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

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: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: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.

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: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.