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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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".

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: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).

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.

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

[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.
 

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: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.

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: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: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: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.

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.

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.