Will The Death of the PC Bring 'An End To Openness'? (infoworld.com)

Slashdot reader snydeq shared "11 Predictions For the Future of Programming" by InfoWorld's contributing editor -- and one prediction was particularly dire: The passing of the PC isn't only the slow death of a particular form factor. It;s the dying of a particularly open and welcoming marketplace... Consoles are tightly locked down. No one gets into that marketplace without an investment of capital. The app stores are a bit more open, but they're still walled gardens that limit what we can do. Sure, they are still open to programmers who jump through the right hoops but anyone who makes a false move can be tossed...

For now, most of the people reading this probably have a decent desktop that can compile and run code, but that's slowly changing. Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it. For all of the talk about the need to teach the next generation to program, there are fewer practical vectors for open code to be distributed.

Comments

False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC isn't dying. Not at all. Despite tablets and mobile devices, there's a lot of work that can't easily be done on them. There are lots of jobs that still require or are much easier when done on a PC. This question is built upon a premise that is false. As long as there's work that requires a PC, and there will be for the foreseeable future, the PC sure isn't going to die.

Re:False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Graphic designer. Work is only increasing, who do you think makes all the GFX for the console's/tablet's? a tablet just isn't powerful enough yet to design on, nor give up the screen real estate of a pc ( I work with x3 50inch screens) I work in an office with other's who code, I dont see them switching either, never see a console you can code on or a tablet suitable.

Maybe one day the consumer base will switch but those of us use that build for a living Pc's wont be going away anytime soon.

Re: False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

Well maybe for your candy crush saga simulation. Try stuffing 10+ GB of data and 64 GB+ ram to run a two week simulation under windows 10 home and get back to me how that went.

PC is just going back to being a workstation, and tablets are the new calculators.

Re:False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

ok then explain to me why I don't use a laptop currently? oh because they are not powerful enough, try creating a animated Television commercial on a laptop - it takes too long to render without dedicated custom build hardware to handle this task, time is valuable.

walk into a design agency, do you see laptops as primary workspace?.. no, always PC/mac. Laptops are there usually as concept/storyboarding tools when doing client consultation but the workhorse is a Pc/mac

How about Rip's for printing or secondary processing, again pc's there are niches that pc's perform so much better than any other device are going to find it very hard to replace, the customizability is the defining feature, something that laptop are not great at.

Re:False premise

[mlts]

The PC isn't dead. There are just a bunch of people in marketing divisions which -want- it dead, because they want to replace the commodity priced item with free OS choices and privacy settings that the user can choose with a device that has to be tossed in 1-2 years, dumps telemetry data 24/7 with the user unable to a single thing about it, and requiring all transactions to go through some type of gateway, where they guard it, and do their best to monetize every transaction. This is a damn good deal for the tablet maker. It doesn't do much for the consumer.

This type of lockdown isn't new. About 12-13 years ago when Windows Mobile smartphones were used, Sprint only allowed signed applications on their devices, and one had to pay several thousand dollars to play in their ecosystem.

PCs are not going away anytime soon. I doubt there will be a tablet that has decent GPU performance that can handle two 4k monitors. In the PC world, $350 gets you a card that can easily handle this task.

Re:False premise

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

+1000

With the exception of the video card and a relatively cheap 512GB SSD, I also haven't seen the need to buy a new PC until it outright fails. It's still humming along on the i7-2600K processor and 16GB of RAM that it came with 5 years ago. While I'm sure there are workloads that can benefit from the latest and greatest, for most people there just isn't any compelling reason to upgrade. We're starting to see the same phenomenon in the cell phone ecosystem as well.

Re: False premise

[Lumpy]

or do what us professionals do. Refuse to use windows 10. Hell most of the engineering computers are still running 7 because it is massively more stable than 10.

Re: False premise

[slazzy]

Switch to Linux.

Re:Raspberry Pi

[Lisias]

Oh dear god no! Please! I'd rather use a Mac!

Not so fast. These little bastards can be amazingly useful. If you can manage to use a Gnu/Linux box, you can use a Raspberry PI 3 as a (very) capable Graphic terminal for your cloud appliances without worries.

I'm using a bunch of crap, I mean, Raspberry Pi Models B (that one with 512Mb) in a little cluster for miscellaneous tasks, and the damned things work fine. I built a web radio for my home with two of them, and they still have a lot of juice to spare.

Banana Pi and Orange Pi are also capable machines, but lack the support Raspberry Pi has. But other than that, there's some interesting applications for a small computer (smaller than a 3.5" sata HD") with sata ports.