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The Greatest Battle of the Personal Computing Revolution Lies Ahead
Certainly one way to define the Personal Computer stems from the era of the IBM PC: a gray box with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard (or a laptop). But the idea of the Personal Computer dates back quite a while — back to Alan Kay's Dynabook, the Lisp Machine, etc.
The Apple Knowledge Navigator provided a vision of personal computing far more dynamic than that dull gray box. Although still a pale comparison, tablet and phone platforms are beginning to look awfully similar.
The essence of those pre-PC Personal Computers was that of the user controlling the device. You control the data, you control the software; the Personal Computer is a uniquely personal artifact that the user adapts to his own working style. One consequence of this is that creating is as easy (perhaps easier) as consuming content. Another nice side effect is that your data remains private by virtue of local storage.
In many ways, then, a tablet or phone comes significantly closer to a personal computer than that dull gray box under your desk. For example, on Android, the screen ceases to be a place to throw icons and becomes a rich canvas of widgets. Additionally, my phone fits into my pocket and is always there. Ubiquitous cellular coverage gives me access to my data from most anywhere. The touchscreen and interface conventions make direct manipulation shine in a way you just can't get from a screen two feet away on a desk.
And, those are just superficial improvements over the desktop. Albeit tied to proprietary services, Google's voice search and Siri are inching closer to the dream of personal Intelligent Agents reminding us all that our mothers called us earlier today and want us to pick up the birthday cake for the surprise party With a few taps I can search basically all of my data, not to mention the collective knowledge of mankind.
But the software running on these devices has a dark side. Want to access your music collection the go? You have to get it from Google Play. Want to have lightweight instant messaging? You have to use GTalk. Or take ebook readers (certainly personal devices): that book you just downloaded to your Kindle is DRMed and stuck there! That intelligent agent? Apple records everything you bark at her and can take her away at a moment's notice.
Furthermore, the software on these devices is geared almost exclusively toward content consumption. You can listen to music all day long, but don't try multi-track recording. That ebook reader is great for reading, but you can't scratch notes in the margins of any of your books or sit down with one and scrawl out your latest manuscript. Clearly, some of this is from the youth of these new systems, but it is distressing to see them geared first toward consumption (the Newton, for example, was geared from the start as a device for creation).
The "cloud" as implemented by Amazon, Google, Apple, et al. is a distinct threat to the personal computer. Loss of control over our own data is perhaps the worst part of the cloud. We're easily seduced by genuinely useful features like access to our contacts and music from any device without having to manually sync anything. It's certainly more convenient to purchase a digital movie on Amazon Prime than to hunt down a DVD, and Netflix is definitely nicer for most people than cable television. But when you buy a movie on Amazon, you don't really own it.
Underlying many of these cloud services (especially media-related ones) is Digital Restrictions Management. Whether it be the files themselves or the protocol used to transmit data, DRM is used to control what you can do with your data, restricting even what programs you can use to interact with seemingly neutral files. Worse, networked DRM services can and have led to lost data when it is no longer profitable for the company to run the verification servers.
The only copying that DRM discourages effectively is the sneakernet. And, given that the sneakernet has existed since recordable media has existed, it doesn't seem like the sneakernet is really much of a threat to creative business. I might lend a friend a CD (or even let her copy a few files), but just as I don't unwrap that CD and torrent it through The Pirate Bay, I'm not going to download a movie from Amazon and do the same. There's really no incentive to do so, for most people — most people pirate because that's what you have to do to get the media you want, not because you have a compulsive desire to share things with your closest 10,000 friends.
In order to prevent what is effectively sharing between actual friends, pushers of DRM-infected data want us to completely cede control of our own data!
And they have made people accept it: Steam, Netflix, and Amazon Prime are wildly popular. All of those services are great ideas, but all of them treat you as if you were a criminal.
Worse yet, the spread of Software-as-a-Service is returning us to the bad old days: that powerful PC in your pocket is quickly becoming no more than a glorified terminal. The open peer-to-peer network is being subverted from an enabler of collaboration never before seen into yet another scheme to tether users to proprietary, centralized services. And, as SaaS expands, privacy recedes. No longer is it implicit that your documents are yours alone; now you write and store things using Google Docs and have no expectation of privacy (legally), despite expecting privacy. Amazon knows what you read; Netflix knows what you watch; Google knows what you visit.
Control over the programs you run, and more importantly can write, is key to a personal computer being personal. And it seems absurd that that right might be taken away, but behold: the iPhone and soon Mac Store are these mythical walled gardens. You have to subvert your device to gain real control! And the natural path for Apple is to restrict Macs similarly to iOS devices.
And so we are all-too-near an Orwellian nightmare where vendors dictate what we can do with and how we can use our own data.
But what about the hardware itself? It could be argued that a device isn't really personal for some set of people if they can't change all of the software. Here too we see some promise, and some pitfalls.
The shift to tablet and phone hardware has meant a shift from x86 machines running PC BIOS to thousands of ARM boards, each with its own peculiar way of being programmed. Things you take for granted on x86, like being able to even boot, require custom code. And let's not even begin talking about all of the DSPs and co-processors. Vendors aren't always forthcoming with documentation for their boards, and, even worse, those that do port Linux to their hardware often blatantly violate the GPL and do not distribute kernel sources. This restricts the utility of perfectly fine hardware: often to the detriment of the user and to the benefit of the manufacturer.
Anyone who finds they can't upgrade to the latest version of Android because their vendor won't support it, and the community cannot support it because of non-free drivers, knows what losing control over their hardware is like (RIP HTC Dream).
It might seem like a minor setback ("I guess I have to buy a new phone"), but the lack of specifications or support marginalizes alternative operating systems. There's Meego, Tizen, Open webOS, Firefox OS, SHR, etc., but experimenting with them on your device is a non-starter. Imagine if the x86 were so closed (something we may not have to only imagine much longer): it is doubtful that GNU/Linux or the multitude "alternative" OSes would exist (Atheos, Haiku, L4Linux, even the Hurd). Ever more closed hardware is putting us into a position where two or three companies will dictate everything about the computing experience going forward, with no room for freethinking tinkerers to revolutionize how we interact with our devices.
We are staring at a bleak future, and living in a bleak present in some ways. But there is hope for the battle to be won by the Personal Computer instead of the Terminal.
The Internet is not yet merely glorified cable television. Hypertext, email, instant messaging, trivial file transfer, etc. have revolutionized how mankind communicates (understatement of the decade). Once upon a time the dream was that everyone would be a first-class netizen: your IP was publicly routeable and with a bit of know-how you had a server. Instead, thanks to grossly asymmetric pipes and heavy NATing, it is rare for any individual to run their own servers. Instead we turn to Google, Amazon, et al and cede control over our data.
But now broadband connections are spreading fast (I've gone from 100Kbit/s to 2Mbit/s upstream in three years just with basic service), IPv6 is really here, and software is being written to challenge the centralized "cloud" model being pushed on us from above.
We've had a few victories already: SMTP is still in use, XMPP is the dominant chat protocol (and IRC refuses to die), RSS/Atom aggregation decentralizes news, and the core network protocols are developed in the open.
But Google still controls Android, and myriad services control your data. Part of this is because they have easy client and server interfaces; sure you could run gallery2 and Wordpress on your own server, but I can just snap a photo on my phone and it's up on Facebook 40 seconds later (well, if their app worked, it would be).
Luckily, there are people working on making easy to use "cloud" services. In particular, ownCloud. ownCloud provides a framework for hosting and syncing data between your devices and sharing data with others. The important part is not so much the central server, but the clients they are writing. Eventually, it should be possible to e.g. replace the Google contact/mail/calendar sync and Google Drive, while adding these features to the desktop. Integration in KDE is already underway.
Imagine, instead of being tied to Google you could move the central server to the hosting provider of your wish (or pack up your data and move it to greener pastures if you're not running your own). And, perhaps more subtle (but the real liberation): Your data would be freely movable between all operating systems (interesting that you have to go through hoops to sync your GMail contacts with anything else, and Abandon All Hope Ye who wants to share between an Apple device and anything else). Additionally, the server is designed to respect your privacy (you can e.g. only store encrypted data server-side).
On the hardware side, projects like Firefox OS are very important: having a "mobile" Free Software OS developed in the open might be essential when the dominant open platforms are developed monolithically by corporations with no interest in protecting user control of data.
And then for developing the next generation of devices, folks like Rhombus Tech are pushing for the development of interchangeable CPU boards for embedded devices, and the FSF is expanding their focus to include open hardware.
There are two serious threats that would undermine any resistance: IPv4 exhaustion and draconian content policing. The former issue is technical and likely to solve itself: in the long run multi-level NAT would be too costly, switching hardware will be replaced as it is obsoleted, etc. The latter is political and represents the most serious threat of all. If we cannot communicate freely and the pipes are owned by the very organizations whose business interests will be harmed... we've already seen how brazen the current IP regime can be, and it will take vigilance on the part of many to prevent them from having their way.
Where will we be in ten years? If Google, Amazon, Apple, and Old Media get their way, in a new dark age of computing. Certainly, you'll have a fancy tablet and access to infinite entertainment. But you will own nothing. Sharing data will be controlled by a chosen few entities, the programs you can run or write will be limited in the name of security, and privacy will be dead.
History shows that personal computing survived despite Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. So, I'm hopeful that other forces will win: the forces of Free Culture and Free Software. If they succeed (or are at least not crushed), the future is much brighter: most content will be available DRM-free, users will control their computing environments, and the egalitarian promise of the Internet will be realized (in no small part thanks to IPv6).
Remember when the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton heralded the "end of the PC era"?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Great for alzheimer's patients, criminals, and little kids. Not great for free adults.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Do you really expect us to read all of that?
long ago cars were sort of open and then things went to a vertical system where the manufacturer designs and manufactures the car with self made parts or custom made parts.
computers are going the same way.
most of us have better things to do than some of the nonsense in this article. $7.99 for netflix is a nice deal for what you get.
The touchscreen and interface conventions make direct manipulation shine in a way you just can't get from a screen two feet away on a desk.
Maybe for some people...personally I prefer a couple of big monitors in front of me.
There's no fuckin' way I'm ditching my mouse and keyboard for a touchscreen.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I've been in [personal] computers over 40 years, seeing them from the kilobyte/kiloflop era to the threshhold of the terabyte/teraflop era. There have been both surprises and disappointments at every turning. I dont see why this would not continue for another 40 or 100 years.
My two biggest mispredictions were:
(1) In the mid 70s I wounder why anyone would buy a store-made computer. They were so fun to solder together yourself.
(2) The sudden rise of the world wide web in 1993. Everyone knew cycberspace would eventually happen, but probably another decade or so. That was a huge victory for open source: thanks Tim!
Excellent read. Thanks.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The 'real' PC, used for design and engineering work, is not likely to go away any time soon, as all our technological advances would grind to a halt without it.
The PC will get more expensive as the sales volume goes down from hundreds of millions to hundreds of thousands of 'real' computers per year. but then, those of us who use PCs for real work have been riding the coattails of the gamers for a decade now.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
2GB music collection? LOL.
It's not a 'collection' unless it's at least 1TB.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The PC will never die. These attention seeking whores are fucking technology morons. They use their computers for facebook, jerking off and youtube. Computers are more than a jerk off machine and a twitter device.
Yes, for the average idiot who was destined to sweep up shit for a living, they probably dont need a real deal pc workstation... because they'll never create or do anything.
PCs are for people who USE pcs. PCS are for people who work, create, manage, code, program, animate, draw, paint, record, do research, study... PCs are for real users. The general public doesnt need roof ladder, but everyone has a fucking ladder still.
The Palm Pilot and Apple Newton never achieved the success the iPad has or the iPhone.
The problem with comparing the Past Systems was the fact they while they look similar, that new feature of multi-touch is the real game player.
Before we needed to use a stylus or one finger to just push a button on the screen. Doing things such as zooming in was very clumsy. The simple feature of the pinch zoom is a massive game changers. During Newton and Palm Pilot Hayday. PC's were in a get a really big display phase. 17" - 19" - 21" get as big of a CRT that can fit on your desk. Why? because you had so much information, you wanted to view but smaller screens didn't have the resolution or were too small to see it. For the most part on the screen we only focus on a couple square inches on it at any moment. But using the mouse to scroll and zooming was choppy, made it so you need to use a desktop if you want to get real work done. With multi-touch you can see scroll and zoom much faster and naturally then before.
The next problem during the Palm Era. Was we didn't have too many good enough CPU's to do the job. During the Pentium 2 Era. your Palm Pilot had the power of an 8088 (10 year gap). Today We are closer to a 5 year gap, and our need for personal processing power has diminished. We can play a movie in High Definition on our phone and it will run smoothly. Programs are responsive and quick. While not as fast as the desktop, we are by no means suffering.
The third problem was network infrastructure. The old devices you needed to sync with a PC. Today they are self updating and work by themselves without the need for the PC. And they have wireless internet that means it is actually handy if you want to look up something.
The fourth problem was culture. Technology gadgets were not cool back in the late 90's. You would have been a major nerd or geek in the negative term if you were caught using one. Cell phones getting smaller and cheaper means more popular people were getting the technology thus allowing more high tech to be more common across the "normals".
We had a bunch of horseless carriages designed before the Model-T too.
It just needed the right situation to get them to kick off.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1) Not one of these locked down devices is hard for a "free thinker" to put a new OS on. No one is making nor planning on making devices that are actually secure against a knowledgeable owner that wants them to do something different. They are looking to add some security that is impossible without hardware support. No one is actually advocating the position your essay is opposing.
2) When PCs started they used to come with the OS (and arguably sometimes more than one OS) on ROM. People still booted different OSes on them.
3) There is wealth of content creation tools for all these platforms that already exist, so concerns about consumption / creation are overblown.
4) DRM is obviously popular with content creators to avoid sharing, and larger entities to allow for distribution and control. It comes in and out of fashion and has for long time. There is no long term trend in either direction. For example in the last 5 years virtually all music is sold DRM free while previously music companies had required DRM.
5) On the consumer tablet / phone devices there already exist a wealth of services to setup alternative "clouds" including both Android and iOS. They are cheap and easy to configure. Instead of whining about them not existing for consumer just set one up.
blah blah blah. walled gardens and cloud storage. I've been playing with my raspberry pi. it's just as fun as my first Apple II and way more hackable (maybe just because i'm a little bit smarter now) Personal computing is better than i ever imagined it would be. There is something to hack EVERYWHERE. get an android device, jailbreak your iphone. find cameras in the garbage. quit lamenting the fact that people who don't care about using computers settle for the walled garden.
But the reason Palm wasn't the end of the PC era is the same as the reason The Tablet (you seem to like apple) wont be either. They are toys. While the PC can be used for entertainment, its primary purpose is as a tool. While I'm sure there are use cases you can come up with where a tablet can be used as a tool... there were for Palms as well, the fact of the matter is, real work is done on PCs. And will continue to be done that way for a the foreseeable future. Will desktop PCs go away? Eventually... but that would require a better interface. Tablets have an inferior interface. So eventually Full VR with thought based interaction. Granted, that's likely less than 20 years off... but tablets are not going to kill the PC market. They will however kill entertainment device markets... GPS, DVD players, MP3 players... etc...
Those were great products just too ahead of their time. This go around, I think they may be right. The market is different, costs and benefits are more inline and the general population is much more savy than when those devices came out (especially newton).
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
I have to point out that while I admire the appeal to cars, that this is a flawed analogy. The horseless carriage was capable of reproducing every single feature of a horse-drawn carriage (except the pooping), which made it an obvious successor. There are a myriad of things that touch-based devices can't do that a mouse/keyboard can. And there are a lot of things a little tiny form-factor micro-pc with an attachment port for a mouse/keyboard can't do that a full-blown desktop can (IE: power a 30" 2560x1600 monitor at 100+ FPS on the latest games). Even with Apple trying to bridge this with their new uber-thin desktop computer, the specs on it are pretty awkward for a computer built in 2012 and at a price starting at $1700 even with, essentially their Thunderbolt display built-in, it's a pretty second-rate system, also not capable of doing things many people need a full-blown tower for. In short: I'm saying that these devices, while they have obvious and great uses, do not fully reproduce the capabilities of PCs, and these hybrid-PC-microdevices don't fully reproduce the capabilities of their larger brethren. So the end result is that the PC is a completely different market, and no new micro-devices are ever a sign of "the end of the PC era."
I suspect until some major scientific breakthroughs occur that it's not even possible for a small-form-factor PC to replace a full blown tower-based PC. Even if Moore's Law continues for another decade, there's a physical limit to how much computing power you can shove into a hand-held or ultra-thin device. Compare that with a desktop that has this monstrous 2200+ cubic inches of space for hardware, and if you can shove 10x-50x the amount of horsepower into that space, the PC has the capacity to behave like a local-supercomputer in comparison. While you might argue that it's possible to use the "cloud" for computationally expensive work like that (and that's an argument, for sure, a little awkward, but I suppose it works), the problem then lies in latency. We're limited by the speed of light, literally, a limit which does not exist when the box is sitting under your desk, so there's a use-case that will never be supportable in a cloud system: real-time gaming on nearly photorealistic engines with extreme physics support. This was tried, and the implementation failed, for the very same reason (it's the latency, not the bandwidth, and that's a physical limit in our universe, so it will never work, until FTL communication is discovered).
But the reason Palm wasn't the end of the PC era is the same as the reason The Tablet (you seem to like apple) wont be either. They are toys.
The Palm wasn't interfaced to a powerful network of apps and data. Today's tablet is an interface to a much more powerful set of tools.
A tablet will never be enough for me, but it will suffice for most people. I like using tablets to interface to my own systems.
I think you are wrong.
On yesterday's PCs, I could just write raw machine code in Hex, save it to the 1st sector of a drive, boot the disk and be in full control of my own hardware with my own code. Many new-ish PCs now use EFI. To boot from EFI I have to write my machine code within a FAT (32) container, which means implementing MS's proprietary and patent encumbered File Allocation Table format... Tomorrow's PCs will use UEFI to boot, which requires a cryptographically signed EFI boot process. That means signing my own bootloader and installing my own keys, or paying for a key for each bootable from MS (some UEFI systems allow booting w/o signature via special boot mode, some do not) -- On ARM platforms shipping Win RT, MS has said the option to boot unsigned code or install user specified keys must be removed.
So, you can see how it's slowly gotten a bit harder to play with my own new hardware thanks to the increasingly high hoops I've got to jump through. If Microsoft has their way you won't be able to boot any OS that doesn't fork over the cash to them. In fact, even the Linux Foundation is planning to pay MS for the right to sign a bootloader so you can still boot your own software on UEFI hardware. I think that's horrible. I understand they want to make it easy for users to run free software but IMO, paying MS one red cent to give us back the freedom to use our own software with our own hardware is just vile and disgusting. Instead, I'll buy from vendors that respect my freedom. The subject line say MS + Secure Boot == PC Death, but really Apple, and many other vendors who don't let us unlock our devices to run arbitrary code are equally as evil in my book.
Recently a longing for the good ol' days of unfettered computing led me to creating Hexabootable. It's a 512 byte boot sector that contains a Hex editor. With it you can edit raw memory then execute the memory you just edited. Using only this minimal tool you can extend the program's features (eg: disk I/O), write any other program, even create a whole new Operating System -- Indeed that's exactly what I'm doing.
None of my hardware or software hacking hobbies will be possible if the OEMs get their way and lock us out of our own hardware. It's all under the guise of Security, but that's not really the reason. Think about it: OS code is huge and bug ridden; If there's even one kernel level arbitrary code execution vulnerability then the whole effort is useless. If the OS makers could write secure (read: bug free) OS's they would be just as secure with and without secure boot! If they can't write secure OSs then secure boot is pointless! Truly, I can use known exploit vectors against every modern OS, secure boot or not, to run my own unsigned machine code, and so can malware writers... So it's not a boot for normal end user security, it's just digital shackles. The real reason Secure Boot Chains exists is to keep you from tampering with your own computer.
Now, what I do find hopeful is the cool work in the embedded systems fields. There are several projects that strive to be as transparent to the user as possible, and get their code up and running controlling everything. Unfortunately you don't always get to run plain machine code on all of the hobbyist devices. Open hardware initiatives give me a warm fuzzy feeling -- That's what will save the "PC" (Personal Computer) in my opinion. Protip: If you can't personalize the machine code and/or hardware, then it's really an Impersonal Computer -- An impostor of the worst kind...
Here's a fun aside: Since I write software in machine code, I could release it under the GPL and provide no other "source code" but the binaries :-P
Conversely, if you know Machine Code, every (non encrypted) binary executable is Open Source!
The same could have been said of Palm Pilots and Blackberries over ten years ago. And yet, here we are. PDAs are dead, and Blackberries are irrelevant. Not because they were terrible ideas, but because technology advanced enough that they became irrelevant, and they adapted to being a complementary device and not a device in which to replace the need for a desktop/laptop.
I also think that stating that the PC is dead is way too much of an overstatement, and see some reflection back to the past. Tablets and phones are good for one thing, and one thing only: consumption of content. Try to do anything outside of that sphere, and it just comes across as a rather clumsy device to use.
And I really have a hard time seeing it ever bridging that gap, since this is a problem inherent with the input system of choice. Much like speech recognition software hasn't replaced the keyboard, touch is not a replacement for the old mouse and keyboard. The problem lies in how by its very nature, touch is less precise of an input method.
That doesn't mean that I'm being a neophyte in regards to touch devices, since they do indeed have their place, but they just aren't the be all end all solution, since unless we're going to go to Minority Report like interfaces to make up for the loss in precision, which, BTW, would be completely impractical for long term use because of the ergonomics involved, then there will continue to be a need for the current input paradigms that we have now.
But that doesn't mean that the desktop won't change because of touch though. Gestures might very well become integrated with the desktop without too many problems, and which for that matter, Opera was a pioneer on this in some respects. However, it's not going to replace the need for finer grained controls. What such an input device would look like though, I dunno. It could be rather much like a trackpad on a laptop, could be integrated into the keyboard for a touch area, or even something else entirely. But whatever it ends up looking like, I'm just not seeing the killer advancement to enriching or supplementing the desktop... yet.
What I think the main problem here is that many who are involved in HCI prefer revolutions to incremental improvement, and then call anyone who doesn't want to jump on their latest bandwagon which doesn't want to go along with their revolution as being technophobic, when their new system that they propose either can't or won't replace all of the use cases that they think that it will.
I get it. Developing for older systems can be boring (although I'm a rather strange one and actually love to be on the incremental edge), and continually delving into unexplored areas is much more exciting. However, computing has never worked that way, with every advancement always being some incrementation and refinement of the older ideas which then builds on the work done by the previous generations of tech, instead of trying to replace it entirely.
So in that respect, I fully expect that touchscreen devices will likely end up being in the same position as your Palm Pilots and Blackberries in 10 years time. They will have failed to live up to the hype being given to them, and they will be relegated to being mostly entertainment devices overall, possibly replacing TVs, gaming devices, eReaders, and so on. Heck, we're actually starting to even see that now.
But they won't be replacing the need for an actual computer, much like Blackberries, iPods, and Palm Pilots didn't supplant them either. The input is just too clumsy to do that, and there's really nothing that technology or software can do to change that. But just because I say that doesn't mean that I then think that the desktop then needs to remain unaffected by it, and that it won't change as well because of it, but that such a change is going to end up being more incremental, rather than revolutionary.
Touch won't kill the need for a mouse, but something else which brings the best of both forms of input just might. And that replacement will then likely be just as inappropriate for use with a tablet as a tablet's interface would be for the desktop, even though it might take a lot of hints from the tablet paradigms.
When I got (built) my first real PC, it wasn't about "content." It was about doing things. I had BASIC (tiny), an assembler, an editor, and a way to store stuff. I wrote all manner of software. Simple stuff at first, then more crazed as I caught on to how things actually worked. As the years went by, I built or bought more powerful machines, and my library of stuff grew. Content became relevant as I could *create* it; I painted pictures, made music, wrote articles, books, wrote and received uncounted numbers of emails (and I still have them all. I was able to dig up a letter I wrote to my stepmother on my 6800 machine in 1975 last week, startled her a bit. :) I designed PC boards, all manner of hardware, even wrote PCB layout and schematic capture software. Games... not so much, although I did write a few, especially as the 80's arcade frenzy came and went and I was employed in that area. Computers were niche devices for people with special interests, really. When I started out hand-coding 8008 instructions, it's not like I was a member of a huge crowd.
Today, the start isn't the wowie-zowie of having "a real computer", it's just Other People's Content. You get a closed box like an iPad, it doesn't come with "hey write your own stuff", although you can add apps like that for cheap. You can add an editor (leaving out the PITA of that on screen kbd for real writing), a perfectly serviceable spreadsheet. On the desktop, developing stuff is still 100% possible, but again, that's not usually why people go after a machine; they want twitter, they want IM, they want to download music... for them, it is an appliance, and neither the environment that enthused me about computers (suddenly, you could have one, whereas before, you could not) or the vast unknown of "what can I do with this" really serves as the entryway or inspiration for most people.
True enough, the general purpose machine on my desk can address either type of person; me, or an inveterate content consumer. But the current market is the latter -- not me. In fact, I might not buy another machine -- I'm pretty happy with what's on my desk. 8 cores, 3 ghz, terabytes of storage, 6 monitors, USB widgets everywhere, LAN, WAN, WIFI, bluetooth, SD radio, MIDI, Logic Pro, all manner of dev languages... I feel pretty good about this puppy, frankly. If that's to be the pinnacle of personal computing... yeah, I'm good with that. Thing is crazy powerful, from my perspective.
I'm just not sure that the needs of us dinosaurs represent the needs of the marketplace today. That's really what I wanted to say, I'm just maybe way too windy about it.
So if the PC "dies", maybe that's ok. It'l die slow, and probably a niche market will arise again. The pendulum swings all the time, for just about everything. We'll be ok.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But tablets and other toys will make the PC go back to it's early days price tags because most people only want the toys, especially now thay have to work all day on this shitty PC at their work.
Not kill, but inability to buy due to price make the same outcome.
This is a major reason why pads, pods, and phones are eating into PC sales.
Maybe, or maybe it's because PC sales have been over-inflated since sometime in the 90's. Just my opinion, but I think we should step back and take another look at this - TBH I'm not entirely sure that what we're seeing is such a bad thing - and that it's completely natural.
Most people aren't tinkerers, inventors, hackers, or scientists. Most people aren't curious about their world, investigative of the way things work, interested in science, or even all that intelligent. Most people don't have a scientific mind or any desire whatsoever to use technology for any more than canned entertainment (which, by the way, is also what they use most of everything else in their lives for). Not because they're inherently a sub-species - but because they just don't care. All respect to the author of the original article above, but I think he's missing something important - PC's are losing ground to tablets, etc in the market because most people don't have any use for PC's - and they never really did. PC's were always FAR more complicated than they were able to appreciate or take advantage of - and they don't have any use for them because they can perform their stupid, meaningless, and irrelevant tasks quite adequately on a phone/tablet/whatever. They also don't give two farts who legally owns the movie they just paid $9.99 for, as long as they get to watch it right now, and have never heard of DRM (and wouldn't understand it if you explained it to them). Jobs was a genius - he understood that, and by simplifying the PC down to a glorified toy, he knew that the entire world would throw their money at him - and they did.
And I say, more power to them. I don't care. Let them do their thing, and let Apple and Google and Amazon make bank off of them. Big deal. Me? I'll always have a PC of some kind, and a hundred other hacked and frankenstein'd gadgets - because my nature isn't to just consume, it's to create and arrange things to make them better. It doesn't really matter to me if Apple quits making Macbooks, or Microsoft quits writing operating systems that work on regular computers - at worst, it's a minor inconvenience, because I and many others like me will step in to fill the void - just as we created the beginnings of all this stuff to begin with, way back in the 80's and before. This move toward DRM and non-ownership of public entertainment is meaningless. Jobs and Gates and the rest took what was originally created and commercialized it; made it accessible to the masses - and the masses, because they don't know better or don't care, will eventually be controlled by draconian corporations or governments, or both. Those of us who care enough to invent, create, and make the world a better place, will not.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Unless you want to listen to it.
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In fairness, it doesn't require a computer to be "curious about the world," "investigative of the way things work," "interested in science," or "all that intelligent."
Lots of doctors, lawyers, philosophers, and any number of other fields that aren't "computer scientist, mathematician, or physicist" are more or less computer illiterate beyond "type a document in word and click around in a web browser" - yet they're still pretty fucking smart.
It's a bizarrely egocentric world view that says "anybody not interested in the things I'm interested in, and not trained in the same fields I'm trained in, is just not that smart, and not that curious about the world." A computer is not the only lens through which to view the world, learn about the world, or investigate new areas of their respective fields.
Most people here would bristle at the suggestion from a lawyer that, "Most people just don't know anything about contract law and tort law, and frankly, are not that smart." Most people here would bristle at the suggestion from a doctor that, "Most people just don't know anything about neurological disorders and gene expression, and frankly, are not that smart." But that doesn't prevent the same commentary from being one of the most misused and arrogant aphorisms frequently seen here on Slashdot.
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