained by infecting a system that nobody uses?

Nothing you've said here is antithetical to my statement, but rather supports it.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[CanHasDIY]

Malware volume is directly proportional to a systems market share; grow big enough to be noticed by the criminals, and they'll start focusing on breaking your stuff.

That old chestnut is overcooked by this time. If a computer is vulnerable, they will build malware for it.

/quote> Disagree - If I created a new OS that had no security whatsoever, but nobody actually used it, it's not likely anyone would waste time writing malware for it (save a handful of script kiddies that can't help but piss in other people's Post Toasty-Os), because the market share (or user base or whatever term you want to use) is non-existent.

An analogy - if you want to steal money, you break into a bank, not an abandoned building; if you want to cause some damage without anyone who matters giving a shit, then you can break into the abandoned building.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

So many mistakes in such a small post.

That's why so few people are using Windows?

Big topic. But it's not because they either like or don't care about viruses. Windows achieved it's monopoly when viruses weren't as common, and when other platforms were equally susceptible.

Malware on Android is not a big issue (sorry, I know you like to make out that it's endemic

It's not me inventing it. There are Android malware stories every few days on Slashdot.

However more people are jumping off IOS due to Apple's restrictive nature.

You misunderstand the nature of market share. Just because Android gained market share at iOSs expense doesn't mean that people are leaving iOS. iOS sales numbers have only every grown, they've never shrunk. There are more users every day, not less.

I mean if I want to transfer a text file from my phone to my work PC I have to jump through half a dozen hoops on IOS (one of which probably requires hacking my phone) but on Android I just plug my phone in and copy/paste.

Then you have to do 3 more steps on Android than you do on iOS. Clearly you don't know about iCloud. iCloud keeps the categories of document you specify up to date on all your Apple devices, including your Mac. You don't even have to save, even live edits are synced. Your up to date file is already on your Mac before you even get there.

People still use Windows because it allows them to do what they need to with a minimum of fuss, and so it will be with mobile devices.

People still use Windows because of inertia, and because it's the OS that comes on the cheap PCs. People end up with Android because it's the OS that comes on the cheap smartphones. The reason Android's market share is not mirrored in web usage is that most of the customers are people that are uninterested in smartphones - they just got the cheap phone that the man at the store showed them.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Ol Olsoc]

Disagree - If I created a new OS that had no security whatsoever, but nobody actually used it, it's not likely anyone would waste time writing malware for it (save a handful of script kiddies that can't help but piss in other people's Post Toasty-Os), because the market share (or user base or whatever term you want to use) is non-existent.

Under your strict conditions that is correct - I don't see any viruses for CP/M running about. But there are millions of Mac computers out there, and if they are vulnerable, the bad guys are doing a disservice to their bad-guyness by not exploiting them. Millions is a long way from one or two.

This is not something like talking with the bad guy and having them say - "What is this Mack-in-tosh you speak of? Some sort of fruit maybe?" The bad guys know, and since they are probably opportunists, they will look for opportunity.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[BasilBrush]

We're talking about computers, not phones.

No we weren't. This thread comes from here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3174039&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=41600849

We're talking about computers, not phones. Don't move goalposts, that's just childish.

Weak. Even if this were about PCs: You try to create a general rule from the single case of Windows vs Mac OS. Then complain when it's pointed out that the rule doesn't work with the nearest comparable situation. And smartphones certainly are computers - they're just not PCs.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of Macs is nothing compared to the billions of Windows PCs out there. They might as well be non-existent.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for Android getting more malware than iOS is simply different distribution of software for both platforms (which also require different development).
So we're really comparing apples and oranges.

But all things being equal*, bigger market share means more malware.

*pretty much never, but sometimes we came close enough for reasonable comparisons

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux OS has biggest market share on smartphone markets (Android), servers (From multiple distributions) and supercomputers (multiple distributions). Still there are actually malware for it counted in one hand, and all too old or just not working.(I am talking here only about operating system = Linux kernel, not about software system (= all software stored to computer HDD/SDD etc, what ignorant people call as "OS").

For Linux market share, there should at least be 200 000 malware for Linux. They don't exist.

The market share has nothing to do with amount of malware. It is about risk analysis what is amount of malware.

Just like there are less bank robbers but much more criminal activity on streets, from pickpocket thief's to car thiefs and so on.
The bank has more money in it, but risk to get caught is much bigger. You need to loot few houses and cars to get even a few thousand dollars, but the risk to get caught is much smaller.

Question is, do you steal one dollar from million users, or do you steal million dollars from one company?

It is easier to make a malware what gives you few cents per computer without risk getting caught, than making a malware against a bank or big corporations to get few millions from them.

If you kill a fly, no one cares, if you kill a man, you can run, but if you kill the president, you are hunted and chased rest of your life by all means necessary.
Even when killing a president can be easier than killing a random man, the risk is much higher.

At software, the amount of malware is based for code quality and software architecture design. If code or architecture is weak, you get easily malware against it. But if you have software what has perfect code and architecture is "hack proof" (in theory now), then you can not even make anykind malware against it, as that software protects user from social hacks as well.

What has happened to those who have tried to attack against NSA or CIA? To search about UFO's?
One "peek" and you are hunted terrorists, traitor plaa plaa plaa.

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anguirel]

The facts don't support your theory. When iOS was the market leader, and Android the minority, it was still Android which was getting virtually all the malware.

Isn't there a joke here somewhere about every phone with iOS having malware on it, called "iOS"?

Re:In a post-lemming world

[Anonymous Coward]

You're ignoring the percent of people who care about being able to install applications that can't get on the market for political or technical reasons. For instance, the Humble Bundle.

Bluetooth monitor, CPU, keyboard and mouse.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Supply the 20 inch bluetooth monitor with a stand. Integrate speakers into monitor. Make the bluetooth keyboard in several sizes, including full size. One 12 volt cord for monitor; one for the CPU. All connections are bluetooth or USB for external disk I/O. Batteries for the rest. Is it still a desktop computer?

Re:Bluetooth monitor, CPU, keyboard and mouse.

[jlusk4]

Bingo.

Plus server in closet for when you need horsepower.

No shit.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

I've lost count of how many "PC IS DEAD, LONG LIVE MOBILE!" arguments I've heard, or if you want to go further back "PC IS DEAD, LONG LIVE PDAS!"

The PC is here to stay, gimmicky toys are not.

They will go away because the desk is doomed

[bugs2squash]

As a piece of furniture in an office I see standing desks now as the in-coming thing and I would imagine that they too will be defunct in a few years as offices re-arrange to make better use of the space and people find ways to work at home without having a dedicated office room. It's the desk that's days are numbered.

I can see the office of the future full of la-z-boys and cup holders.

Re:They will go away because the desk is doomed

[Loosifur]

I agree with you so far as standing desks being gone in a few years; I have never seen one outside of Ikea.

On the other hand, the office of the future you describe is one sectional sofa and a chihuahua away from being the average east Texas living room.

PC will be integrated with screens

[na1led]

As computing power increases, and size decreases, most likely Desktops will be part of the LCD. Look at the Raspberry Pi, or the MK802, it's small enough to hide inside any LCD made today and provide the computing power of a PC 4 years ago.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[JustAnotherIdiot]

This is already being done by several companies, it's commonly called an "all-in-one PC"

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[na1led]

I can see buying a monitor and choosing what pc module you want plugged into it. A hidden compartment that let's you plug in you pc.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[viperidaenz]

a 700MHz ARM SoC can't even compete with a PC from 10 years ago, let alone 4. For particular tasks like video decoding, where there is dedicated hardware support then yes. For general purpose computing, not a chance.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[na1led]

Have you looked at the mk802 III? It has a dual core 1.6 ghz cpu with 3d graphics, and 1gb ram.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[viperidaenz]

That might be comparable to a Pentium III-800! Wait, that's 13 years old. It'd get its ass kicked by a 1.4GHz Pentium 3, from 10 years ago in anything but academic benchmarks.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[na1led]

Pentium 3 systems didn't have 1Gb of DDR3 system memory, or high end 3D GPU's. Plus Windows is a bloated operating system, so comparing a 10 year old system to a smartphone today, the smartphone will whip through the Internet far faster then that old Pentium 3.

Re:PC will be integrated with screens

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I believe these are called "laptops" or "notebooks", they also outsell standard Desktops in the PC market.

Laptops are the new desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't personally touched a "desktop" in years. At work i have a laptop attached to an external monitor most of the time. At home I have a laptop attached to an external monitor most of the time. Only my hardcore gamer friends have desktops at home.

Laptops these days are pretty dang powerful
At work I can do my software development, and number crunching just fine.
At home I can edit photos and game to my hearts content.

The limited improvement in performance (for most tasks any way) and the theoretical upgrade path by having a desktop simply doesn't matter to most people.

For the desktop to remain cheap they need to sell tens of millions per year... I don't think the market will be that large so that advantage will go away..

Laptops are the new desktop, deal with it.

Re:Laptops are the new desktop

[dadelbunts]

When purchasing a new computer recently. I found that laptops of the same specs were actually cheaper than desktops.

Re:Laptops are the new desktop

[91degrees]

Yes. It occurred to me that the benefit of a laptop is not portability, but stowability. A desktop PC requires a substantial chunk of space since it needs a dedicated desk, pus a chair. A laptop can be used on a kitchen table, and put on a shelf when not in use.

Sort of: Digital Creators Vs. Digital Consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop PCs won't last forever, but what will last is a niche for people who want to create with their device as opposed to merely consume or interact with something another person created.

That's a difference in what experience people want to have and what effort they are willing to invest, and that kind of mental difference is going to last a lot longer than form factors or input devices.

I would buy that book

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this. I want you to write a history of technology going back to pointy sticks and heavy rocks.

I should say that you could write a book about it, but self-publishing has clipped niche book publishers.

No, and there's no reason for it to.

[theedgeofoblivious]

Research is being done on things like Google Glasses.

With augmented reality and the ability to overlay images from every possible perspective onto the eye, there will be no need for a desktop display screen. Voice recognition can be cumbersome for navigation(at least now), so you might still have a desire to have a keyboard(if for nothing else than tactile feedback)..

Research is also being done on ways for computers to read brainwaves and to actually implant thoughts into people's heads. That will do some very interesting things. First, it would enable communication that approximated telepathy, not just in communication but in education. It would allow me to instantaneously convey to you everything I knew about a subject. It would also get rid of the need for input devices like mouses and keyboards, because whatever system you were using could type words at the speed that you think them. It would enable augmented reality, but it would also enable fantasy-type environments, in which your brain could believe that it was experiencing inputs it actually isn't. It would be much better than Star Trek's holodecks, because you could experience entirely different states, like being an animal, being someone of the opposite gender, living a million years, flying, having magical powers, having orgasms on demand, et cetera.

Tablets are nothing but a stepping stone. But no, desktops will definitely not be around forever.

Probably not, but it's not going away anytime soon

[Ziggitz]

The PC still exists for 2 reasons. Interface and processing power. Lugging around a full qwerty keyboard, mouse and 2 24+ inch monitors is not practical. Having a portable unit is also far more expensive, technologically challenging to produce, and difficult to power.

When the ergonomics of a truly efficient gesture based interface, based on more subtle movements no greater than what you do with a mouse and keyboard instead of exaggerated imprecise arm waving, a set of eye wear or other output mechanism that gives the output bandwidth of two large monitors and a way to fit more processing more than the most power PC's to date into a case the size of a phone and power them, then the desktop pc will die. Alternatively access to enough bandwidth to offload all processing requirements to a server with a thin client like device on hand at a very low latency will also achieve the same goal.

Most points are true but generally irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

There are really only 2 points that I can agree with for reasons why desktops may never go away completely.

5) You can play (real) computer games on desktops
7) You can use creative software efficiently on a desktop

The both really boil down to the same thing. You don't have power limits you can get a lot more powerful components. For 7 many decent laptops are more than plenty for basic creative software functions. Yes there will always be heavy uses pushing what can be done but laptops will be "good enough" for more and more of the tasks people want to accomplish.

1)Desktop PCs are cheap- true but not really that big an issue. The convenience of having a portable system when you need it makes that increasingly small additional cost less of an issue.
2)Desktops are more powerful- true but outside of category 5 & 7 it's really pointless. Even those pathetic arm processors in tablets and cell phones are actually plenty powerful for most of what everyone else does.
3)You can plug a ton of peripherals into desktops- most people don't really plug all that much stuff into their machines and even if they do hubs are common and cheap. USB3 and thunderbolt make this even less of an issue.
4)You get extra screen real estate with desktops- just because you are using a laptop doesn't mean you can't use the same big screen you'd use on a desktop. Multiple monitor support is more common even if it is just the laptop monitor and the external. Many dockable laptops will even support multiple external monitors.
6)Fixing a desktop is easy- True but most people treat their desktops like a toaster or microwave. When it breaks you buy a new one and it makes sense. If you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself the cost for someone to do it for you is going to eat into a lot of your potential savings all to be stuck with a machine that still isn't in warranty.
8)You can recycle a desktop as an NAS deviceor a fish tank- who cares most people don't do anything like this with their old machines.
9)Desktops are secure and they last a long time- A laptop can last a long time if it isn't carried around a lot but if you are carrying it around enough to rough it up and loose it then you obviously need a laptop in the first place so the desktop not being portable doesn't seem like an advantage. As far as theft from your house a laptop locked up with a cable lock is more secure than a desktop sitting there.
10)You can build your own desktop- Once again something most people don't do and there really isn't any reason for most people to do so. If you are just looking for a cheap machine to do basic tasks you aren't gonna be able to beat the price of a dell/hp/etc box building it yourself. The only time it's really an advantage is when you want an odd setup for a specific task. Mid-level gaming cards seems to be one of the area's that big OEMs still don't get. Their gaming boxes are either cost is no issue with 500+ dollar video cards or a 100$ for a barely better than integrated video video card. It's very rare to see a 150-250 card and when it is an option they charge you 250$ to upgrade from the base 100$ video card.

Different devices for different taks

[Turmoyl]

I was just having this conversation with my coworkers this morning. It took me 3 years, but I finally found a use for a tablet. I am getting burned out on the constant cycle of patch and nerf that MMOs come with, and don't have the time to sink into console gaming. I have found that I enjoy the digital trading card games, and other phone/tablet based RTS genres, but that playing them on my phone strains my eyes, and causes my fingers to remain in cramped positions. As such, I ordered my first tablet yesterday evening.

However, the one thing that phones and tablets absolutely suck at is productivity, and I am currently attending college. My desktop, with its 22" screen and multitasking ability, rules for creating spreadsheets, writing essays, or even creating longer messages such as this post. However, the desktop stinks for the online portion of my math class as I have to lean forward to to reach past the keyboard for hand calculations, or try to do it against a clipboard or folder leaning in my lap. Either way quickly invites ergonomic issues.

Because of this I have a Chromebook. I can leave my desktop's keyboard tray pushed fully in, and bring my chair up against my desk. The Chromebook sits neatly to my left while my scratch paper is right in front of me. The only time I touch its keyboard is to enter solutions.

At first glance it seems ridiculous that I have 4 devices now, but each one of them fits a niche in my life. I don't see anything replacing the desktop soon as there is no other practical way to have a large screen and enjoyable input format, let alone true multi-window multitasking. However, I know that once my tablet arrives I will have little need to boot my desktop up anymore, perhaps once per week. I may even be able to do my online math homework on the tablet, but the Chromebook does this so well that I'm not certain it would be worth the hassle of finding a stand for the tablet.

No way

[gooner666]

Porn looks WAY to small on those things.

I keep getting -1 over here...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'll be generous: this article deserves a +5, ridiculous.

I give the common desktop 5-10 years tops

[Leslie43]

Once we get wireless displays in our phones (and cheaper storage, which is coming), that will mark the final straw, everything will be phone based.

Right now we try to bring the data to the phone, instead, reverse it, put everything on the phone and run everything from that. With this method, you always have your data, instead of always retrieving it from elsewhere. As the phone becomes more and more the primary device, this makes more and more sense. If you haven't seen it, take a look at Clambook. Now adapt that same system (wirelessly) to a desktop and tablet. They won't even be a thin client, they will simply be extensions of your phone.

This means less services to pay for since you only need internet on the phone, as well as fewer items to maintain. It ends up far cheaper and more efficient as you don't even need to buy a tower anymore. As it stands, the only thing really holding it back is a UI that works on a desktop, any guess as to where Microsoft and Ubuntu think we are heading?

Desktops will remain, but they will become more of a tool (like they were 30 years ago). Gamers, artists, etc, anything needing more power will stay on the desktop for at least a bit longer. Some things need the extra power, but the average store bought PC that is mostly for browsing the internet will be dead. The same applies to game consoles, they will go back to being just a game system for more hardcore gamer as most will play from their phone connected to whatever peripheral they choose.

Desktops will live on, but not for everybody

[Animats]

Desktops will live on for many decades, but may not be of widespread use. The main use for desktops will be for people who have to input and manipulate graphically complex stuff. Engineers, animators, graphic designers, architects, building contractors - people who can start with a blank screen and fill it up.

Tablets and phones (there's not much of a distinction any more) are mostly output devices. Touch-screen typing is mediocre at best, and touch-screen drawing is awful. I suspect that tablets which optionally work with pens may make a comeback.

The future of desk jobs where everything comes in and out through the computer is bleak. More and more of that will be automated. The call center industry is leveling off and will drop.

I welcome the ASUS T-800 series

[Anonymous Coward]

Only cyborgs can end the reign of the desktop.

news ?

[Tom]

Uh, last I checked, pretty much everyone who doesn't work in the marketing department of a tablet company, or in the newsroom of a computer magazine that needs sensationalistic headlines, or had a terrible accident during brain surgery agrees that the whole "post-PC" is either bullshit or at least doesn't mean that the PC is going away.

I've yet to see the first non-crazy argument about how exactly tablets are going to completely replace PCs. They take over in certain areas, they are better suited for some tasks, but they aren't going away and anyone who says so has had a bit too much of his favorite drug.

Of course it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

When Apple says something, you better listen. This said the PC is dead, so it's goddamn dead.

Fucking dinosaurs, stop clinging to your malware-infested limited crap.

Off by more than an order of magnitude

[tepples]

People who care about creating their own programs: 0.01%. (and that's being generous.)

In 2004, the U.S. population was 293 million (source). By your estimate of 100 programmers per million, you'd expect there to be 29,000 programmers. But in that year, there were 760,840 people employed as software engineers in the United States, who made up about one out of every three engineers in the nation (source). That's not even counting people who aren't programmers per se but whose job includes some programming, computer science and software engineering students, and hobbyist programmers. So I'd guess your estimate is off by two orders of magnitude.

People who care about not getting malware: 99.99%.

There are ways to limit the damage that malware can cause without forcing everybody who buys a computer to rely exclusively on a single application repository curated by the operating system publisher and subject to said publisher's ulterior motives. For example, a platform could use the Ubuntu/Android model of having multiple competing repositories. Or it could use the OLPC/Android model of limiting the capabilities given to an application while still allowing self-signed software to run.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[BasilBrush]

Those are professional programmers, not people who want to create their own "homemade applications".

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[jbolden]

There are ways to limit the damage that malware can cause without forcing everybody who buys a computer to rely exclusively on a single application repository curated by the operating system publisher and subject to said publisher's ulterior motives.

Apple doesn't do that. You can point your phone at any repository you want. You just get the University or Enterprise SDK and you setup your own.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[tepples]

You can point your phone at any repository you want. You just get the University or Enterprise SDK and you setup your own.

How much does it cost over the life of a device to "just get the University or Enterprise SDK"?

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[tepples]

Even professional programmers need a way to test programs that they have compiled. So do software engineering students. How do you intend to provide that in a post-PC world?

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[jbolden]

To point your device costs nothing. And you wouldn't buy a repository for one device. For one device you just use a developer SDK.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[BasilBrush]

Even professional programmers need a way to test programs that they have compiled.

Sure, and they or their companies join the Apple Developer Program to do so. $99 isn't a bar for professionals.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[cykros]

"The Cloud".

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

So 3.8% of software developers would have to care about their own programs. Sounds about right!

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[Ol Olsoc]

People who care about creating their own programs: 0.01%. (and that's being generous.)

In 2004, the U.S. population was 293 million (

Whoosh.

There are ways to limit the damage that malware can cause without forcing everybody who buys a computer to rely exclusively on a single application repository curated by the operating system publisher and subject to said publisher's ulterior motives. For example, a platform could use the Ubuntu/Android model of having multiple competing repositories. Or it could use the OLPC/Android model of limiting the capabilities given to an application while still allowing self-signed software to run.

Um huh. Went to the Verizon store today to get my son a smartphone for his birthday. The sales guy who was a way over the top android fan was telling us how stupid it was to get the iPhone because of the "walled garden" How he gets apps "from all over the world - and for Free!" a person would have to be stupid to go for an iPhone - and It's SOOOOOOO Expensive."

You see, the android phone people want to get their apps free, they want to not have any restrictions, and they are setting up another Windows like environment, where the price you pay is eternal vigalence. Sorry, I just want a telephone that has some helpful things on it, not a tiny badge of freedom that I have to maintain like my windows computers in the past.

So while there are possible ways to ensure safety, their market win't have them.

We got the iPhone. And I'll have an iPhone 5 when my present contract is up.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[tepples]

For one thing, it's not $99; it's $99 per platform per year.

For another, you still haven't mentioned where high school students and college students are expected to get this $99 per platform per year.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[BasilBrush]

That's because they are not professional programmers. You mistook me for someone who wanted to encourage non-professionals to make apps for iOS.

There's a free university student programme. That seems like the right level to be encouraging.

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

So, "if you need to ask, you can't afford it"?

Re:Off by more than an order of magnitude

[jbolden]

No it is rather affordable regardless just at a PIA. More like you buy a plane ticket not charter a plane for one person.

The Same As...

[dcollins]

- Books killed storytelling.
- Movies killed theater.
- Videos killed radio.
- Arcades killed boardgames.

Re:The Same As...

[Anonymous Coward]

But books are still around and I'd much rather read a real book than text on a tablet. Theater is still strong if you mean live action .
OTOH I can take a whole library with me on a tablet while being limited to a couple of books or magazines. OTOH I much prefer a larger screen than a tablet but with an internet connection I can read most of my magazines on-line, although a download is preferred. Ever try streaming while on the road without it dropping out.
Streaming has a long way to go before it matures. Even with a 60 Meg connection (that often goes to 100) streaming is often intermittent, while I can download a two hour movie onto an HD is a couple of minutes. Music takes seconds.

will stupid apple tablet devs shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

no really we already said your tablets are only useful to 5 year olds .....now go away...

I LOL'd

[EmagGeek]

"it's nowhere near as convenient as a desktop when you're trying to complete serious work in an office environment."

Haha... this is America. There is no more serious work being done in an office environment. Just a lot of millenials hanging around, playing video games and ping pong, drinking Red Bull, and expecting the big paychecks to roll in ad infinitum.

In fact, Bravo has a new "reality" series showcasing millenial entrepreneurship, where meetings happen over drinks at poolside, and maybe someone might write a line of code from time to time - and everyone gets rich!

WOOHOO!!!

Re:I LOL'd

[geekoid]

Well, a Bravo reality TV show! It must be true,.

Ergonomics

[Anonymous Coward]

Once all the work related injury lawsuits (caused by too small input devices and people hunching forward to read too small screens) start rolling in, watch desktops come back with a bang.

They may be thinner and more integrated, but if you spend all day as a slave to the machine, you need decent I/O devices that don't damage the human body - so workplace use will continue to use something that looks like a desktop for quite a while.

What's the point of docking?

[Anonymous Coward]

If everything exists on the server, what do you need the phone for? Thin clients are cheap enough that you can put one in the monitor itself.

It'll live until something better comes along.

[Loosifur]

The PC killer will have to have:

1. A better input scheme than mouse and keyboard, suitable for everything from gaming to typing.
2. A power supply that is effectively unlimited.
3. The capacity to be easily modified, either by attaching external devices or by adding internal components.
4. Processing capability suitable for at least moderately intense applications.
5. A display that is clear and easily viewed.
6. Storage or access to storage capable of operating independently of web access.

Essentially, the most important aspect of the PC is the fact that it sits on a desk. You can hook a PC up to a television (or use a console with a keyboard) and it's not nearly as useful--try typing a lengthy document or doing anything work-like hunched forward over a coffee table, and don't get me started about wireless mice. The PC/desk combo has been developed to be the most effective, efficient, and comfortable workstation since the two became involved in the 70s.

Laptops come close, but only when they're--you guessed it--used on a desk, and then they're hampered by battery life. Unless they're plugged in, as most are, making them essentially small, cramped PCs. Consoles aren't anywhere near PCs for ease of control, and of course they have virtually no use beyond watching movies or playing games due to the lack of effective keyboard peripherals and the whole coffee table thing. Tablets and phones are fine for checking email or looking something up on the Internet in a pinch, but they're awful for typing, still lag far behind in processing power, and have battery life issues.

Until someone comes up with something that basically replaces the desk as the primary place of work, the PC will be king.

Re:It'll live until something better comes along.

[neminem]

My laptop has a 17.4 inch screen, and a full keyboard including number pad. Not really that cramped. Just saying. I certainly wouldn't complain if I could get a better battery in it, though my primary use case for having a laptop is "be able to unplug it while it's on, move it to a different room conveniently, plug it back in and keep using it". Secondary use case is "turn it off, stick it in my backpack, bring it to a friend's house, plug it in, use it." I love the power-to-convenience ratio of desktop replacements, and I can't imagine -those- getting replaced by anything that isn't obviously simply a better, but clearly similar, desktop replacement, anytime soon either.

Think Smaller

[Motard]

When I compare what used to sit on my desktop in the '80s, to a smartphone today, it's really not too much of a leap to imagine a final form factor that will be very much like a credit card. Eventually, this 'CCPC' may have an integrated screen, but interim editions may drive a separate screen you keep in your wallet along with your extra battery capacity.

These screens will only be used to lookup a phone number or to perform other 'console-type' functions. Screens of varying sizes will be everywhere. In your car, at work, at home, in your hotel room (instead of a TV). Likewise, speakers, keyboards and any other peripherals you may need will be everywhere. You'll be able to walk into a client's boardroom, pair your machine with their wall mounted display and give your presentation. Then you can get back in your car and its touch display will be paired with your device so you can use navigation and get reminders.

Most of us will probably have at least two CCPCs. One for personal business and one for company business. We'll just carry them both around as we carry around multiple credit/debit/reward cards (which will all be made redundant). The credit card is already a proven form factor for being small enough to be supremely portable, but not so small that it is easily lost.

Back when the Macintosh was introduced, it was fashionable to use computery MICR fonts to make your company look high tech. But with laser printing and desktop publishing, the last thing you wanted was to produce something that looked like it came out of a computer.

I think a similar thing is about to happen in the next evolution. Right now, the world wants stylish new smartphones. But soon, having a device that's actually visible to others - and especially fiddling around with it - will make you look like a luddite. Instead, we'll conjure images onto the nearest touch display 'ourselves'.

The CCPC will become *more* personal (and ever more powerful), but no longer bound by the desktop. Sure, your desk may have 12 displays that you use during the work day, but when you walk away, you'll take their brains with you. You probably won't even need to log out.

Re:Think Smaller

[jbolden]

I think you'll like this video from Microsoft about their long term direction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a6cNdhOKwi0

Re:Think Smaller

[BanHammor]

So, if short, Raspberry Pi will rule the world?

Yes, yes it will

[slapout]

Everything lays the foundation for what comes next. IP protocol sits on top of Ethernet. TCP sits on top of IP. HTTP sits on top of TCP. Just because everyone thinks mostly at the level of HTTP doesn't mean that Ethernet is no longer relevant. Likewise, tablets are nice. But (most of) those web sites you're visiting on them were created using a Desktop PC. And those apps your running on them were created with a Desktop PC. Just because you can't see the PC, doesn't mean that it isn't involved in some way.

Re:Yes, yes it will

[EnglishDude]

That's not a good comparison. I mean, in the past, you could access the Internet on dial-up modems, coaxial networks and the like. Do you see them around nowadays? No. What you're describing is what is in use today and slightly different to each other such as HTTP is entirely software and Ethernet is entirely hardware. Laptops, desktops, tablets etc are equivalent devices that in theory can do the same thing (watch video, send emails etc).

Mine seems to be hanging in there!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've forgotten how old it is, but it's pretty old. Seems like forever already.

I think we should hope the answer is yes

[DarkOx]

Forever is a long time, and there are major events like if quantum computing suddenly became a mass market reality but baring something like that:

The humble project box style PC remains the most powerful, inexpensive, and flexible personal computer device you can get. Even if we get to the point where its not the center of our day to day computing tasks (and some folks may be there already) there is just nothing like for trying out new ideas.

Any software project, hardware peripheral, interface, network architecture you can image can at least be experimented with on PC. There is just no platform like it. I am including things like ARM boards etc in this, basically anything you can stuff in in a industry standard project box style case, run with one of the common standard power supply types etc.

Old paradigms

[Anonymous Coward]

In the quest for new paradigms, we are for some reason obsessed with the obsolescence of older paradigms, like we can only have so many paradigms at a time or something. Many people remember this about the rise of the popularity of laptops, "is this the end of PCs?" No, laptops didn't (and will never) replace PCs, we now have PCs and laptops, and now we have PCs and laptops, and smartphones, and tablets, and gaming consoles, and arduinos, and PVRs and etc

The wheel was invented at the beginning of time (or something like that), but I predict it will never reach obsolescence, even with a paradigm like hover technology available, the wheel will still be more elegant from an engineering stand point, as well as efficient.

Define anytime soon...

[multicoregeneral]

From my vantage point, I don't see Android killing the PC just yet. It's got a long way to go as far as serious apps for business. The play store is wrought with Spam, and there are still no capable dev tools how many years later? So, we're figured out how to root the damned things, but that doesn't really do us any good unless there's something good to run on them. It's only the last two years that reasonable office suites have begun to emerge. Quality code editors and debuggers are seriously lagging.

Believe me, if I could replace my PC with a tablet, I would. I'm just not ready to throw away the monster desktop just yet, though.

Re:Define anytime soon...

[geekoid]

"no capable dev tools how many years later?"
WTF are you talking about? Maybe you should educate yourself a bit, hmmm?

Re:Define anytime soon...

[multicoregeneral]

Show me some capable development tools for Android that are at least as capable as Notepad++. There aren't any.

Re:Define anytime soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ being the minimum working standard for functional dev tools, by the way.

no.

[Nocturnal Deviant]

No. It will last until something is found that is faster, cheaper, and smaller than the current status quo.

New mobo == new PC

[tepples]

At one time, or another, each of these pieces interacted with a piece of the original machine, or a piece that interacted with a piece of the original machine (I think the most is 2 generations of that). David Wong was brilliant when he wrote about the axe paradox.

At least for purposes of Windows OS licensing, it's a new PC when you replace the motherboard.

Re:New mobo == new PC

[norpy]

Of course if you have a retail license that doesn't even matter, you get somethign like 5 motherboard upgrades before you have to call them up to activate but they rarely question it.

hmm

[nomadic]

I disagree. I know plenty of people who don't use a desktop at all, and will spend hours in front of a laptop in their office. Many of them don't even move their laptop around. Personally, I can't do it, I much prefer a desktop, but I definitely feel like I'm in the minority.

No

[geekoid]

in fact it will become more personal. You'll just always carry it around with you and dock it to periphials when you can.

Like a security camera

[tepples]

managers can't see their people working if they're not chained to a desk

My boss and I tried an experiment where I'd run CamStudio screen recording software in time lapse mode, reencode the day's work in VirtualDub, and show it to him sped up by a factor of about 100. This was enough to prove to him that I wasn't slacking off all day. I imagine employees are more likely to accept such remote monitoring if it means they won't be chained to a desk, just as retail employees have learned to accept surveillance for loss prevention.

Standards there already & partially deployed

[Anonymous Coward]

When I travel I hook up my phone to the hotel TV via HDMI. My phone also supports bluetooth keyboard and mouse - and using the mouse isn't too bad. Power is micro USB.

So we're mostly there already - and no vendor lock in for any of those.

Re: building

[CanHasDIY]

There's one minor issue I see with your (repetitively posted) dystopian future view: it assumes that society will continue in its current form indefinitely. It will not.

Also, entropy

So, all the geeks and no one has read Snow Crash?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only read the first 20 comments so call me lazy but....

No one mentioned Moore's law. People alluded to it but no one named it. In '93 I upgraded my hard-drive from 60 to 260 megabytes and that was huge. I would say that mobile computers have already replaced the PC, and I dare-say that I have built more PC's than all but the most hard core out there. I would say that the iPhone is a perfect example of something faster and with a ton more storage than the first 10 (well, I went through a lot of computers) computers that I had. Now, I bought the little eye-device the glasses that you plug into your iPhone and then simulates a 32" screen, had a keyboard for the iPad. You start to think about voice recognition, and speech to text, and you realize that the attachment to the PC is a geeks fondness for the past. It was cool, it's over. Time for you to get over it. Things are bigger before they're smaller, so maybe pc's will be a place for exercising the "I had the biggest, fastest first war." My guess is that far more important to the growth of small computers being better than PCs will be the development of ultra-highspeed wireless internet. The real thing that separates using a pc vs. a laptop or 'mobile device' is about the speed of connection. Couple a fast connection with screens you can wear like glasses or that are even embedded in contact lenses, speech to text (better than today but not much) and basically you can go to a world where you don't need a computer on you at all, you just log into a workstation and access your information through the cloud.

PC's are dead, let it go.

The 80's sucked.

You're old now.

Let it go.

Laptops aren't good for business?!

[CobaltBlueDW]

I like how he tried to sneak laptops in there at the end. You can definitely do REAL business on a laptop. In fact, my life would be a hassle if you couldn't, I take a laptop everywhere with me. Laptop + Smart-phone-Hotspot = business ANYWHERE. You might be able to get more power for the price with a desktop, but there are very few jobs where PC performance is an issue.

So the twats are gone

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically all the wankers will fuck off and the people who care will be left. It'll be like the pre 1983s all over again. Thank fuck!!

will cars live forever?

[fishingmachine]

with the invention of aircraft are cars now going the way of the dodo? boeing thinks so. click in rage so we get more ad revenue kthx.

Are we talking efficient computing or cheap boxes?

[Envy Life]

They key to efficient computing is the display and input. It's many times more productive for me to work with a full sized keyboard and a large monitor or two than to squint at a small screen and use a keyboard sized for kid hands.

Fact is, most notebooks sold today are fast enough for 90% of the use of a PC (internet browsing, email, office documents), and include all the peripherals peole need, and will have more in the future. As a result desktop computers will die, and sooner than some of you want to believe. To the parent, a $80 SSD is a cheap fix for the encryption issue.

manna

[Anonymous Coward]

the second half of manna (book) is where I would like future tech to direct itself.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

How to make the desktop PC extinct

[abhi2012]

If you ask me, its pretty much easy to make the Desktop PC extinct. 1. Decrease the cost of hardware in mobile devices especially laptops. 2. Decrease the cost of hardware in mobile devices especially laptops. 3. Decrease the cost of hardware in mobile devices especially laptops.

Thank you, Article Author

[Anonymous Coward]

Those the article is retorting: 1998 called, it wants its hyperbole back.

When laptops started to become more than just the previous generation's hardware [if it was connected to a docking station] for 2-3x the price of a desktop, it was 'the end of the PC'.

When console gaming started to overtake PC gaming, it was 'the end of the PC'.

When palm pilots and blackberries and the demi-smartphones all hit, it was 'the end of the PC'.

When mobile versions of powerful hardware [such as mid-grade video cards] hit, it was 'the end of the PC'.

When smartphones hit, it was 'the end of the PC'.

When tablets and Android hit, it was 'the end of the PC'.

Crying 'PCs are dead!' is about like that one crazy old fart that keeps insisting that *this time*, he's right about the date of the rapture, and conveniently "miscalculated" every time he's proven to be a loon.

The numbers everyone loves to point at to "prove" PCs are on the way out...declining PC sales and skyrocketing porta-gadget sales...has nothing to do with the end of PCs and everything to do with market saturation. Almost everyone that has use for a PC, has a PC. Sometimes, several. iShinies haven't hit that saturation yet. Combine that with the obsolescence rate of the two devices...Apple releases a new iStatusSymbol what, every 9 months? A PC built in the past 5 years will be 'good enough' for anything but a high-demand user until the day it keels over. There is no everyman software driving up system requirements at this point; only a handful of niches need the latest and greatest.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one that sees that. The article's author, and several users here, also see it.

Careless words

[Anonymous Coward]

Forever? Trillions of trillions of years?
I would hazard to guess it will not.

Nothing can replace the typewriter

[erroneus]

It's simply too important an invention. It is found in every office, every business and nearly every home. It was a breakthrough in so many ways. What could possibly replace it?

Oh sure... some "computer" thing... it's just a fancy typewriter is all... and it's too expensive. What else is it good for?

Some may not remember hearing things like that, but I do.

Now people are unable to imagine a replacement for a PC? Sorry, but it's coming.

You phone is the new PC. You will have different displays, different interfaces and different functionality based on where it is used. In your car? It's navigation, information and all that... and a phone. At work it's a work machine. At home, it's a game machine. When I'm vacationing... you get the idea. Your phone is the new PC. You don't need a desktop any longer.

Bob's Game

[tepples]

Independent Developers - hobbyists and other small scale/independent developers currently can't afford the cost of server grade computers to do their development on.

Nintendo doesn't give a $EXPLETIVE about truly independent developers. It denied Robert Pelloni the privilege to release his product on its platforms because Pelloni didn't have enough capital.

NES and Atari 7800

[tepples]

Yeah uh huh, because device manufacturers in the future won't need developers to write apps to sell their devices. All the SDKs will go away, companies will stop giving away free developer tools and all interfaces will only be available under NDAs *rollseyes*.

In the set-top and handheld video gaming market, this has been the case since 1986 when the NES and Atari 7800 came out.

You are wrong on mainframes though

[Sycraft-fu]

There are more of them now than when they were the only computers there were. Now that still isn't many compared to desktops, but the market is as big as it has ever been. They have been eclipsed by other devices, but not killed off and show no signs of dying.

Same kind of deal with desktops/laptops.

Creation versus consumption

[Anonymous Coward]

It's starting to look like we have two main use cases:

1: Content creation
2: Content consumption

The desktop is great for creation, and can serve some consumption needs too.

So it all comes down to this: Is it possible for mobile devices to become good at content creation?

The answer to this will depend almost entirely on very specific UI details, mostly centering around editors. Think: text editors, file managers, picture/video/sound editors, etc. Can a mobile device ever support those apps as well as (or almost as well as) a desktop?

My intuitive answer is: no. Sometimes, the form factor is absolutely everything. Human fingers will never be less than about 1cm across. Human eyes have a resolution limit. Vision will always contain orders of magnitude more information than speech ever can, so speech recognition will always have its limits.

To me, asking whether mobile devices can be effectively used for content creation is like asking whether we will ever have cars that are so small that they can fit in your pocket. Cars are as big as they need to be to accommodate the realities of human dimensions. I have no reason to believe that computers won't also follow that basic rule.

Nothing lasts forever

[JSombra]

Forever? No. But some type of "desktop" will always exist until someone comes up with a better alternative for production based computing than the the mouse and keyboard and currently no one has. It's not about the the actual PC but rather the tools that humans use to interact with it and while touch screen/tablets have their uses (consumption) they are poor for production *Quotes around desktop because there will most likely come a time, at least in corp environment where the hardware, aka actual computer, will not be anywhere near the desk but rather some kind virtualized pc getting directly beamed to a screen with a just a receiver chip in it and at a later date the same even in the home environment

Waiting your turn

[tepples]

Keyboard and Mouse trumps controller all day.

I'll grant you that for some genres. For others, four controllers (plural) trump one keyboard, one mouse, and three players sitting and waiting their turn.

After the 1983 video game recession

[tepples]

However, someone has to create the stuff that we consume so the desktop is going to be around for a long time to come.

The walled-garden approach pioneered by Nintendo and Atari in the mid-1980s holds that yes, someone needs to create works, but this "someone" should be an established company, not a startup formed by recent graduates.

No emulation on Windows RT

[tepples]

Microsoft aims Windows RT to be an OS with a windows OS kernel for ARM, with all the theoretical capability of being a grown-up desktop OS if it needs to. Your visual studio will have an ARM compile target, and your favorite app vendor will give you an ARM binary. Legacy stuff will get emulated (remember rosetta?)

Windows RT has no emulator. Windows RT can't run anything in the desktop environment other than Office and IE. All third-party applications run in the WinRT environment, have a "Modern UI", and must be approved by Microsoft and distributed through the Windows Store.

Android has a major risk here - on-boarding a grown-up desktop OS into a phone-based VM can be a killer app if done right, and Google have no grown-up desktop OS.

That's something Canonical is trying to fix with its Ubuntu chroot for Android.

JAMMA

[tepples]

I can see buying a monitor and choosing what pc module you want plugged into it. A hidden compartment that let's you plug in you pc.

Arcade games have been doing this for a long time. You buy a cabinet with a JAMMA connector, and then you buy game PCBs to play in it.

Re:JAMMA

[na1led]

Yea but the PCB was large, and the controls don't always match. Now building a name arcade cabinet powered by a cell phone would be cool.

adb install and Unknown sources

[tepples]

And on Android devices, doesn't it vary by OEM?

In theory it does, but in practice, very few relevant OEMs block sideloading. All Android devices that come with Google Play Store allow sideloading through adb install; it's part of Google's CDD. Almost all of them have a checkbox to let users make this process more convenient, labeled "allow installing applications from unknown sources" or the like. Even AT&T capitulated on this by popular demand for the Amazon Appstore. The major holdout on this appears to be recent Nook tablets, whose developer sign-up model appears to be oriented more toward poaching experienced developers from other Android app stores.

AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[tepples]

If you don't own a Mac and have a developer license then you likely don't know enough about iOS to develop your own applications for it.

You can't develop for iOS on an iPad. You can develop for Android on an Android device. Droid does what iDon't. And even if one did have a Mac and "know enough about iOS" after a year of experience, the developer SDK still expires after a year.

How many Objective-C developers on PC, more than 0?

I admit the GNUstep community is an edge case, but it's still greater than zero.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[jbolden]

I admit the GNUstep community is an edge case, but it's still greater than zero.

Fair enough but... I'm not sure that's still not 0. The GNUStep community are Apple fans or at the very least NeXT fans. They mostly all have Apple developer licenses and the ones that don't know enough about iOS to install without them. I doubt you would find many GNUStepers that don't own several Macs. The whole point of GNUStep is to bring NeXT/Apple features to Linux.

You can't develop for iOS on an iPad.

I agree. That's a very different statement than your original claim about not being able to install your own software.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[tepples]

That's a very different statement than your original claim about not being able to install your own software.

After your developer license expires, you can't install your own software.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[jbolden]

After your developer license expires, you can't install your own software.

After you stop breathing you are dead, that doesn't make you dead now.

You should qualify your statements when you make them. From "you can't install your own software" to something honest like, "Apple allows you to install your own software providing you have access to a developer license which costs $99".

 

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[tepples]

You make a good point that I didn't qualify it enough. So I'll qualify it as honest as I can make it: Apple bans copylefted software from its App Store, and it requires a recurring payment for the privilege to install one's own software on devices that it makes that run iOS. Apple doesn't intend for the vast majority of users to gain this privilege.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[jbolden]

Almost.
Apple bans copylefted software without a special distribution license for Apple. I.E. copylefted software from non copyright owners. So for example if the FSF wanted to distribute emacs for iOS Apple wouldn't care but they wouldn't let you do it.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[shutdown -p now]

His point is that you'll have to keep paying $99 every year, for the sole privilege of being able to run the software that you have yourself compiled (even if you aren't even changing it anymore).

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[shutdown -p now]

Out of curiosity, does this mean that you're generally okay with the arrangement where you do have to make some considerable extra effort to sideload apps, so long as it's free as in beer? (i.e. the way Win8 Store apps work)

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[jbolden]

That's not true. Once you have a provisioning file for an application, it continues to work until you replace the device.

Also any developer can create a provisioning file for any device.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[jbolden]

First off, it is not so much "OK" as let's be honest about Apple's actual policy. I don't think anything is gained by easily disproven propagandistic lies and I think the FSF has done themselves a real disservice in misdiscribing Apple's policies in a way that started this whole meme.

I don't think of this in the abstract so much as in the particular. Apple is on balance providing a really valuable service with their iOS store and policies as it exists today that is greatly to the benefit of developers, consumers and IT telco administration. The system is good and it works. In theory, this system would be kind of yucky. It works well because it is Apple doing the administration, good judgement is a key component of what makes the Apple system work.

Microsoft does not tend to show the same sort of good judgement at least so far. As you know I'm very excited about the direction for Windows 8 and their attempt to implement ubiquitous computing. When it comes to exercising good judgement on tens of thousands of apps a month I'm not sure Microsoft is up to the task. What works well for Apple may be a disaster for Microsoft.

Re:AIDE runs on the device, unlike Xcode

[Anonymous Coward]

I was actually addressing the question to tepples.

Anyway, I don't mind the walled garden, so long as I can opt out of it. It does not have to be an easily discoverable feature, but it must be something that is enabled once, and my hands are untied from there on. Much like Android if you use a pre moderated app store like - there is always adb.

Any system that intentionally does not provide this at all is yucky as far as I'm concerned.

Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing

[MpVpRb]

Yeah, it works..kinda poorly

Who actually likes a porta-potty better than a nice toilet at home

A pipe is always better..connected to a box with a big screen, a nice keyboard and a comfortable chair

Portable is ok if you really, really need portable. otherwise, it's second best

RE:

[andrew2325]

I think the desktop PC will have a niche in the market for a long time because people like them. They have a good number of micro-itx systems and even the Raspberry Pi that can replace some systems and not cause as much clutter, but there is a definite time and place where a desktop has no replacement.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

All the Same

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to study computer science, and generally I regard all computers as the same. Machines do vary widely in their peripherals, architecture, and extended functionality, but at their core they are all pretty much the same.

The question of whether the desktop PC will forever is more a question of I/O than it is of form factor. It doesn't really matter how big or small the machine is, but what makes PC's particularly useful are things like a larger screen, a keyboard, and the ability to use it comfortably in a sitting position, on top of a desk. My laptop, albeit a "mobile" device, has all of these characteristics; therefore, I could use (and have used) it as a replacement for my desktop PC.

Handheld devices in and of themselves would never replace larger consoles. However, it's entirely possible to drop these handheld computing devices into a dock or connect them to peripherals that provide desktop functionality. Such devices already exist, although they're not popular. Full sized desktops still give you the most bang for your buck, and the legacy of software support can't be beat.

When The King Of Zelda Dies

[Anonymous Coward]

Zelda is Microsoft.

The King of Zelda is Steven Anthony Balmer.

Stevie B is trapped in a no-win game.

The only way for him to escape Microsoft Corp. is death ... His in first person.

What a sad sad state this ... Microsoft.

And, Wikipedia Loves him ... Homosexual love ... from the Top 'Executive' of Wikipedia. Why? Money!

The Games Jimmy Plays.

Define "forever."

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I just built my 2nd desktop box this year, so that's ?8? or so since the 90's, and I still have five that just won't die, so yes, the desktop pc will live forever. At least until I die. Which will be de facto forever.

When tablets get a standardized architecture...

[evilviper]

I can go out and buy any old netbook, starting from $100, and I can install any Linux or BSD distro I choose, or I can install any version of Windows I want, install DOS, or SCO for some nightmare of a legacy application the's still needed by my employer, or I can do any number of other things with it.

Once I've installed an OS on it, I can run pretty much any application on it that was built for that OS. I have access to the full feature set of the program, and can do pretty much anything with it.

Compare this to tablets...

I can go find a $50 tablet, with decent enough specs that it would make a passable Linux laptop, but I can't just go install Linux on it. Even while Android runs on Linux, the kernel has been hacked to hell to support that one tablet. All manner of memory addresses are hard-coded into it, with no way for a generic kernel to boot up and attempt to auto-discover which bits it should be fiddiling to reach each component it needs to control. Never mind things like all the power management hacks burried in there.

Even if you're happy to keep using that kernel, you've got a long way to go... The GPU and display are also going to be complete custom jobs, not even guaranteed to be similar between different revisions of the same model of tablet. So prepare to write your own X11 driver for each individual tablet you want to use.

If ARM had a standard architecture, as x86 does, I'd love to get a $50 tablet, install a Linux distro and lightweight window manager on it, and use it like a desktop with USB or bluetooth keyboard and trackball. Instead, you're buying a consumer device that you can't hope to customize, maintain, repair or upgrade, yourself. It's a "WebTV" until, that you are locked-out from. The market is fleetingly small, because the manufacturer of the device is also the ONLY source of operating system for it, and may give you a useless boxx of circuits because of their unwillingness to fix some bug in the OS. Never mind not being able to upgrade. And in such a case, the hardware then becomes completely worthless, and it can't be used for anything else.

For tablets to eliminate anything... Desktops, laptops/netBooks, etc., they're really going to have to start getting standardized. Perhaps not to the extent that PCs have, but far more than they currently are. It's not practical to make as OS custom for every piece of hardware, nor is it practical for 3rd parties to release updated images for the proliferating hardware variations, making this a very tight market, difficult to break into, because of the catch-22 of popularilty begetting popularity.

Because of the sad state of things, I'd be interested in watching the Windows 8 tablet market... x86 compatible devices would get us closer to the goal posts. We just need mass market adoption of them, and cheap Chinese brands selling at incredibly low prices, trying to break-in to the big-money market.

Honestly...

[Internetuser1248]

Yeah because those are the only two options... X will live forever or died already 3 months ago. Nothing in between is possible.

Shut the fuck up already.

This message was written on a desktop PC

hi

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice Blog and good thought

of course not

[smash]

Most people don't want a PC. They want to do online banking, facebook, voice/video and browse the web.

Previously, they've had to endure PC ownership to get that. With newer handheld devices, they no longer need to.

Re:of course not

[gl4ss]

that's not to say that pc wouldn't live forever.

or perhaps you would start calling them commerce computers or development computers - instead of pc's... they'd still be pc's and widely available though.

No

[gronofer]

Because forever is a long time.

what is a desktop anyway?

[epine]

A desktop is a large, high-bandwidth display position roughly where your hands would stitch together two animal hides, with an efficient method to make a long series of decisions to either knit or purl, possibly supplemental with a system of analog gestures, by means of which one selects an object of interest upon which to knit or purl.

The key ingredients are bandwidth, stamina, interactivity, and precision.

The human focal plane at fingertip distance isn't going anywhere, nor is the field of view or bandwidth of human vision. The demise of the human attention span, however, is an eternal news item, since way before we first supposed that fusion power would be perfected in a single congressional appropriation.

These rumours are much exaggerated. Even in a heroine flophouse back in the era of French Indochine, you'll find some deviant skulking in a dimly illuminated corner of some back room, puzzling out Ulysses. We'll suffer our passions in whatever format circumstance demands, whether it be a lowly tablet or a cell phone. But eventually--when the magnum opus rattles inside--a man wants a bigger canvas and fewer beanbag chairs.

National security issues could mandate desktops

[opentunings]

In this world where people are not allowed to bring thumb drives or cell phones into intelligence agency / military secured rooms...and the agencies want to have absolute control over the computers in use...the desktop will probably stay in demand for a long, long time. After all, these agencies really don't care how inconvenient it is for you to work in their offices: security is their only concern, period. So arguments of "I'm much more productive using my wearable computer" probably won't fly. And it'll be a long time before a wearable computer would be cheaper than a desktop. Even the spook agencies have budgets to meet.

The importance of high resolution in these applications shouldn't be forgotten, either. No small physical display could trump a large monitor. A virtual heads-up type of display might get there, but they're difficult to share.

I expect the desktops will still be around at least until I'm gone.

Moot

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be, unless innovation stops entirely or costs truly become too prohibitive, a demand for the biggest chunks of hardware to run the most gnarley applications (games, simulations, multiprocessor heavy load work) because for some time is money or speed is paramount vs losing in a game or dealing with processing latency or paying more because of the time it took to process data for a csutomer. This has been true ever since the first 'pc' to now and this is not going to change until we hit some kind of technological limit.

It happens that these larger monsters of computing power will, outside the more convenient/portable counterparts, require larger cases to hold their internal "best overengineered parts available at cost of energy efficiency, and space" components.

There will always be a demand to be faster and more powerful at the cost of size and money because there is MORE money or success or whatever to be had by using the most extreme of what is available to overcome opposition/market competition/other gamers.

Exactement

[flirno]

Exactly. The world of electronic devices added users, it did not shift users from PC to mobile.

The only losers here are the legacy media platforms: print media, visual arts entertainment and to a lesser degree (because it lost out years ago to visual entertainment) radio.

Re:Exactement

[hairyfeet]

But I would argue that those things were already on life support if not already bleeding out. Know what the number 1 web page that is most likely to be seen by me as a home page is? Yahoo web portal, why? Because people use it as a replacement for their paper, radio, and for some even TV. It has all the latest headlines, radio stations, and videos of all the latest news and events on that single page so what we geeks think of as cluttered makes those that used to use print media happy.

Re:Exactement

[flirno]

This kind of cultural change takes time and gradually, it isn't done yet and the on life support phase takes years.

Don't count on it

[Anonymous Coward]

With the current rush by politicians to ban anything and everything that can used by "terrorist" to cause "damage" the PC is in line be outlawed.

Think about how much easier it would be for law enforcement if everyone was bound to use an iPhone where Apple conviniently store all our data, all our movement and all our conversation for easy data mining? It would be easy to make a mandatory listening mode too so all your surroundings would be recorded as well...

The power of the common PC combined with the internet is too great for many politicans to like, think about it, if it had not been for this technology we would not have seen the recent revolutions in nothern africa...

Judging by what apps are ported

[tepples]

once they can run Dwarf fortress, Photoshop, Valgrind, Audacity, TrueCrypt, and display full video at a reasonable speed then it will be a valid replacement.

Valgrind and Audacity are free software and can be ported if someone has the time. There exist other roguelikes, and I'm told Dfterm lets you run Dwarf Fortress on a remote server. Some Android tablets support disk encryption. But if the fact that Adobe has so far declined to port Photoshop to Android makes Android tablets not PCs, then three Dell PCs that run Ubuntu (one at home, one at work, and my laptop) aren't PCs either.

I'll also need the ability to store all my stuff

Some Android devices support USB mass storage.

run whatever programs I want

Turn on "Allow installation of applications from unknown sources" and you can run whatever Android program you want that has an APK available.

display to multiple screens

I wonder whether the ability to run Android apps on TVs could be part of working around this.

But yeah, props to the Android for doing what others cannot.

Agreed 100 percent.

Re:Judging by what apps are ported

[HeckRuler]

Ah, running Dwarf Fortress remotely is interesting. Thank you. This might let my little netbook tackle it...
But the crux of that requirement was speed. Portable devices aren't beefy enough, memory and processing wise, to handle these heavyweight programs. It doesn't matter if you can run it remotely if there's no-where remote to run it.

But these are just my requirements. Most people don't particularly need that much processing power because they don't run Dwarf Fortress. Even though they should. So while I will be sticking to my desktop, I imagine a lot of people out there could simply live on a smartphone today. Which is kinda concerning because once desktop components are not the defacto-standard, they'll no longer benefit from economy of scale. Which means I, and geeks who actually use their computers, will suffer for it.

Docking...

[Anonymous Coward]

As most things get smaller and cheaper to make and of course more powerful each year they will get to a point where mobile devices like your phone will be common place out and about and a docking station to charge the phone and connect it to a bigger screen with full size keyboard and mouse to use, or maybe even a laptop/tablet dock...

$99 per year

[tepples]

Apple gives away the developer tools, you can compile your own apps and even distribute them to 100 other people ad hoc.

Since when? I thought Apple charged $99 per year plus the cost of replacing your current computer with a Mac for the developer tools.

PCs won't die until...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a convenient and non-difficult way to play MMOs on a tablet. Laptops just don't have the graphics power (unless you are talking high-end XPS-type Laptops) to pull off WoW, Rift, or ToR, among other MMOs, and games like those mentioned do not lend themselves well to the console market either. With WoW having subscribers in the millions, Rift having over a million subs, and ToR having a significant userbase as well (I can't be bothered to look up an exact number for ToR), each of these players are playing on a PC, because quite honestly, a Laptop will get you, maybe, 10 fps in a five man dungeon in Rift, and in a raid, you might as well be watching a powerpoint presentation. My understanding is even on an XPS the frame rate is still horrid.

Now, why is this? Mostly it's battery and cooling - we're kind of at the current known limit of battery tech, so to make a laptop that can perform as well as a PC graphically, you'd have to install two or more batteries to be able to use it away from the desk, and that would increase the cooling necessary to make sure you didn't slag your video card.

So until they can find a way to break the currently known laws of physics, which is what is holding back battery tech, or find an exotic material that allows us to create super cool, super powerful batteries, a PC will always trump a Laptop for MMOs, and until we have consoles that we can upgrade the hardware on so that an MMO can have continued expansion packs without needing to wait until the next gen console is released, a PC will trump a console for MMOs. Since this means that MMOs will, for the foreseeable future be best played on a PC, until you can convince 9 Million + people to give up WoW, the every man will continue to use PCs, so Post-PC is still a while off.

Re:PCs won't die until...

[rpstrong]

Now, why is this? Mostly it's battery and cooling - we're kind of at the current known limit of battery tech, so to make a laptop that can perform as well as a PC graphically, you'd have to install two or more batteries to be able to use it away from the desk, and that would increase the cooling necessary to make sure you didn't slag your video card.

Maybe I'm dense, but this just doesn't make sense to me. Additional batteries increase the charge life, but the video card still draws the same amount of power - and it is the power draw that creates heat. That is, adding batteries does not add heat.

Video game consoles have been successful

[tepples]

Platforms that lock them in, put up barriers to doing things and when a user does something their own way they tell them "they're holding it wrong" will not be the successful platform.

Yet locked-down platforms have been successful in the video game industry since 1986 when the NES came out. Even though the PC has the technical capability to be the gaming box connected to an HDTV, major PC game developers have tended to choose not to make PC games with an option for multiple gamepads and one large monitor. Why is this?

You happen to prefer an appliance

[tepples]

Sorry, I just want a telephone that has some helpful things on it, not a tiny badge of freedom that I have to maintain like my windows computers in the past.

In other words, you happen to prefer an appliance over a general-purpose computer. But do you support the efforts of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Sony to deny general-purpose computers to people who want them?

Re:You happen to prefer an appliance

[BasilBrush]

In other words, you happen to prefer an appliance over a general-purpose computer. But do you support the efforts of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Sony to deny general-purpose computers to people who want them?

Do you support the efforts of Google and Samsung to deny appliances to people that want them?

That wasn't a real question. It was to show you how dumb your question was. Selling a product isn't the same thing as denying other companies products. It's adding to the possible choices, not taking away from them.

iOS is incompatible with copyleft

[tepples]

I pointed out the fact that most people care about [not having to be aware of malware], and few care about writing their own programs.

It's not just people who "care about writing their own programs"; it's also people who want to use the best solution when the best solution happens to be unavailable on the operating system publisher's own repository for whatever reason. Case in point: VLC media player is not available for iOS. It was pulled from the App Store for the same reason that Pajama Sam for Wii was pulled: copyleft licenses in general are incompatible with the App Store distribution agreement.

Re:iOS is incompatible with copyleft

[BasilBrush]

VLC was first put up, and then pulled by it's own developers, or at least one of them. Apple didn't have a problem with it. Stupid people if they chose a license for their project that they then decided stopped them from doing what they wanted.

I've put open source out into the world. I'd never be dumb enough to GPL it.

Re:iOS is incompatible with copyleft

[tepples]

people who want to use the best solution when the best solution happens to be unavailable on the operating system publisher's own repository

Stupid people if they chose a license for their project that they then decided stopped them from doing what they wanted.

Sometimes the choice of license for an application isn't driven by the choice made for the developer's own code; instead, it's chosen by the author of one or more libraries used in the application. And when the best library for the job is GPL or LGPL, the requirement for "Installation Information" and the requirement that covered binaries must be redistributable rule out distributing the application on a platform with forced curation.

Only for gamers

[SCHecklerX]

For everything else, there is the laptop and dock.

Since I don't game anymore, my tower became my server in the basement. Since I got a tablet, my laptop pretty much sits on the dock at all times now, and has become my 'desktop pc'. I spend most of my time browsing on the tablet in the living room. If I have to do real work, I set at the desk with the laptop.

I think the only situation you need a desktop these days is if you need the horsepower and cooling to play modern shooters.

The true Desktop PC will live forever

[Finerva]

The Desktop PCs that our parents bought from Dell that cost around $300 and are mainly used to check e-mail and surf the web (basically all it can do anyway) are dead. It just no longer makes sense for the average consumer to own such a large device to do such simple computing. My step-dad recently told me he uses his Galaxy S3 in place of his desktop...

Re:The true Desktop PC will live forever

[rpstrong]

The Desktop PCs that our parents bought from Dell that cost around $300 and are mainly used to check e-mail and surf the web (basically all it can do anyway)...

At that price you get MS Office Starter edition, but Office Professional is offered as an option - meaning that they will also do spreadsheets, word processing, databases, etc. They also meets the minimum specs for MS Visual Studio. With the exception of high end games or graphics, what will they not do?

... are dead. It just no longer makes sense for the average consumer to own such a large device to do such simple computing. My step-dad recently told me he uses his Galaxy S3 in place of his desktop...

I agree that a tablet is often a better choice, especially for your parents' use. But this doesn't kill the PC market. If your step-dad was crunching numbers in a spreadsheet or writing code, I suspect he'd be back on that $300 dinosaur.

BTW, I do write code. Currently on a desktop that I built last year, but my backup is an old Dell - which works fine, but is slower.

Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to program on a tablet, phone, small POS device, etc..?

Who wants to live forever...

[oldestgeek]

"Who wants to live forever when love must die?" - Queen, Freddie Mercury.

I sure stopped loving my pc when I entered the macbook walled garden. :o:o :o

Not dead yet but on the way?

Desktops PCs are not going anywhere

[Cherubim1]

I always here these premature death warnings about the demise of the desktop. It happens every year yet the desktop still marches on. and will continue to do so for the following reasons: 1. Corporate customers are the biggest market for desktops and that isn't going to change much if at all 2. Enthusiasts and gamers use desktops because the hardware is cost effective and one can pick and choose components 3. Desktop PCs are more powerful than any similar speced laptop and often cheaper

Re:Desktops PCs are not going anywhere

[rpstrong]

3. Desktop PCs are more powerful than any similar speced laptop and often cheaper

Uh...doesn't 'similarly speced' sorta mean that they are equally powerful? But yes, almost certainly cheaper.

Answer: NO

[iq145]

The "PC" is even already on its way out...

What about chip arch economics?

[tehowe]

Isn't there something of a negative feedback effect to look out for - as more of the R&D goes into mobile platforms, desktop CPUs could get squeezed on cost and lagging innovation. That would eventually price those of us who still want them out of the market for microcomputers, which would then join the minicomputer on the scrap heap of history. I like my server and hate touchscreen keyboards so hope I'm wrong.

mainframes didn't disapear

[nitrofurano]

and people saying that didn't see that those mainframes from decades ago didn't disapear, now they are supercomputers instead ( top500.org ) - the future of desktop may be on multicored workstations (like those BoxxTech, MacPro, etc.), or stuff like RaspberryPi-supercomputers inside an atx case

Can turn off Unknown sources

[tepples]

Do you support the efforts of Google and Samsung to deny appliances to people that want them?

I don't support such efforts because they do not exist. Any user of a Motorola or Samsung phone can turn "Unknown sources" back off and get an appliance. Doing the opposite on an iOS or Windows Phone device requires a recurring payment.

Selling a product isn't the same thing as denying other companies products.

You mean like when Nintendo denied Robert Pelloni a developer license or when Sony sued George Hotz for reenabling homebrew on the PlayStation 3?

Re:Can turn off Unknown sources

[BasilBrush]

You mean like when Nintendo denied Robert Pelloni a developer license

Thanks for drawing my attention to him. I wasn't aware of that story. Very amusing. What an idiot. And what a crap game. Nintendo is serving it's customers well by keeping crap like that out.

But no that wasn't related in any way to what I said. My point is that Nintendo and PS3 don't prevent open consoles being created as products. In fact a few have been over the years. They just don't catch on, because that's not what most people want. They want quality games, not amateur hour.

Re:Can turn off Unknown sources

[tepples]

And what a crap game.

On what do you base this?

[Console gamers] want quality games, not amateur hour.

What should a gamer do if he wants both quality games and amateur hour? What should a developer do to be promoted out of amateur hour?

Re:Can turn off Unknown sources

[BasilBrush]

On what do you base this?

The videos he posted on YouTube. It's the kind of 80s Nintendo style rip off, usually done with Flash games. Except he didn't even have an artist to make the artwork look good.

A few decades gave passed since that would have been a decent game.

Microsoft accounts and furry characters

[tepples]

does this mean that you're generally okay with the arrangement where you do have to make some considerable extra effort to sideload apps, so long as it's free as in beer? (i.e. the way Win8 Store apps work)

I don't own a copy of Windows 8 yet, so I can't make specific comments on whether the "considerable extra effort" to sideload a WinRT application into Windows 8 is excessive.

But what I can say is that it is tied to a Microsoft account. Something I recently learned about Microsoft accounts while trying to integrate OpenID and other delegated authentication mechanisms into a project at work is that the Code of Conduct incorporated by reference into the terms for a Microsoft account appears to dictate the design of fictional characters in applications, videos, and other works that users create using products and services that require a Microsoft account: "You will not [...] use the service in a way that: [...] depicts nudity of any sort including full or partial human nudity or nudity in non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga." In other words, animal characters have to be wearing clothes. For example, Arthur Read OK, Spyro bad. Simon Seville from the 1980s OK, Tigger bad. I hope I'm grossly misinterpreting this line of the Code of Conduct.

Re:Microsoft accounts and furry characters

[shutdown -p now]

The extra effort in question is installing a developer license. Which is free to obtain, and is a command prompt one-liner, but it expires every month, requiring to be updated (and every time you do it, essentially, phones home). It also can't be automated, so far as I know, because it uses a UAC-style elevated dialog.

Once the license is there, you can locally deploy and run any unsigned app, pretty much. But only for as long as it's there.

Can't do OnLive; an AP is needed

[tepples]

Flash memory is cheap.

Not necessarily. Tablet makers tend to charge a lot extra for internal storage, and Microsoft charges for the patent license to use a FAT file system on an SD card or USB flash drive. In addition, a lot of applications intentionally don't support caching items to flash memory; they have to connect to the Internet because they have to connect to the advertisement server.

And devices can sync over WiFi or similar in a P2P fashion, without involving any central servers and clogging up your Internet pipe.

Provided that the devices are in the same room. I can't sync with my home computer while I am riding the bus to or from work. Nor can I play an OnLive game on a Wi-Fi-only tablet while riding the bus. If I want to play a game on an Android tablet while riding the bus, it has to run directly on the device; therefore, the tablet needs processing power to render pictures in real time.

And provided that the devices support ad-hoc Wi-Fi. On the the Android tablets that I've tried (Archos 43, Kindle Fire, Nexus 7), I haven't found the option to create an SSID to act as the AP for a disconnected LAN. Some phones might have this, but only if one pays extra for a tethering plan. How do you recommend to send files from a Nexus 7 to a Kindle Fire in the same room?

Before and after college

[tepples]

There's a free university student programme. That seems like the right level to be encouraging.

I realized this. So you agree that there exists a level at which the benefit of training new developers outweighs the risk that malware will spread within a particular ecosystem. But do you think high school is the wrong level to be encouraging, and if so why? Or the gap between graduating and becoming hired?

Where should a programmer start?

[tepples]

A few decades gave passed since that would have been a decent game.

So as of 2012, where should a programmer with an idea (the "inspiration" in Thomas Edison's proverb) and the time to implement his idea (the "perspiration") start?

Re:Where should a programmer start?

[BasilBrush]

There's no shortage of platforms he can scratch his itch with. Whilst he tries to get a job with an established games company.

None of this means that all platforms should be open, nor that open platforms are better for consumers. Games are far more advanced than they were decades ago, it takes more than amateur hour.

Re:Where should a programmer start?

[tepples]

Whilst he tries to get a job with an established games company.

How does that typically work? Who pays to transport the candidate to and from the city where the games company is located? And what sort of portfolio does a candidate need in order to be considered?

Games are far more advanced than they were decades ago, it takes more than amateur hour.

Why is amateur hour acceptable for video (e.g. YouTube) but not for video games?

Re:Where should a programmer start?

[BasilBrush]

Who pays to transport the candidate to and from the city where the games company is located?

You're now suggesting free bus passes for games writers?

What about people who's interests are in other fields that they'll need to move to a big city for. Don't care about them eh?

Why is amateur hour acceptable for video (e.g. YouTube) but not for video games?

Go down your local entertainment store. Professional games for consoles, professional movies for DVD/Blueray players.

Go onto the internet. Amateur hour Flash movies, amateur hour flash games.

There's no inconsistency.

Re:Where should a programmer start?

[tepples]

What about people who's interests are in other fields that they'll need to move to a big city for

Thus we come back to the gap between graduation and being hired, which I mentioned earlier. How should a recent graduate earn enough money to support a move and job search in Austin, Boston, or Seattle if nobody wants amateur hour games?

Re:Where should a programmer start?

[BasilBrush]

Spending their time on amateur hour games would not be very lucrative. So probably that's a bad direction.

Portfolio

[tepples]

Spending their time on amateur hour games would not be very lucrative.

How else should a portfolio be filled?

Yes, the Desktop will reign forever

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a gamer. I prefer large screens, ergonomics, and extreme performance. My Desktop fits this role, and when I'm on the go, my laptop works as well.
Mobile devices like phones (that do more than call and text) and tablets are useless. My laptop can do anything a mobile device can (other than call) and more. My desktop can do even more than my laptop, and it's even faster. There are so many people who put their laptop on their desk and use it like a desktop. I have no idea why they just don't buy a cheaper and more powerful Desktop. Desktops shall reign forever.

Only two form factors I need: ATX and the portable ATX form factor

no desktops?

[Anonymous Coward]

no desktops would mean, very little or no home networks. no wired networks, unless you wanted to string wires between latops and netbooks. this in turn means very little or no security. show me a laptop that can crank numbers like a desktop....are there any? until people stop having digital hobbies (music movies number theory, encryption, programing web design....) there will be desktops. my brother keeps telling me that thier dieing. india and china have just recently been opened up to them, and Australian sales are INCREASING. the large companies here say the numbers are decreasing, but theres no way for them to count, except for the people who just pick one up at walmart, but those sales arnt even counted. they count how many walmart buys. not what walmart sells. they don't count what newegg sells, they count what they sell to newegg.
anyone who says that desktops are dieing is either creating a cloud of smoke, or trying to increase sales for their ultra-useless devices. is it even possible to type on a tablet? that lil on screen keyboard is....to small to be useful. try typing a term paper on your kindle or iphone....
the desktop is here to stay. maybe some people in the govt/large corporations don't like it (for the security factor), but it isn't going anywhere. sure their power hogs compared to a laptop, netbook, phone, or anything else, but can do so much more, just cant be carried around.
i for one love my duel screen glowing keyboard hulk of a pc, i jsut upgraded the chip to a 5 year old phenom x4 :D im good for another 3-5 years. show me a laptop that can last 7 years and still be upgraded and usable...

What Post PC actually means...

[Shadowmist]

Is that we have an expanding area of activities that were formally confined to the desktop now being opened up to non-PC devices, i.e. tablets, smartphones, and other smart appliances. These include... Web Browsing Content Creation Game Play Third Party program operation Instead of everyone in a household having a PC (including Mac) for these activities, the population will be more diverse.