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The Desktop Is Dead, Long Live the Desktop!
theodp writes "'The desktop or laptop is now in decline,' writes John Sall, 'squeezed from one side by mobile platforms and from the other side by the cloud. As a developer of desktop software [by choice not necessity], I believe it is time to address the challenges to our viability. Is software for the desktop PC now the living dead, or zombieware.' While conceding there's some truth to truisms about the death of the desktop, Sall believes there's still life in the old desktop dog, 'We live in a world of computing where dreams come true,' Sall concludes. 'The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses. But at each step along the way, some applications find their best home – and other applications as well as new applications find the more convenient and smaller home better...So let's keep our desktops and laptops, our PCs and Macs. They are amazingly good at what they do.'"
Go ahead. Fire up SolidWorks on your pad or phone. Or AutoCAD. Go On. I dare you.
Now tell me the desktop is dead.
Every year we hear about how the desktop is dying and every year it doesn't. When will these idiots realize that desktop PCs are a niche that's not going to go away? It might shrink, especially compared to other forms of computing. But reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
The Desktop Is Dead
Isn't 2014 going to be the year of the Linux desktop?
For the web, desktop, tablet or phone, PCs or Macs are where development happens. We often need more power than a laptop can handle, so we use quite a few desktop PCs. For the general public, tablets may fill the need, but for development there will always be desktops.
I can say as a computer repair / consultant shop the desktop/laptop is not dead. people don't like windows 8 and when i tell them i can still get windows 7 they are ecstatic and want me to build them from scratch a computer!
Something with a decent HID will always be around. It might be a tablet with a keyboard and mouse but it will always be around. The platform to consume content will relentlessly evolve but content creation has a pretty standard set of requirements for those humans that do it. This paradigm will drive the PC market to the niche where it might belong. Stuff that is truly creative and commercially viable generally isn't produced on an ipad and uploaded to youtube for your 31337 friends to fawn over. Yes, the bar to create this kind of stuff has been lowered but it still requires actual talent to do it.
The personal computer is not a form factor, it is a philosophy.
No dependence on centralized service, computing done by the user, for the user.
Unless done properly, cloud and toys (smartphones, tablets) are a regression into the mainframe era. Give your toys enough control and you'll see.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
But, tablets and phones have shitty specs compared to a laptop or a computer.
I'd rather keep a 3.00GHz+ quad core x86 PC than some shitty 1.2GHz ARM tablet.
The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses
Each of those form factors has a different balance of convenience and functionality, with the smaller device being more convenient but also more limited. As the first post pointed out, you're not going to be running CAD software on Google Glass anytime soon. You might run a client interface to a server, but not the CAD software itself.
People like convenience most of the time, so we're quick to get smartphones and tablets, because they offer convenience doing the tasks we do most often. For bigger jobs than that limited hardware can handle, we'll move up to a bigger machine, sacrificing convenience for the necessary power. As technology improves and tasks can be moved down to smaller devices, we're also discovering new problems (and solutions to old ones) that fill in the gaps at the top of the chain.
The death of the desktop is not approaching any time soon. The death of computing's status quo is upon us, and has been for decades.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I know I'm crazy but I still think we need to separate the processor from the I/O devices (well I supposed a desktop kind of does that but...). I've always envisioned two types of processors, mobile (such as a smartphone, small but not as powerful) and non mobile (very powerful but does not fit in your pocket). Then all I/O uses wireless communications to the processor device.
So now you use your desktop from anywhere in the house with a wireless keyboard/mouse and wireless monitor. You want a little more mobility you can use a think client "laptop" that connects wirelessly to your non mobile processor at home or your mobile processor when not at home. Same thing with a tablet, no on board processor for your 10" touch screen, just wireless connection to the primary processor.
I suppose if it was worth doing this it would have already been done though. Must not save enough money by pulling the processing out of a laptop or tablet style device...
The reason desktop sales has slumped isn't just because of competing devices and the cloud. It's because there hasn't been a compelling reason to get new hardware for a long time. The reason is simple: game consoles. In the last 13 years, PC games have taken a very different course than the previous 20 years. For the better part of the 80s and 90s PC games were targeted solely at PCs. For the last 13 years game publishers have targeted Xbox[360], Playstation[2/3], as well as the PC with the very same titles. This caused them to focus on the lowest common denominator hardware; consoles. This had the unhappy affect of holding back their developers from writing games to fully utilize the PC. Therefor PC gamers didn't need to upgrade their computers with the same frequency as they did the previous 20 years. This caused a gigantic PC sales slump. I see a very large increase in PC sales in the next few years due to new lowest common denominator: Xbox One and Playstation 4.
I should be able to have my desktop use my phone and a password to do a 2-factor authentication, and transparently share with my pad, and with the older pad that lives in my office. I should be able to have one reference book open on the pad, a second open on the old pad, and a notepad program and open office open on my desktop, and cut and paste from any of them.
The author of the article does stats, while I write books and programs. I should have some serious support from all my hardware vendors for what I do for a living, instead of phone support for messaging, pad support for "consuming" media and desktop support for doing actual work.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I do 3D design so I want a very large screen, blindingly fast rendering and a high quality mouse. The people who proclaim that the desktop is dead are usually talking from a very limited perspective on the use of computers as work tools. I find it hard to imagine being able to design a tablet computer, using only a tablet computer bu maybe in 20 years or so, when the tools and interfaces become a little more 'holodeck' like in their intelligence and intuitive operation we might be able to ditch the desktop as we currently know it, but we are a long way from that point.
Being picky, but i just can not stand every time I see this phrase used incorrectly, and it's almost always in the same wrong format where the same "king" is dead and being told to live long, which just makes zero sense if you even think about it for a second. The phrase "The King is dead, long live the King" refers to the first king dying and the next being crowned. When the current queen of Britain dies, and her successor will be a king, the correct phrase at that time would be "The Queen is dead, long live the King". Please don't let me see this again, or I might have to post for a second time in my life on Slashdot.
I was suprised by:
"I've invested my life in it. My net value, it's all vapor, tied up in company valuations. It's not real. I don't go out and buy yachts or do other strange stuff. I spend most of my time working," he said.
To develop the apps that run on smartphones, tablets, smart watches, HMDs, etc.
Desktop gaming beats mobile gaming and console gaming every day of the week.
Oh yeah, and what tabet are you going to use to download those 10 seasons in 1080p of your favorite TV series.
Yes, those use cases are incredily niche uses by today's standards, but they'll keep desktops alive for the foreseeable future.
There is no true death here: only an inevitable and natural partitioning of platforms based on target usage. Desktop PCs had a good run (three decades) as a platform for both creation and consumption, but the world has changed. Phones and tablets are better-suited for consumption (literature, movies, music, games, web-browsing), but PCs are still the best practical platform for creation (writing, editing, composition, game development, web-site building). And yet this is all pretty obvious. Of course PC market-share will go down, way down, as it must. But the sensationalist media can't help but to bandy about terms like "living dead" when describing the desktop PC industry because - as any MBA is more than happy to tell us - in business, lack of growth equals death.
It's as though they have seized upon a mercantilist mentality of a world divided exclusively into winners and losers. World ain't like that.
Haven't you seen the Star Citizen promo? Here. The PC and it's capabilities are not dead to the tune of $33.7 Million USD and counting.
Just because a newer or different technology sells well and meets one segments needs (business) doesn't mean that the old one will die. I mean seriously, how many of you are still running a tape library out there?
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
Youtube (along with large HD displays) will always keep the desktop viable. TV/video in general will -- small may be cool and convenient, but big still has panache. And don't forget the demographics: those retiring baby boomers will continue to demand ease of use and visibility.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
The desktop isn't even pretending to die.
Yes, it's not the big hot thing anymore. Laptops took over the hot spot a few years ago, but for the purpose of software, they're generally the same as desktops. Now tablets and phones are cutting into the laptop market.
But the markets are huge. Even a 90% decline would still leave a substantial market with opportunities for new products. It's only a problem for companies with established dominant products. If you are depending on upgrade or support sales to an established base, then a declining base is a problem.
The comparison to mainframe may be particularly apt. While everyone likes to talk about how the mainframe was replaced my mini computers and later desktops, this isn't really true. There are lots of companies with large mainframe deployments. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry.
While in the future you will be able to have a tablet that is like 10x faster than a current desktop, and it offers enough power to work on basically anything needed, the format itself of the tablet is bad for working.
The "virtual keyboard" is always worse than a regular keyboard, and as its a portable device, the screen will always be small and will need you to hold it.
Of course, you can plug a keyboard on the tablet, and can plug another screen on it or put it on a stand, but the end result? a battery powered, slow desktop computer.
Maybe the "computer" of the future will be a small box or a pendrive like device that will be plugged on several different "shells" for perform different functions.
Exactly. For content consumption, small and mobile devices are very convenient. For quick interactions, they're OK. For serious content creation, they are just not the right tool for the job.
The trouble for the PC vendors is that for most serious content creation, desktops and laptops were already powerful enough a few years ago. Only those who really need local power, like creative media or CAD types in business or gamers at home, are interested in buying newer and more powerful machines often any more. For everyone else, the desktop isn't dead, it's just a mature platform and they already have it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There's many, many more PCs in the world than there were last year, and there will continue to be many, many more PCs next year.
Just because it's rate of growth is slower than it used to be, does not mean there will be fewer PCs used - PCs are not actually getting less popular, they're just not getting more popular at as fast a rate as before.
The 'desktop' is as necessary, and as used as ever - there's just fewer folks needing a new copy right now. The role of PCs in doing most of the creation of content, serving of data, and as a customizable platform will not be reduced - there's just other specialized devices getting into their own growth phases in popularity, consuming the content created by an industry of PCs and PC servers.
It's like saying that micro organisms are in danger, because they've filled most of the world, they aren't doubling in number periodically anymore, and other creatures that eat them are increasing in number. But none of those 'competitors' actually fill the same niche, and they all depend on the lowly class of micro organisms to function in the end.
Ryan Fenton
Desktop for creating content. Tablet/Phone for consuming content. Cloud? Meh. Same old by another name.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The traditional PC is the truck. Not everyone needs a truck, so most people drive other things, but for those who need to do heavy work, trucks still exist.
Tablets tend to suck for creation. There are limited exceptions, but for the most part a mouse n' keyboard, and a screen without your fingers in the way, are what you want for creating things. This includes software, of course, but also more mundane business things like financial spreadsheets, e-mails, and so on. It applies to other creative pursuits such as writing, video editing, and so on.
Basically tablets are reasonably good if you want to consume content. You can read a book, surf the web, etc with ease on a tablet. However when you start to talk creation, they are not as good. They can do in a pinch, but much better to have a real keyboard and larger screen.
What we are actually seeing is not desktops and laptops "dying" but rather maturing. The market is more or less done growing. However that doesn't mean it is going away. The two states are not "growth" and "death". Rather it can be stable.
We've already seen this in things like mainframes. Desktops didn't kill off mainframes. You can still buy them, and people do. There are more of them now then when there were only mainframes. However it is a mature market. There aren't many organizations that want one, and you don't replace them that often. So there's no growth, but it isn't dead by any means.
That's what is happening with desktops. Go in to a business, have a look around, they have not tossed all their computers and started playing with tablets and phones. There is a computer on every desk practically. However, as noted, there is a computer on every desk. They've got their computers. They buy for replacement now largely, not to increase the numbers.
The only people who think desktops/laptops are going to "die" are either kids who just play on their smart phone and don't do productive work with a computer, or idiot tech journalists.
Desktop software lives strong. After all, Angry Birds Space (http://www.angrybirds.com/) is still available for the PC or MAC.
LeoPolus Web Design: http://www.leopolus.com
Aren't they always saying that PC gaming is dying too--and have been saying that for a couple of decades now? For something that's dying, it sure still seems to keep kicking. It's got a longer death scene than Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs, I guess.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
For the web, desktop, tablet or phone, PCs or Macs are where development happens. We often need more power than a laptop can handle, so we use quite a few desktop PCs. For the general public, tablets may fill the need, but for development there will always be desktops.
You should get an iPad an do like I do. I take my iPad down by the beach and then I tell Siri to develop new apps for me while I'm swimming. Then I jet over to Paris for dinner. I use the iPad on the plane to tell Siri to develop some web apps for me. On Friday I count the Bennies. I guess I could make Siri do that too, but I kinda enjoy doing that myself.
PCs are so dead, dude.
P.S. Watch out for my new Siri developed social networking, dick pic sharing website startup with accompanying Siri developed smartphone app. VCs are all over this thing. It'll blow your mind, dude.
"They" are always predicting the death of PC gaming too.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Yes, the PC boom for consumers is gone. What the PC market is losing is basically all the people who only ever used their desktops for cat videos, email and a little word processing. All of those tasks can be done on a tablet or a smart phone. Tablet's and smart phones however are not currently in position to replace the less mundane tasks.
However when my phone has the power to fully run Photoshop et al. and dock to a keyboard and my big monitor, then the PC may die, until then...
the same platform is somehow important, and fueled a creative outburst that's not likely to be duplicated.
You're sitting there consuming content, and you think "Hey, I can do that better", and right there you have
the platform to do it. Things like Hypercard and being able to edit HTML by hand and view the file
in a browser made the capital investment low and the turnaround fast. With both these barriers very
low, a lot of people got into the action.
How would all this mobile software be programmed if it wasn't for desktop systems with proper development environments?
Desktop/PC is not dead. It's just that people, until now, didn't have any other option than to purchase a PC, in order to do tasks they are interested in.
Now that they can get a tablet/phone to do this, they don't need PC. They never did. They just didn't have a choice.
why would I want to buy a new PC when my 5 year old quad core 3Ghz AMD system with 12 GB of ram with a R5770 graphics card can do 99.99% of what I want in a desktop. Honestly it boots and runs every program I throw at it almost as fast as the new $1200 I7 I have at work(as perceived by the human Eye and not some benchmark). If the innovation in desktop processors/graphics cards kept up with mobiles I would buy a new desktop. But for now there is no need.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Last time I looked in our server room, there were still some mini-computers hard at work. I know of companies that still have "Big Iron" running. While not dominant any more, both are still "alive". Yes the desktop form factor and even laptop form factor are in decline, they continue to server a purpose and will for many users, for many years to come.
People often forget to ask themselves what is a desktop. Most of you thinks that the desktop is a big tower stuffed in a desk, but the desktop is actually:
1) Big (by comparison to phones and tablets) screen.
2) Full physical keyboard
3) Mouse or other pointer device.
The tower by itself does not make a desktop. I think in the end you will just plug your phone or watch or whatever into a big screen screen with bluetooth mouse and keyboards to do your work. Your phone os will also have a desktop interface (like windows 8, but without sucking) that will come up when you plug a big screen.
"'The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses"
In the end we will have a device with no screen and a single button: "Like".
The desktop was never even alive. It's called a computer. It runs windows. That's all people know. whether it's a laptop, a tower an all in one or in the future you phone that you plug a screen/keyboard/mouse combo in.
People don't care. shut up about the death of the desktop already.
As a developer, the only thing you should care about is on what OS it runs and what the input devices are, not if it's powered by a tablet or a phone or a tower or a laptop or a server or a "cloud".
Why are old people so desperate to have a big box next to their desk while hardware is shrinking to pocket sizes? Or do you really believe a mouse and keyboard are going to disappear along with that hideous box of yours?
i mean, have you ever tried playing a decent game on a touchscreen? oh no wait, you are an old fart too busy complaining about desktop sales decline.
Whenever I see news or discussion about dwindling desktop sales I don't see anything about market saturation. Computers are relatively durable appliances that people aren't typically going to replace without the need to do so.
When was the last time you replaced your toaster just for the hell of it?
nope, modern laptops are just as good as desktops now. Apart from the small screen (which can be good as a secondary thing to run your email or whatnot on), the laptop has as much power as your desktop.
An average laptop might have as much processing power and RAM and disk space as an average desktop, but the upper bound on a desktop is still far, far higher. To pick an example someone mentioned earlier, you can't get a lot of laptops with dual fast processors and 64+GB of RAM, which is a good but realistic specification for a professional CAD workstation. If you're rendering video or working with high quality audio, you might be thankful for a local RAID array with a few TB of capacity (as well as the large SSD for OS/applications and probably networked storage for larger capacity, obviously).
Also, in terms of peripherals, laptops are stuck in the dark ages. I'll take my two large monitors (try driving 8+ megapixels from any laptop's built-in graphics), my ergonomic keyboard and mouse, my real graphics tablet for sketching and precision work, and my real surround sound speakers over whatever feeble imitation the best laptop you can find has to offer, thanks. Sure, you can plug all of these into a modern laptop (until you run out of USB ports, at least), but if you're going to do that and shove the laptop out of the way, you've just bought an expensive and less reliable/upgradeable desktop anyway.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They'll have to take my Desktop PC from my dead, cold hands.
Maybe the best use of the PC Desktop needs to be focused on protecting the user Identity and his/her Privacy. Like a firewall focused on protecting identify and privacy of the users of the system. First step would be to harden the desktop so we would at the very least, know the desktop is doing the owners bidding rather than a commercial interest or worse a hackers maliciousness. I want a desktop that feels like it's my private space to create, research, write, form ideas and communicate Privately at my discretion.
... cannot and will not be confined to a 7-inch screen. Nor can the range of artistic inputs be entirely duplicated by a touch screen. In time holographic displays and other technologies will displace some of the current hardware requirements to run, say, multiple displays, but we aren't there yet.
The PC market (where P = personal and 'PC' includes Mac,Windows,Linux etc.) has had a 30 year honeymoon period during which specifications were increasing exponentially and real-time prices were dropping. Customers had a real incentive to upgrade their hardware and software every 18 months or so, because they were trying to to jobs that were pushing at the limits of their hardware.
Now, that has come to an end. Your 3-year old PC can effortlessly run a GUI-based OS like Windows 7, OS X 10.6 or your Linux distro of choice. It can do non-linear HD video editing fast enough for 'pro-sumers'. It can render web pages as fast as your broadband can deliver them. It can play FPS video games at 60 frames/sec, at levels of detail that are just this side of 'uncanny valley'. The only reason it would even break a sweat doing wordprocessing, DTP or spreadsheets is if the software is a bloated mess mentioning no names). The 4GB-8GB RAM you got is probably still enough and the only thing that can really fill up a 500G+ HDD for personal use is your video pr0n collection - for which cheap external HDs (convenient to lock in a cupboard) are available.
Of course, there are still specialist niches who need Moore's Law to keep rolling - but they will increasingly be looking at things like multi-GPU computing, clusters and the Cloud (£1 in the swear jar) rather than traditional Personal Computers.
Upgrading might get you a 10% improvement, but that's not going to turn your movie render from "coffee break" to "instant". I think the last, great upgrade for most people will be to switch from spinning rust to SSD (which does produce a dramatic speed up for many users) - after that, the only reason to upgrade will be if your computer breaks, suffers planned obsolescence or if the vendor sells you a stylish new model on non-technical grounds (Apple are the only real masters of that - possibly why they are doing less badly than others).
Sure, tablets and smartphones are part of the picture, but I suspect that it is more a case of people spending their spare cash on the latest fondleslab as a supplement to their 2 year-old PC rather than junking PCs for tablets.
There's also a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, with manufacturers obviously spending their R&D money on mobile devices rather than coming up with anything new in the PC line (beyond bunging touch-screens on their laptops) and software houses screwing up their offerings in a misguided attempt to make them more tablet-like (Windows 8, Gnome 3, Unity).
The only reason the PC will die is if modern hypercapitalist corporations decied that they can't be arsed to support a mature market that is no longer in its boom years and unlikely to generate short term windfall profits.
Quite frankly, computing could do with a few years respite from 'if it works it is obsolete' to give people a chance to finish upgrading their DOS software to a system that may still be around when they finish the job.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I believe people confuse "the death of the desktop" with "the logical conclusion of the desktop". In the past, each new generation of desktop brought important new capabilities, often in terms of speed and memory, but sometimes in terms of other things (long ago) such as GUI capability, networking, USB support.
However, desktops now seem to have reached their logical conclusion, at least in terms of speed an memory. Desktops already have more memory than is needed in most cases. Regarding speed, processor clock speed seems to have plateaued, and many processors now have more cores than can be efficiently used. Also, the speed of the computer as perceived by the user now is limited by non-processor factors such as network speed and hard drive speed. And what was the last new "killer feature" to come along like USB to make you buy a new desktop?
All that leaves little reason for the user to upgrade to the next generation. So, desktops aren't dead, they've just reached their logical conclusion. New desktops will continue to be made, bought, and incrementally improved. But much as car manufacturers change the cosmetics of cars each year to sell new models to people who don't really need to replace their old ones, we can expect Microsoft, Apple, Dell, et. al. to continue to change the cosmetics to convince us to "upgrade". And that will occasionally result in marketing disasters such as the Edsel and Windows 8.
Maybe for personal use the desktop is dying, because legions of brainless "consumers" seem content to "consume" on their devices rather than produce. But the computer desktop will live on for a long time in business where it's often the best tool for the job.
No comments about the countless clerical, finance, and other sorts of people who enter, proofread/correct, analyze, update, and/or look up data stored somewhere: the desktop historically, or the cloud (if one, or one's management, is willing to take a chance that everyone between you and your data will vote unanimously to allow you to get at the data on any given day). These people doubtless outnumber all the AutoCAD and software development people by a huge margin. It seems inconceivable that they could do their jobs with tablets or, even worse, a phone or something like Glass. For them, I imagine a good-sized screen and a keyboard will always be needed. Whether these essential I/O devices are driven by a phone (with still more third-parties getting between you and your work) or something else isn't important. It needn't have the same form factor as a desktop, but it will need much of the same I/O and connectivity as a desktop.
I would like to see a tablet that can
1 do a svn pull of Blender tag 61055 (and libs)
2 patch the source with the Cloth Sewing Patch
3 Compile for a win32 target
then
run it and create clothing.
Heck i have been looking for anything that can do this for a month!!
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
All of these desktop vs. laptop vs. tablet vs. phone vs. etc. discussions imply that the computer is the focus when really it should be the interfaces. If my quadcore phone had methods to type and see the results as well as I can on my keyboard and multiple XX-inch monitors, I doubt that I'd have a need for anything else. For me, as my eyes fade and fingers age, the screens are also getting smaller and the keyboards need greater agility. Yea, progress!
Sounds like one of the help-desk guys brought him a tablet to try out this week.
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Again? Jesus could learn something here, the PC was proclaimed dead more times that I can be arsed to count.
The PC isn't dead and it will never be. Why? Cuz it's the pinnacle of technology and as such it will always have it's devoted followers. Sure, phones, tablets, laptops are taking over a segment once reserved for PCs, but the PC keeps moving forward, always, relentless, while other mediums gets forgotten as time pass by.
The next BIG thing will be virtual reality and only the PC has the computing power to deliver the perfect experience.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
For the "media consumption" crowd who only surf the web and watch youtube videos, then yes, perhaps the desktop is dead.
For people who CREATE anything, perform any kind of development work, do web page design, graphic design, or any kind of office work, the desktop, even if it's virtualized via thin-client hardware, will still be king.
I work on a desktop, but the main purpose of this desktop is to login to a mainframe (not kidding), that's running cobol code that goes back to the 1980's. There's millions of dollars of software investment in this system, and it's not going anywhere, even though upper management has tried to get rid of it. It simply works too well. And I'm sure I'm not alone -- I'm assuming there's billions of dollars of hardware and software that firms are hesitant to simply drop and replace if it's doing the job.
And don't even get me started on "the cloud" -- without the equivalent of cheap/ubiquitous "desktop" machine hardware out there, the cloud wouldn't be able to exist.
The desktop is dead? Hardly, and only if you're looking at a single segment of the market. That's like saying the wristwatch is dead, the wired telephone is dead, the stereo system is dead, and the TV set is dead -- all of these devices can be replaced by a single mobile device, so, consumers don't need these things either, does that mean that they are dead too?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The desktop/laptop PC market has always been two separate markets. One it the office, workplace, market. The other is the internet access market.
The standard PC was made for the office market. Both the office productivity market using the standard wordprocessor/spreadsheet/presentation apps, and all the various kinds of design and simulation software used by umpteen varieties of designer.
The standard PC was also sold for the internet access market - mainly web browsing and email, because initially it was the only device that could do it. But it wasn't actually optimised for these uses - is just did them because it was a good general purpose device. You could say that it was mis-sold for these uses: it was over complex for the simple uses people needed. When smartphones and tablets came along, they were actually designed to do the job these users wanted. Naturally they captures the market.
The PC market peaked at about 180 million devices. I reckon that was about 30 million work devices ("Sit forward" devices, as I think of them) and 150 million net access devices ("sit back" devices), The 30 million sit-forward market is still there, and growing at a reasonable rate. The 150 million "sit back" market is evaporating fast as people who want that switch to purpose-built devices.
Who is buying your product? Look at how they are sitting. If they are sitting forward, stay with the PC: you are selling to a steady segment of the market. If they are sitting back (or trying to), jump ship, because that is what your customers are doing.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"They are amazingly good at what they do."
True story, I don't think anyone forsees desktops vanishing, but they are moving more towards becoming something you replace when it runs out (e.g. toilet paper), than something you keep constantly up to date by buying the latest and greateast.
and that can happen if desktops die and people move to phones / tablets.
Also other stuff like un removable batterys and fixed storage (apple systems needs at least an SD slot) and USB.
You're right: desktops will become workstations (if they're not that already). They will continue to be very powerful devices suited for very particular work, that either requries a lot of computational power or is ergonomically sutied for a desk-and-chair.
Until quite recently, desktops were multipurpose devices: they did all that but also browsed the web, did word processing, and other lighter tasks. They'll still be able to do that, for sure, it's just that unless people need the workstation stuff, there are simply better devices than desktops.
The desktop isn't dying, it's just narrowing its mission.
The desktop isn't dead, the desktop is very much alive and well. Try doing FPGA design / VHDL design without a laptop or a desktop. Try doing intensive computing in Matlab / Octave without a desktop / laptop. I can keep going but there is no point, the desktop / laptop is very much needed in many cases, let alone servers.
Anyone telling you the desktop is dead is:
A) Lying
B) Trying to tell you something
C) Stupid beyond the capacity of any language to encompass
D) Completely out of touch with reality
E) All of the above
I'll go with E.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
INPUT | PROCESSING / memory | OUTPUT (feedback) |
shows the phone and tablet as having the same Processing/memory as the PC. The only difference is in INPUT and OUTPUT. Therefore, the way to remove PCs from the world is fairly straightforward: allow phones the same input and output options. This can be done with bluetooth keyboards and a video connector to access a larger screen. Being able to connect to a printer would also be a nice effect.
With data in the cloud, there is little reason for such a device to not exist. Why it doesn't yet, I have no idea. MY understanding is that was EXACTLY where Apple was going, until Jobs died. Then the cowards took over and they're doing a rear guard action ever since, viz, the cylindrical / inferior MacPro, etc. The iPad should be the new MacBookPro by now, but, that would take vision and guts, something not found at Apple sans Jobs, or in Japan (culturally) or at Microsoft (ever). Maybe Google will put something together.
What we're looking at is (as noted by others here) that PCs are a VERY mature market. You can only do word processing so fast. If an app complies in 5 minutes, you're not gaining that much labour time by doubling the speed to 2min 30sec. And if an action takes 10 seconds, and you can do it in 1 with some new crazy processor, you're not gaining that much. There ARE applications where speed matters (rendering video, for example) but those are edge cases, not the majority. Remember when benchmarking was done with an "Unsharp mask filter on a 40meg Photoshop file"? How long does that take anymore? A second? Two? We're in the land of Good Enough Computing. And if there is anything that should keep AI fundies like Kurzweil awake at night, it's that. It's not that we can't use more speed and power, we just don't need it for 99% of what we do, and so our money will go into things are are technologically "inferior" but infinitely practical and dirt cheap.
So, yeah - Apple, MS, Samsung, whoever - they could kill the PC tomorrow. Just let datapads multitask, power USB (for keyboard / mouse / graphics tablet / printer etc), and have a convenient HDMI port out. Most of those things already exist to a certain degree already - so now it's just a matter of time before the iOS / Chrome / Windows / Android catch up to the need.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
the games we played pushed the envelope of PC hardware. More detail, better graphics, physics engines, etc. That, IMO, is what drove the PC hardware market.
:/
However, we've reached a point where the games are pretty damned impressive now ( visually anyway ) and the hardware from a few years ago is sufficient to run them. Couple that with the COSTS to create a game anyone wants to play that will push the hardware to the current limit and you can understand the decline in PC hardware sales. They haven't given up on them, there is just less reason to upgrade as often now.
As bad as it sounds, I would rather play a game on console rather than deal with the DRM bullshit that comes with PC gaming anymore. ( Notable exceptions are Steam and those games that just don't play well on a console )
The market for current generation hardware is just smaller now but we've always known the manority of the market really didn't need their desktop anyway. ( eg, my parents. They can make do with an Ipad for what they need it for. It's great for me as I don't have to make a four hour drive to "fix" it every six months because they don't understand the concept of not clicking the "You Win!" banners and opening up emails that remotely resemble something legitimate.
Last, but not least, I could have typed this whole thing in record time were I not posting this via a tiny ass smartphone keyboard
I don't know where and why this keeps coming up, but at the end of the day, the death of the PC won't happen for a while, for many reasons:
1) Creation vs. Consumption
I hear this bullshit a lot as the main driver for the death of the PC. This is a particularly specious argument. The whole creation vs. consumption aspect comes from creating content. While I can type on a tablet or other device, it is not as good (no matter the method) as a keyboard. I can type this entire post in 20 minutes on a keyboard but would take hours (and having fun with spell check, etc.) on some tablet device.
2) Ownership of content
This a huge one. With a desktop I can own what I own, and it is mine. With any always connected, remotely managed device I never can control what they manage. Cloud apps just scare the hell out of me as you don't own anything. You buy a song on ITunes, it is yours until Apple says it is not. You buy a movie from Amazon, it is your until the movie studio sues Amazon and they get a take down notice. This is why if I buy something, it is a physical device. You can not take my Blu-Ray copy of Skyfall without a warrant and coming to my house.
3) Ownership of information
The next thing is who owns your data. Have you read many of the EULA for software? Try turbo tax. You would think that your data is yours. Nope. Well I can control how the software works and how it calls home for information my data is stored locally. It never sends that information out. Now use the online (cloud) app from them, they store your information for you. Let me see my tax information is probably one of three things I never want anyone to see (for identity thief protection). This is stored somewhere where you trust them to keep it safe. This is why a desktop (or laptop) is best for this as it is stored local and you have control.
4) Form Factor
Yes at the end of the day, you can consume any form of media on any form factor. I can watch netflix on my tablet or my phone, but is that the most enjoyable experience? Hell no, it is just the most convenient. If I am going to watch a netflix show I would rather watch it in all its glory on my 52" TV with dolby digital sound system. However when I am sitting at an airport, yes I have to watch it on my portable devices since pulling a 52" TV through an airport w/ associated 7.1 system would just be unfeasible.
5) Gaming .. frame per second, first person shooter) will never work on your dinky 4.3" Iphone screen. Yeah games can be made for those form factors, but at the end of the day, are those the games which are going to be what you want to spend 60 dollars on and want to spend hours playing on a larger screen. Nope, that is a console or a desktop.
While some stupid little game like candy crush or angry birds work on those form factors, you cannot tell me that a high FPS FPS (heh
My medium line desktop smoke the hell out of my medium line laptop, both bought at the same time (2 years ago) and at the same price range with the same OS.
It's all about the games. As long as gaming consoles don't allow the use of keyboards and mice, there will always be a huge market for desktop PCs. It's also one of the reasons Windows has taken so long to die. If Linux ever becomes a viable gaming platform for AAA titles, a lot of us are gone.
Desktops are not selling right now because Moore's Law has let us down lately. As soon as the Law is restored, desktop sales will resume.
I come here for the love
The desktop, and/or notebook computer isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I doubt very much you're going to see people in offices sitting at their desks writing documents and sending e-mail and browsing web sites on phones or tablets. It just doesn't make ergonomic sense. As it is, desktops and notebooks are an ergonomic nightmare, I don't think we want to trade that for another ergonomic nightmare.
Exactly!
Also, for serious hobbyists there is one more turn-off when considering a new computer. This is the Windows tax.
For a desktop this is simple enough: look for the parts or find a nice shop which delivers high-end gear without the Redmond junk bundled. But what if you want a laptop? Good luck.
It is nearly impossible to get a laptop without Windows bundled or having to otherwise pay for that. It's simply insane. The antimonopoly officials should wake up, again.
One more obstacle is that if all one does is surf with the browser all the time, there's no point in getting a 2000 USD noisy desktop box. A tablet will suffice. It's just optimizing the hardward for the use-case.
For real work and content creation, a desktop is mandatory. There's no way around it. So yes, of course the market grows smaller when people who don't need a desktop stop buying a desktop. Does it mean "the PC era is over"? No, of course not. Some idiots want us all to think that but that's just justifying their broken business models.
Also, we need a "base station" whether desktops go away or not. You need to feed your tablets and phone and set-top boxes from somewhere, and the cloud is too monetized to really help consumers.
The desktop or whatever base station is in vogue in the privately-owned and controlled appliance that we need.
When I can have multiple monitors going, with legal research on one screen and MS Word on the other, and am able to type text quickly with a reasonable keyboard......then I'll believe the desktop / laptop is dying.
Until then tablets and smart phones are for surfing the web, putzing around on facebook, and doing minor work tasks. Productivity is still the domain of the PC.
You can take my PC when everything great has been discovered & shared. Until then it will be busy.
Where you can't get at your files unless you have an Internet connection, and they go away if some company goes bust -- but the NSA and the 1337 |-|@X0R d00d2 can help themselves?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
"The king is dead, long live the king" meant that the previous monarch has died, and a new monarch is now ascending to the throne to take the place of the previous king. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_the_king!
The way you are using it implies that some new desktop is ascending to take the place of the old desktop. Yet in the article and summary all that is mentioned is pads and phones. I see no mention of any new type of desktop ascending.
Your title should just be exactly like the last 100 of the same story have been "The desktop is dead".
And, though clunkier than a desktop on a desk, it's still less clunky on a laptop carried in the other hand than a touchscreen device.
N900 with a keyboard is better than either of those, but that isn't touchscreen.
dropping sales does not mean that something is dead but simply that people already have what they need. Lets be serious, the average joe is perfectly happy with a three to four year old pc (maybe even *grasp* second hand), so why buy a new one?
The users are dead, not the desktop.
Those who are happy:
- playing angry birds
- tweeting
- facebooking
and generally adding nothing to society, != end of the desktop. Its just a phase in which the market is flooded with simpletons.
When people realise what a waste of life Facebook/Twitter is, they might use their desktop for something useful.
No doubt, the idiot who wrote this article will then feel the need to write more pointless shit.
It just continues on living forever
Accept a world where you will no longer create content, only consume it. We tried with proprietary O/Ss and APIs. We tried with walled gardens. Now we will take your input capability away.
Resistance is futile.
Have gnu, will travel.
Oh wait, it's not an award...
Srsly tho, how long are people going to keep talking about this drivel. It's not going anywhere because of gamers. They keep the desktop alive. Why?
Because we won't buy macs because you can't expand them. We won't use Linux/Unix because they don't have Direct X. We won't use tablets or phones or laptops because it's a sub-par experience.
WE WILL ALWAYS USE THE DESKTOP, AND YOU CAN'T STOP US.
It isn't possible to type as quickly and accurately on a tablet or iPhone as on a desktop PC. It isn't possible to precisely select a graphical element in one step (as in a CAD drawing).
Since voice input/control is not there yet, we are restricted to using mobile devices' clumsy keyboards. Even with voice, it is likely that users will opt for keyboards for other reasons (privacy, quiet in a group work environment, etc.).
Years and years have had people said desktop is dieing, its like people keep predicting the end of the world. I'm sorry, but your not going to be playing games on a tablet or phone. And a lot of people don't like consoles as their mane game machine. Steam just had a 1 million user increase from last year's black Friday sales which proves desktop PC is alive and well.
Just another guy trying to tell people to stop buying desktop computers for some personal reason.
Last time I heard the mainframe "declared dead" was the late nineties... and at the same time, IBM was shipping more mainframes than they'd ever delivered before.
The desktop dead? Let's see, why might that not be the case?
1. People upgrading their existing systems, including hardware, rather than buying a new computer.
2. People without 20/10 vision, who can't read email on that tiny screen.
2.a Websites (such as MySQL's documentation) that use fixed widths and locations, resulting in
overprinting if you don't have your browser fullscreened.
3. Gamers.
4. Anyone who actually wants to watch a video. (I "watched" Thor on a 12" screen on an airplace a couple
of years ago, with daylight in the cabin. Tell me what you're watching on your expensive phone
gives a better view.)
5. Anyone who is actually doing work, including writing something longer than a twit, spreadsheets (the
original killer app), Power Point (no, no, I don't, but managers *adore* them), or graphics, or....
6. Anyone who does more on it than a couch potato.
7. See 3. (Who do you think drove video?)
8. Um, most of the stuff that you look up on those phones and tablets? What do you think *THAT* is running on, if not
servers or mainframes?
mark
Who the hell keep trying to push this stupid idea?
Tablets and phones are great for some tasks...reading email, checking your Facebook page, games, Skype. Not so great for others...anything where you have to type a lot, anything where the precision of a mouse is needed, anything where you need a big screen to function properly.
Personally, I use my phone almost exclusively for personal email. Most of it does not require a response (bill due, etc.) so the phone is the perfect form factor for that. The tablet seems to be good for book reading or watching Netflix. But when I have to get any real work done I want a desktop with two giant monitors attached to it. When it comes to multi tasking, nothing beats the desktop, keyboard and mouse combination.
For some people, a tablet and phone are just fine. Maybe even just a phone. Or just a tablet. Or just a laptop. It just depends on what you need to get done and how important mobility is to you. Pick the right tool for the job. After all, a hammer is great at what it does but it makes a lousy screwdriver ;-)
The cloud is not reliable, fast, secure or universally available. Sure, in the city you think you have reliable access but even that is an illusion.
Tablets are great, for consuming content, playing games, filling out surveys with minimum text entry, taking inventory but they're no replacement for my laptop/desktop machine and the apps on tablets are very lightweight - they don't compare with real word processors, illustrator, photoshop, etc. I'm a content creator. Content creators have always been the dominant users of computers. Now we have a new device, tablets, for consumers and that's just fine and dandy but it doesn't change the fact that the content creators still use and will continue to use content creation tools which are a lot more powerful than the apps on tablets.
... and the developers who actually *create* all the consumer stuff for tablets, phones, phablets, cloud and other consumery mobile bullshit will use what, exactly? And what about CAD, drafting, design, programming and other professionals?
Yeah, no, you didn't think that one through. The desktop is withering in the consumer market, sure, but it is not going anywhere anytime soon. People who use their machines for things other than dicking around still create a big demand (not that you could convince companies like Lenovo so they stop making a clusterfuck out of the ThinkPad, though)
You'll have to pry my desktop from my cold dead hands.
"The desktop or laptop is now in decline" and the reason is that the punters and chaff users switched to tablets and phones, their needs are so simple that don't need any more than that.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
PC/Laptop sales are declining because everyone already has a PC/laptop. People who are lamenting the death of the PC are doing so because they don't understand the concept of market saturation.
A state I aspire to.
Fact is, lots of people bought PCs back in the day who didn't need them. The majority of people I know only do web and email. A few years ago, a PC was the only option. Same people moved immediately to laptops when they became affordable. The same people are now moving on to tablets and phones, because that's all they ever needed. Those of us who do actually need the power of a PC will still be there.
As someone who does a lot of 3D modeling, and who has done professional graphics and game development, I am worried because affordable, powerful systems may become out of the reach of the average person. Cellphone and tablet chips, generally have 1/10 of the processing power than can be found on a desktop computer. You may be able to draw a few lines and rotate a few objects on tablet, but in 3D CAD can be quite demanding. Machines have parts. Circuit boards have traces. Processors have a piece of silicon with lots of little blobs of stuff on it. All of these add up to a difficult problem for even tablets. HD video editing can be demanding.
Beyond the hardware, so little is expected from even tablet software. Is it really a miracle if we can cut and paste? Could you run an entire business on your tablet, a tablet that could have 300 times the processing power than a desktop of the 1990's business system? The problem here is we expect too little. As an example, PhotoShop Touch cannot even edit a 24 mega pixel image from a $500 Nikon D3200 entry-level DLSR camera, but PhotoShop, PaintShopPro or the Gimp could do that an a netbook.
Cellphones and Tablets, Android and iOS are application-centric, not document centric. When we work, we often need to exchange information between programs, and that is not easy to to on iOS. In Android, every program has it's own weird file chooser. We don't have proper shared font folders for these, in fact they tried to get rid of the parent/child folder/file metaphor, which is fine of you never plan to organize anything using a computer.
So many cell/tablet centric computers a married to the cloud so tightly, that you cannot work if your connection is slow, goes down, or something bad happens. The sobering part is: a war or natural disaster could mitigate any productivity of cloud users by offering a single point of failure. Please don't put all of your eggs in one or someone's basket.
What we needed was one OS that worked on "devices" and computers, the difference being than one CAN work autonomously, and they other is a new metaphor for a old idea, the dumb terminal. Microsoft screwed up Windows 8, twice. They should have never made XP into Vista, and now it's too big, let that be your coffin nail. Windows 8, was not about doing the work that was needed to be done, it was about using the code you had. Apple's has tried integration, but remember, Apple likes application centricity. Gnome tried so hard, but we want a 2 pane file manager. We want to use this stuff for desktop applications. Mint chipping undermining Ubuntu Linux throne, suggests that we still want a command bar. We still want multiple window. Where would you have been in your life, if you never compared anything to anything else?
Are we becoming a world of chattering people who can't do anything creatively with one of the greatest machines ever made?
[Lately, I've been having problems even finding laptops with dedicated GPUs. The Intel Integrated GPUs do not seem to have a full OpenGL implementation, and the going gets slow when you need just as much CPU as GPU.]
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Although the desktop is a big market and will continue to be one for some time, the lack of growth means a likely shift from research to development (to make things cheaper) as the competition reduces the gross margins, but new research doesn't pay back (it's good enough). The platform will probably die a slow death as new research money (and they people that chase that money) move on to the shiny new stuff and as vendor consolidate to reduce overhead and competition, the number of product offerings will shrink.
If you want to compare this with the mainframe, there are only really 2 types of mainframes today. IBM (zOS) and clusters. Although people often talk about servers and super-computers as mainframes, they really aren't the same thing. Although once a highly vibrant multi-vendor industry, modern mainframes have specialized to the point where they are really just encrypted transactional database processing machines provided mostly by one company (IBM 90% market share). It may be a multi-billion dollar industry, but it's mostly vertically integrated and single sourced. I think if the PC business morphed back into this model because of lack of growth, I doubt anyone would recognize this as the desktop that they know and love anymore...
I think a better analogy for the desktop is the wristwatch business. Although it might appear that there are many watch manufactures, most vendor just buy a movement from a handful of vendors. This is pretty much how the desktop is now (small number of ODMs, selling standard stuff to companies that repackage).
For a while, the end-user price of a watch seemed to be going down and there are many available options, but more recently the price of a decent watch is instead it is going up. Why? Because instead of being a growth industry, less people are buying watches (because everyone has a time-telling cell-phone) and the low-cost players chased out all the bulk of the industry and the remaining players are selling jewelry that happens to also be a watch. The movements in these low-end products haven't really changed in years. Of course there are always a few niche players that are more vertically integrated or buy high-end movements direct from other vertically integrated vendors and craft them into custom products, but you pay through the nose to buy them because there is no down-market to create a volume business as the velocity of innovation slows.
In the watch biz, high-end movements today don't get picked up by the low-end folks after a few years, the low-end movements are completely optimized differently for price and manufacturablity, the old high-end stuff just gets end-of-life/discontinued because the parts were never produced in enough volumes for a low-end volume business and the high-end folks don't want to canabalize their own business by dumping their old high-end stuff in the discount bin.
I think the PC desktop business has already bifurcated into this today. If you want a generic vanilla low-end platform where you can install linux, it will probably exist for a long time. If you want something high-end, you will likely pay the "niche-tax" for it. Who knows, it might track the watch business as desktop usage declines, but unless a low-end "jewelry-like" segment emerges, the low-end may just evaporate because of low-demand. I think many folks feel the tablet will emerge as the "jewelry" segment so in this case the low-end of the desktop business might be doomed. In which case, it might still be a multi-million dollar business, but each PC will be at least $2,000 (ironically, the same as the low-side of the high-end retail watch business) instead of under $500 (the average retail price of a "jewelry" watch before it hits the discount bin).
I remember the time in Apple when there was only one model of (desktop) Macintosh, with a B&W screen; Apple at this time announced switching to color screen was definitely useless to the customers.
Indeed, switching to color screens was maybe the only step they took well behind "Windows"...
Herve S.
This is silly. All this talk of work moving to tablets or smartphones, or laptops replacing desktops (a) misses the point of why we use desktops in the first place and (b) focuses on a relatively narrow selection of the workforce.
The advantages are not in processing power or framerates or whatever, that was largely solved years ago and portable devices get better every year. The advantages are in ergonomics, efficiency and maintenance:
Desktops have:
- an arbitrarily large screen (or mutliple screens)
- a screen which is adjustable in height above the desk as well as angle
- a screen which can be mounted on a wall or other convenient location away from the CPU and keyboard
- a separate keyboard and mouse which can (a) be placed arbitrarily on the desk relative to the screen and (b) can be cheaply and easily replaced when you spill coffee on it or when it gets dirty
- the box can be replaced independently of the monitor, which is good for maintenace if something breaks and good for costs in the upgrade cycle
Now some will argue that all the above can be solved by a docked laptop, and that is true (indeed I am typing this from a docked laptop). But for the vast majority of workers they neither need nor want to take their computer home with them (most office workers) nor should they (e.g. hospital workers). In that case it makes no sense at all for their employer to spend more money on a laptop and docking station when the laptop will never move anyway.
Mobile devices are good for managers, marketers, creative people who like to work in cafes etc, people who need to work in the field and people who take their work home.The vast majority of workers are not these people. They are secretaries, accountants, HR staff, middle management, shop workers, clerical staff, workers in healthcare, in retail, etc etc. People who use spreadsheets, full-screen forms, databases etc. These people have nothing at all to gain from mobility in the work place and everything to lose in terms of ergonomics, and their employers in terms of costs and maintenance.
Even for home use the ergonomics of a separet keyboard, mouse and monitor mean the desktop will often stay (kid spills juice on the keyboard? $10-$50. Spills juice on the laptop? $100-$500.)
That's why desktops are not going anywhere; developers, CAD users and the like are just the power user icing on the cake.
bought it used some years ago for $30 from WeirdStuff, still has the price tag. I loaded Win98 from a CD of my previous PC when it died (purchased in the days when they provided OS on a CD). Still use it here and there, i.e. running programming software for older 2-way radios. But also have newer PC (win7 laptop). I know many people dumped their Win7 PCs and ran out and bought Win8, I don't understand why as their Win7 was perfectly fine. Now all they do is bitch about Win8 on mailing lists.
mfwright@batnet.com
This is mostly propaganda. Those that want control are trying to convince the public to use only THEIR products and to turn control over to THEM, just like the smartphone industry is mostly under the control of your carrier, and the ipads and nooks and similar devices are under the control of their manufacturers.
And if you use "the cloud" and are, or soon will be turning control of your information, your inventions, your creations of art, music, and literature all over to those that host it.
Stand your ground, seize control over what is your's or lose it forever.
Where computers are concerned, HBCC2 (Home Brew Computer Club 2) will continue manufacturing computers out of a garage, and selling them to those that want to maintain control over their own lives. And negotiation and selling out, will NOT be an option.
Who cares, it's on xbox and playstation where i don't need to worry about tweaking settings to match my particular combination of RAM type/amount/speed, CPU type/speed, GPU type/speed, operating system, resolution, etc. Also don't need to worry about that king of all crashes and instability: Graphics card drivers!
Don't get me wrong, the PC is the ultimate choice if you are into highest resolutions and graphics tweaking/fiddling to get the optimal experience but for gamers it is wasted time, go the console, less time frustratingly dealing with drivers and settings, more time playing!
Phones and tablets are better-suited for consumption (literature, movies, music, games, web-browsing)
Only certain simplistic game genres, and only web-browsing where you are not writing back.
I will but that when tablets stop to be overpriced toys. Or when tablets can: Burn Bluray/DVD/CDs, edit audio and video professionally (not cut and paste or add silly memes), or have real open source applications instead of adware apps that sells every feature for 0.99 USD per item (TIP: No gimp, open office, emacs, vim, etc for Android, why for?)
You aren't going to get them to deal with a ~4-5" screen for everything.
For more screen real estate, you'd plug an HDMI cable into the phone, pair it to a Bluetooth keyboard, and place the phone to the right of the keyboard to be used as a trackpad.
It appears we've already run headfirst into Layne's Law, arguing over definitions. I'd recommend abandoning "consumption" and "content". But by your definition of "consumption", how many people engage in "creation" at home? And if too few people engage in "creation" to warrant continued production of affordable home PCs, how many people will just skip trying "creation" because of the cost?
It is nearly impossible to get a laptop without Windows bundled
MacBook Air computers do not ship with a Windows OS. Nor do System76 laptops.
One more obstacle is that if all one does is surf with the browser all the time
It's not just what one does; it's also what one plans to start doing over the next few years. If all you have is a locked-down tablet, then you or your child won't be able to complete homework assignments once you or your child enrolls in a programming class.
Sometimes it's just nice to get news that your friends got engaged or someone's baby arrived safely when you're out, and mobile social networking apps can tell you.
I don't see what's wrong with learning these things eight hours from now once I'm back at an Internet connection. I wait eight hours anyway when I take a nap for the night. And yes, my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 laptop fits in my satchel, and the reason I complained when manufacturers killed the affordable 10" laptop was that bigger laptops wouldn't fit.
The problem comes when this narrowed mission brings with it a substantial price premium over a locked-down tablet that isn't useful for, say, computer science homework.
So for people who often need a "car" but occasionally need a "truck", what does Apple recommend? And how should one afford the upgrade from an iPad to a MacBook when one's circumstances change to need a truck more often, such as a family member enrolling in a programming class?
In that case, please allow me to move the goalposts just once: What Linux distribution capable of putting multiple windows on one screen has become popular? When I open a calculator or notepad app on an Android tablet, and it completely covers up the other app that I was using rather than staying in a phone-sized window, the screen feels wasted to me.
console hardware, which is seriously lacking when compared to a laptop from just four years ago
Are you referring to previous generation consoles (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) or current generation consoles (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One)?
How do they react when you tell them they can keep Windows 8 but still have it feel like 7 by installing one piece of freeware? That's what I got when I installed Classic Shell on my Windows 8 PC at work.
The x86 lineage of computing could be supplanted by the ARM lineage
The problem here is that apart from old Acorn Archimedes computers running RISC OS, ARM tends to strongly correlate with cryptographic lockdown that prevents someone from using a device to, say, do his homework for programming class. The transition from 6502 to x86 didn't come with the same loss of ability to write your own programs.
Games from US/UK developers that have little/no console experience....yet, but will do so eventually
Thank you for recognizing this career path. In this case, as a developer progresses through own-site sales and Steam before moving to consoles, PC's advantage will continue to be "you get to play games from rising stars... first."
After all there was a time not so long ago when die-hard PC gamers said things like:
Or. You'll never have official game modding tools on a console. I'll grant the exception of game-maker titles with very limited engines like RPG Maker and WarioWare DIY, but if (say) Half-Life were console exclusive, there would never have been Counter-Strike.
Computers are relatively durable appliances that people aren't typically going to replace without the need to do so.
Microsoft will stop issuing security patches for the Windows XP operating system in April of next year. PCs still running Windows XP and connected to the Internet will either A. get a new OS installed, or B. get replaced, or C. get 0wn3d and then replaced. I imagine most users of Windows XP beyond the deadline won't be savvy enough to put Xubuntu or newer Windows on the machine, which leaves replacement.
The only reason the PC will die is if modern hypercapitalist corporations decied that they can't be arsed to support a mature market that is no longer in its boom years and unlikely to generate short term windfall profits.
You mean like what happened to affordable 10" laptops a year ago? I'm just worried where I'll find a replacement once mine breaks. Or have x86 tablets with a keyboard, or other tablets with a keyboard and a compiler and a not-full-screen calculator app, become as affordable as netbooks were in 2010-2012?
Tablets and phones have made consumption easier, which takes that task away from the 'PC' and moves them more to the producer side.
What PCs offer is upward mobility. Someone who wants to stop being only a "consumer" and become also a producer will have a much less expensive time of it if he already has access to a PC.
Joe reads Facebook, but he also posts. He might have some pretty long posts to go with his cat videos. And that is much clunkier on a tablet than on a laptop.
Someone who's browsing Facebook on a tablet could just whip out his Bluetooth keyboard and start typing. For someone who starts out by "consuming" on a tablet, adding a Bluetooth keyboard to the existing tablet is a lot cheaper than adding a whole new laptop.
Yes. In my vision, apps designed for a phone-sized touch screen would run in a phone-sized floating window, much like the Calculator desk accessory that has shipped with Mac OS since 1984, or a phone-sized strip at the side of the screen like the "Snap an App" feature of Windows 8 and Windows RT. Apps designed for a tablet that lack specific support for a desktop would fall back to a variant of the tablet UI, with some of the controls abstracted to use touch paradigms (such as drag to scroll) on a touch screen and mouse and keyboard paradigms (such as mouse wheel, scroll bars, and Page Up/Page Down) with a mouse and keyboard. Splitting a 1080p monitor right down the middle into two roughly iPad-sized windows would at least be superior to the "all maximized all the time" window management policy that iOS and Android enforce.
At some point phones will be good enough to run a full blown OS
They already are. My Nexus 7 tablet has about as much RAM as my netbook, and I happily run Xubuntu on my netbook.
Need a keyboard? Oh carry one of those too. Etc. Before you know it you are walking around with a suitcase of components and cables to connect them all together.
The idea is that there'd be a monitor and possibly a keyboard at each work station, and you plug your own phone into the monitor and pair the keyboard. Or if you're worried about a keylogger, all you need to bring is the keyboard. At that point, you could use anyone's HDTV as the monitor.
Desktops are just too powerful and cheap to not have one.
My fear is that once the PC becomes perceived something that people buy only to use at work, PC makers will get away with charging inflated "enterprise" prices for them. Case in point: the price of a 10" laptop rose sharply at the end of December 2012 when netbooks were discontinued in favor of far more expensive x86 tablets.
I'll pay 500-1000 for a faster device and saving a few minutes a day for a few years and suspect most businesses will too.
That's just it: if it's something that only businesses buy, too bad for home users who have a need for one or more PC use cases.
Then who's going to bring your point to market? Unlike x86 as of today, which has both BIOS and EFI and a PCIe bus that can be scanned for peripherals, ARM as of today has no standard way to boot the machine. One can't take a single system image and boot it on multiple devices the way one can with, say, Xubuntu on a USB flash drive. This lets ARM device manufacturers get away with locking down the bootloader because they see end users as having no legitimate use for changing it. The lockdown isn't just "in some previous ARM processors"; it's also in currently shipping devices.
You're right: I think the category of "budget computers" will pretty much disappear. But is it going to be such a loss?
It is if high school students can't do their programming homework on a phone because of cryptographic lockdown. Phones running Ubuntu or Ubuntu + Android could solve that, but let me know when they get anywhere near the major carriers in Slashdot's home country. (VZW and Sprint use CDMA2000 without CSIM and won't activate any handset not sold by them, and AT&T bills the subscriber for a subsidized phone even if he doesn't take one.)
Let me see your notepad, ipad, or phone play this. STAR CITIZEN This is just ONE example. It is not the only one. There are more. Business programs. Games, etc. Dead? I don't think so.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
...breeds bullshit stories.
Yet another one, Slashdot. Yet another pile of bullshit posing as news to inflame us and get people commenting.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
But it is much quicker an precise to do text selection with a mouse than it is to do it with a touchscreen.
True, but how much of time spent writing and editing a document is done in text selection? Besides, when I don't have a mouse available, such as while riding the bus, I can use keyboard keys to move the cursor by a word or line at a time. This works on my laptop's built-in keyboard or on a Bluetooth keyboard paired to my Nexus 7 tablet.
Not if you want to use a keyboard and mouse which is the optimal setup for FPS and RTS games.
Granted, that's fine for FPS and RTS. But plenty of genres that aren't FPS or RTS don't benefit from a mouse. Take a cooperative platformer for example. I don't see how a platformer would benefit from a mouse unless it's a Contra clone like Abuse. On a console, you'd put player 1 on the included gamepad and player 2 on another gamepad, either one sold separately or one included with player 2's console and brought from home. On a PC, you'd put player 1 on the keyboard and player 2 where? (It'd be possible to put player 2 on a USB gamepad, but only if player 2 learned how to play on a gamepad and not on a keyboard.)
Not everybody wants to sit within cable-distance from their screen with a mobile device
HDMI cable distance is pretty far.
much less have a cable hanging out of it.
People tolerate a cable coming out of a computer mouse.
Look, the desktop is not dying in any way, shape or form.
The "problem", if it can be called that, is three-fold:
1. Desktop computers have been commonplace for over twenty years now, so practically everyone who wants one already has one.
2. The upgrade roundabout has slowed down massively: a ten-year-old PC ago is still sufficient for most of today's consumer tasks (despite Microsoft trying to change that with Windows 7/8). That certainly was not the case ten or even five years ago.
3. PDAs are outselling everything else at the moment for one reason. We are in an adoption phase for both tablets and smartphones. When everyone who wants one of these has one, the growth will level off and settle into a more stable replacement/upgrade cycle. The current adoption trend leads to an impressive growth curve that some dimwitted analysts have tried to extrapolate.
So while we're seeing slower adoption rates of desktop computers, that has nothing to do with people stopping actually using them.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Considering that I was able to run Knoppix 7.2 recently on an ancient PC with 256 mb of ram and some random swap on a smallish disk, I see no reason I couldn't run a desktop on a $100 mobile device. If the thing had a couple of USB ports, enough to attach a hub, I should be able to hang all my desktop peripherals off it and be good to go. All the better if I could boot off a USB hard drive and run whatever OS I have on it. I don't even see the size of a flash disk to be a problem if the networking is all there, the boot from the hub devices. I can plug my 19" monitor, keyboard and mouse. This would be fine even though I find it hard to use the tiny display that comes with these devices. I want a Rasberry PI device with more umph! So give me a 64 bit AMD compat processor in the device, a couple of gigs of ram and just enough flash for a boot loader or installed OS, say 500 gb, and I see no reason at all to worry about doing without a desktop.
You know, my 60" HDTV is not big enough. I'll hold out for one more year, and then I'm in for an 80-incher. Seriously, you expect me to do anything meaningful on a 7" screen? Much less a friggin iPhone? I just don't have time to tweet and twit and watch 12:9 movies on a handheld display outfitted with earbuds. Just like I'm not gonna be generating PowerPoints, spreadsheets, and Word documents on a tablet any time soon. Maybe the desktop form factor will go away in our lifetime, but if it does, it won't be replaced by something with a 9" display.
That's going to mean using a touch UI with a mouse and keyboard, which people don't like (as demonstrated by Metro and Unity)
I dropped Unity in favor of Xfce two years ago for performance, screen real estate, and auto-hide. I only use Windows 8 at work, and I stay in the desktop all the time thanks to Classic Shell, so I lack first-hand experience with the difficulties in using Windows Store apps with a mouse and keyboard. Other than that the launcher is full-screen (which Classic Shell fixes), what might they happen to be, so that I can suggest improvements?
, you can already see how much of a failure that is by just using the iOS, Android or Windows Phone simulator on a PC.
That's why I tried to caution against a too-literal interpretation of touch paradigms. For one thing, it'd apply only to applications "designed for a tablet that lack specific support for a desktop", and for another, a GUI toolkit's standard controls would switch to more mouse-like behavior when a mouse is connected or when the internal display is turned off in favor of an external monitor.
Not to mention things like making a phone call then require a headset
That or just speakerphone.
You think all manufacturers - including small PC shops - are going to form a cartel to increase prebuilt PC prices? Even then you can still build your own
Small PC shops didn't build laptops last time I checked, especially not 10" laptops, unless putting a tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard in a carrying case counts as "building".
I don't know where you get the idea that PCs will become so obscure that they will move into the realm of unaffordability.
Price rises for a particular feature have happened in the past. In the early 1980s, home computers that could output composite video to an SDTV were cheap. By the 1990s, as VGA and other enhanced-definition formats took over, TV output became the province of obscure, expensive, external scan converters, and TV gaming largely shifted to locked-down consoles. Only with the rise of HDTV circa 2007 did TVs again become able to display home computers' video output as a standard feature. The same happened with PC parallel ports, which a lot of hobbyist hardware hacks used to abuse as an 8-bit GPIO before the rise of legacy-free PCs.
...for about five desktop computers.
Hey, wise men have said dumber things...
Any one know of 8086 tablets or phablets out there?
Tablets and and smartphones are for exploiting Internet, and most bytes in moving in Internet (by far) are entertainment. Even most time people switch on a PC is is for using Internet stuff, so, for entertainment.
And most serious tasks done at home don't need a powerful PC, they can be accomplished with remote services.
Let's see what you/we do at home:
Except for personal documents and spreadsheets, there is nothing that can't be done comfortably with a tablet or smartphone. And even personal documents can be written with a tablet if you aren't writing a big memo, and usually I don't (for personal use, not at work).
PC, as home gadget, is dead. So desktop for home applications is dead. Desktop will still survive in professional niche, but a reduced niche.
It's their own fault if Dell, HP, and friends created a business plan that depends on the entire population tossing out their computer within 24 months, and that no longer happens. They should have made better products rather than relying on Microsoft to make their previous models become slow in a short time.
Enough of this nonsense about planned obsolescence and waste being needed to "create jobs" or "help the economy". That's code for making people waste their money and resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Low demand causes prices to drop.