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The 'Post-PC Era' Never Really Happened... and Likely Won't (techpinions.com)
Mark Lowenstein, writing for Techpinions: As we head toward Apple's annual device announcement-palooza, it's an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs' vaunted, much quoted 'Post-PC Era.' The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn't look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future. [...] Tablets have had a good run, but sales have tailed off of late. I'd say they've had greater influence on the evolution of the smartphone and the PC, rather than leading to a significantly different nomenclature for what most of us carry around today. My Techpinions colleague Ben Bajarin says that Creative Strategies surveys indicate that only about 10% of tablet users have 'replaced their PC' -- a number that has held steady for several years. And that 10% is concentrated in a handful of industries, such as real estate and construction. PC sales aren't exactly surging, but they're steady. Your average white collar professional today still carries around a smartphone and a laptop, with the tablet being an ancillary device, used primarily for media/content consumption.
Tablets have had a significant influence on the design of smartphones and PCs. They ushered in an era of smartphone screen upsizing, led primarily by Samsung, and now reinforced by the iPhone X and the expected announcement next week of a 6.5 inch iPhone model. For those who don't want to swing both a smartphone and tablet, we have 'Phablets,' most personified in the successful Galaxy Note series, and alternative-to-keyboard input devices such as the S Pen and the Apple Pencil. We've also seen the development of some hybrid tablet/PC devices, the most innovative and successful of which is Microsoft's Surface line. But that product is competing more in the tablet category than in the PC category, with the exception of a few market segments.
Tablets have had a significant influence on the design of smartphones and PCs. They ushered in an era of smartphone screen upsizing, led primarily by Samsung, and now reinforced by the iPhone X and the expected announcement next week of a 6.5 inch iPhone model. For those who don't want to swing both a smartphone and tablet, we have 'Phablets,' most personified in the successful Galaxy Note series, and alternative-to-keyboard input devices such as the S Pen and the Apple Pencil. We've also seen the development of some hybrid tablet/PC devices, the most innovative and successful of which is Microsoft's Surface line. But that product is competing more in the tablet category than in the PC category, with the exception of a few market segments.
Until now, m'ladies
(tips fedora seductively)
They are just a different form factor for convenience when performing different tasks.
PCs, tablets, and smartphones are destined for convergence.
Smearing greasy prints on a screen, waving your shit around like an idiot, screaming at your word processor that you mean your, no, not yore, no not you're, no for fuck's sake!, or literally walking through a filesystem... All cute gimmicks that last about ten minutes.
And then you pull out the keyboard and get real work done.
Nobody has yet come up with a remotely serious idea that even has a chance at ousting the PC.
Tablets do not replace PCs and laptops. They just aren't as functional. Tablets are nice for reading and doing light work but for anything that requires real heavy-weight work, the PC reigns king.
What's a computer?
Consider that one of the most popular accessories for tablets is a bluetooth keyboard, mostly because trying to type anything longer than a text message is an exercise in frustration/painful. People still desire the functionality of PCs, even if they think they want the sleek and slim form factors of tablets and smartphones. Beyond that, the most popular tablets are primarily designed around media consumption and are generally poorly equipped for any kind of actual work, besides maybe the iPad Pro (which is still priced well within decent laptop range).
You don't look at sales to see if one platform is replacing another, you look at usage. What are people using to do everyday "computing" tasks. From my casual observation, a lot of personal tasks are being done on phones and tablets, while business is still being done on traditional PCs.
It's not either/or. It's both.
There seems to be enough jam in phones for non-technical work (docs edit and pics viewing).
Sounds like a product to have a no guts laptop. Just a screen / mouse, keyboard, storage and power. Though thats all the heavy bits so its a moot point.
Still waiting for my NON-3D light as a feather 4K screen glasses. Ditch the currently technically impossible 3D bits that rely on non-battery power hungry CPU and make a now-useful product. Some kind of projected non-physical keyboard and mouse and you have a futuristic product thats plugs into the phone and uses its CPU. All this tech exists.
Small Aux batter pack / power supply / charger / Aux storage / UI projection box.
Glasses
Existing phone
For a lot of apps just the phone (use its UI) + the glasses.
In many senses, it already happened.
How many programs did you download to your PC? My mom uses a browser and mostly nothing else. Most people I know are perfectly happy with online Office and Google apps. My e-mail client is a web application, as is my calendar, my spreadsheet and my notepad. My word processor is also a web application. What's left is the collection of compilers and system administration tools, terminals and so on most users don't need or know how to use.
The fact they are still x86-based laptops or desktops is due to manufacturing scales, mostly.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
... the big sucking sound for software is coming to close down PC's. We've seen huge gains by Vavle and the game industry to lock down PC's, couple that with smart phone games and emulators like nox and then top it off with windows 10. There is huge pressure to keep taking away control of the machine from end users largely because customers can't reach these companies to punch them in the nads for their theiverous practices. The internet has allowed companies to force policies on populations that don't want them through attrition (aka, are you not going to buy videogames forever if devs choose to release drm infested games?). The market is over and we're finally seeing our society enter a feudal like faze where capitalism is transforming itself into a new feudalism of serfs who have no rights to own the things they buy and lords you extract tribute through simply not being able to be reached by the peasants.
Eventually, the handheld devices will become so powerful that all we need is a better interface. The "docking station" will make a big comeback. I already have a little USB thing for my laptop that provides Ethernet, power, HDMI, and multiple USB ports. The same thing will happen with the "phone". Now, how long that will take is anybody's guess. So the idea of a "PC" as something different from handheld is what will go away.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
(tips fedora seductively)
Stop him! That fat fuck is trying to eat his fedora again.
...is that devices specifically manufactured and marketed as tablets first and foremost are limited. They don't successfully replace all of the functions of a PC, in that the software written for them and the nature of how they're designed to interact with peripherals and with other systems is restricted. In some senses this can be a good thing, we don't have quite as many problems with poorly written software crashing the OS, but because of the walled-garden approach that both Android and Apple have taken, there's simply less functionality. On top of that, due to the battery-operated, portable nature of the devices, they don't do the CPU-intensive tasks as well as something designed to be plugged into the wall, or even something that carries a lot more mass in batteries.
In an ideal world, I would have a very small device that could interface to any screen and set of input devices that I so chose. It could serve as my phone, it could serve as my book reader, it could serve to watch movies, could serve as a portable computer for business functions, could serve as my full-featured desktop computer, depending on what set of peripherals I'm using with it. Unfortunately desktop computer operating systems don't do the mobile functions too well, and the mobile operating systems don't offer the freedom I need for desktop functions.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
On point in every case. This is something that is amazing to watch as the next generations cede all their agency to corporate overlords, all the while thanking them for the privilege of being misused. Sickening.
Ok, so they both died in the process, but they won. Netscape with its "browser as a platform" strategy, and Sun with its "network computing" strategy, both failed to win their early battles against Microsoft, but in the end, the PC lost its place as "the" platform. Applications are now accessed over the Internet, and they can be accessed using any device. Applications locally installed on a Wintel machine are still around, but they're no longer the primary way we do most things with computers. Remember when you had to install a special Windows program to track a FedEx package? To log in to your bank? To do your taxes? That era is over. We're in the post-PC era now, and we've been there for quite some time now.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Stop trying to make this a thing. It's pathetic, really.
People forget that the current way of working on a PC evolved over 150ish years....
It is still the most efficient way to work over long hours (assuming correct posture) with the least amount of effort required (imagine your arms after having to navigate for 7 hoursusing touch with 2 32" 4K displays).
Also businesses have invested BILLIONS in software that currently only run on x86-AMD64 architecture (and in fact due to their GUI and information density not really usable on touch navigation) that they are in no hurry to replace.
It's possible that one day we will replace all desktops with smartphones powerfull enough to run x86-AMD64 emulators to run legacy apps, however mouse/keyboard/screen setup is not going away any time soon.
Yes, tablets are powerful enough today to do most of what most people want to use a laptop or PC for, with one exception: Sensible input and output. Sorry, but the screen-keyboard of a tablet is useless compared to a normal keyboard. If you don't agree, show me your touch-typing on a tablet with more than 80 wpm and we'll talk.
Likewise, output is atrocious. When you're used to 22" screens as your display real estate, trying to get used to screens not even 1/4 the size is really taxing.
It's a neat tool to check your mail while on the go. I give you that. But getting any sensible work done is next to impossible on them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I always wonder what would have happened if Apple had decided that a keyboard and more importantly a mouse was an acceptable iPad peripheral.
I mostly liked my iPads (1 & 3) but over time felt hemmed in by the lack of a mouse. I had a keyboard case which made text input a lot better, but the lack of a mouse and the clumsy nature of screen touch made editing anything an impossible chore and even the promise of RDP to desktops unappealing for anything more than basic status checks or the most marginal of activities.
If Apple had allowed mice, would the iPad have gained more ground from PCs?
Making your screen as wide as a 5" 16:9 format phone (2.5"), but stretching it lengthwise from 4.4" to 6.1" until you can call it a 6.5" screen does not make your phone a phablet. It makes it a very long 5" phone, which is retarded.
Microsoft made some serious effort toward unifying a desktop, tablet, and phone into a single unit with the Display Dock. Paired with UWP apps, this was a pretty slick little setup. Too bad the Windows phone platform never took off. https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
I always saw tablets as expensive toys with limited uses, and to be fair they have legitimate uses, but as a replacement for a full-blown desktop computer or laptop? No. Too limited, too specialized. It's always been marketing hype like with anything else, trying to convince people their lives aren't complete unless they have such-and-such thing. Just like smartphones; you don't actually need it, a plain old phone would be just as good, but you want it, mainly because they convinced you you need it.
I would be very interested in a macbook body with an ipad as a display, detachable of course. Unfortunately the issues of touchbar, no ports, and no replaceable battery are huge downsides, that I see Apple never changing, even though it would increase their notebook sales.
Mobile devices have those secure OSes which only execute authorized machine code and don't give bad guys full control over your property.
That'd be fine so long as A. the owner of a device[1] has authority to authorize machine code to run on that device, and B. asserting this authority doesn't require a separate purchase from the same or an affiliated manufacturer with a price that meets or exceeds the price of the device.
[1] Or, in the case of a corporate owned device, an authenticated user chosen by the owner.
Anyone who watches TV knows that a computer is a large mysterious machine that occupies a large room. It communicates via many blinking lights [...] Mere mortals are separated from computers by a large glass windows. The computer operators wear white lab coats.
Still somewhat accurate, except that sort of room-filling computer is called a "server cluster" or "on-premises cloud" nowadays.
There is no readily apparent mechanism by which the humans communicate to the machine; but it doesn't seem to need their useless opinions.
Humans communicate to the machine through devices called "terminals". These come in the form of smartphones, tablets running a smartphone OS, and Chromebooks, precisely the devices that were associated with the "post-PC era".
While the rest of the devices are soul sucking social media time wasters only destined to make life harder....
I have seen lots of variants on this, related to personal computer evolution. And I swear, one things is blindingly obvious: more than half of the time that someone says that, they are not talking about how the trend of user preferences is forcing them to react, as though a market force. What they really mean, is that they want the users to change, preferably by buying their weird, inconvenient products.
This isn't just about Apple so I don't mean to single them out, though they really are part of it. You see the same bullshit in many other forms. Why does your website have to use Facebook comments? Because Facebook wants you to. The users don't, though, and in fact they're going to stop posting (and possibly even stop visiting) once you do that. Why does your website need to support AMP? Because Google says so. Not a single one of your users wants that, though, and whatever local ad revenue you're making, you should expect that change to reduce it. Why should your phone exclude a 3.5mm audio out? No serious reason. You can think of many things that have been going on like this. Whoever it is that does want the change, does not represent the users. They are trying to change the users.
(I'm not sure it's even a tech thing, but I won't explicitly point out the political parallels.)
The times are changing, but few users ever really request, "make it suck more." Tablet-sized personal computers with shitty OSes are fine thing to add to your home after the desktop(s)-with-functional-OS are sufficiently deployed. And you can live without the desktop apparently, but don't kid yourself: anyone who still has a desktop has a much easier and more convenient life. The best, most expensive high-end tablet is a piece of shit compared to a 10 year old whitebox desktop.
The most prominent way the times are changing, might be more people are getting more desperate for some demagogue to tell them what they're supposed to be thinking in contrast to their own actual opinion. People want to be told they're wrong about everything and that their real life experiences are not real life. They want religion (which isn't new) but they don't want it to be called religion anymore, and they'll take anything.
You know there's more to computing than games, right?
True, but for many users, there isn't more to local computing than games. I've gathered through conversation with other Internet users that many of them use only two categories of application: 1. web applications and 2. native games. They don't use any native non-game applications not shipped with a device's operating system. They could be satisfied with an Xbox One and a Chromebook.
“You gotta have a tuna melt on the menu!” That’s what my old friend Joe Fox told me when I was thinking about opening a diner. And all these years later, this classic open-face sandwich is still a staple for Q. We melt American cheese over the top, but it could be Cheddar or Swiss. Feel free to make it the way you like it.
when you're on /. it's easy to live in the tech bubble, but fact is most people just want tech to work. They're a means to an end not an end themselves. If they pay a little (some cases a lot) extra to have it work that's well worth it. And so it giving up the control of an old school PC experience.
Also, there's a huge difference between somebody who likes gadgets and a technophile. We often conflate the two and think there's more technophiles than there really are.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wouldn't go to France.
as Fortnite just proved. You can download a dev kit right now and make and sell Android apps w/o google's permission. You do have to adhere to the OS's permission rules, meaning everytime you install an app on a user's computer it will ask them to grant permission for each thing your app does (network, camera, file system etc).
I wish Windows had that level of security. It makes Malware a lot harder since if I go install a dumb little single player game and it wants access to my network, contacts list and camera and microphone I know I'm dealing with a scam.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
jobs was a asshole that would spew any kind of hate to sell more of his crappy products?
A market with multiple solutions for multiple use cases.
There will always be a use case for PC's as there will always be one for tablets and it is up to the consumer to figure out which one they want/need
The PC market will never fully die out because there is a good chunk of the population who need one, granted they arent needed as much for home use but businesses will continue to keep the sales up as specialty software used in engineering and creative work will always need more power than a tablet could provide. Then there is the consideration that in business it is beneficial to have the employees using PC's because it confines them to a physical location.
I am truly getting annoyed at all of the speculation that people go on about which does not help the furthering of technology but in essence is more for investors than techies. The whole post-PC era bullshit is entirely that, nothing more than speculation for investors to set their betting strategies to. I wish people in the same strain of society as jobs would focus more on putting out solutions to problems instead of speculating as to which way the market is going to go.
I also wish that the slashdot editors would bring back tech news or at least admit that they are catering to wallstreet investors as well now. (just take a look at all of the tesla articles are presented)
What I see in 90% of homes are families that have a laptop for the mother, tablets for the little kids and smartphones for teens. Dad tends to be in the "man cave" drinking, or uses a work provided laptop, typically both.
It has become extremely rare to see desktop PC's in a home unless the person telecommutes or operates a home business on the side. Gamer's are really the only group left that stick to PC's but there is a growing trend to go with gaming laptops since they are easier to take to a friend's house/dorm.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Now could someone tell gnome this? And maybe ubuntu?
You CAN put it in developer mode, if you want to.
My biggest complaint about Chromebook developer mode is its complete lack of durability. If someone else turns it on and presses two keys as prompted, this triggers a powerwash, causing you to lose data since the last daily backup as well as the use of apps that had been installed until you have a chance to restore from backup. Until Crostini support becomes more widespread, how practical is it to carry around backup media wherever you carry your Chromebook?
Furthermore, for people who want to jump through even more hoops, you can replace the firmware.
If a Chromebook's firmware has been replaced, and its screen, keyboard, or power jack subsequently develops a fault, is its manufacturer still obligated to repair the component that has developed a fault? Or does turning the write-protect screw and patching the accidental powerwash misfeature out of the firmware void the warranty on the whole shebang?
My PC at home has a 4-monitor display, with enough CPU and RAM to run a couple of VMs concurrently. I've got several TB of storage, and have two other machines stitched in on a KVM sharing some of those monitors.
At work, my docking station allows my laptop to have two monitors hooked up to it.
Storage, display, and peripheral support needs to happen before the tablet can ever come close to killing off the PC. And, no storing my shit in the cloud is not a solution to any of those things.
People like me have always rolled our eyes at the 'post PC era', since it was never going to happen.
My mother in law? Sure, she can do everything she needs on her iPad. But you're not going to see tablets replacing PCs in most work environments.
Yes, tablets sold a whole lot of units, but now pretty much everyone who wants one has one, and the PC market goes on. The people predicting its demise have always been full of shit.
Tablets have had a good run, but sales have tailed off of late.
That's because they ceased making them better. Almost every tablet I've seen is nothing more than a supersized smartphone and it runs more or less the exact same software. I haven't bought an iPad because it really does nothing for me that my iPhone doesn't do competently and if I need more computing power my PC will run rings around any tablet on the market. Tablet's exist in the space between smartphones and laptops which constrains them on both sides. They aren't as portable as smartphones and they aren't as powerful as PCs. To grow further they need to do offer something which neither smartphones or PCs can easily match.
What seems to be happening is that tablets are slowly becoming low end laptops rather than their own distinct type of device. It's not clear if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it does explain why they've plateaued.
Other problems include that the accessories for tablets tend to be complete afterthoughts. The keyboards, and covers and other periferals are not well integrated. Apple introduced the Apple Pencil which functions fine but lacks software support and has no physical integration with the device. You have to carry it separately rather than sliding it into a convenient holder where it gets charged when not in use.
It's a neat tool to check your mail while on the go. I give you that. But getting any sensible work done is next to impossible on them.
That's because the software for tablets by and large sucks. It's basically the same software designed for smartphone with minimal changes in most cases. Not powerful enough to replace a real PC but nothing much added over a smartphone even when it could be.
They should be great for a wide variety of tasks but the makers of these things got lazy. So they get treated as a poor mans laptop or a content consumption device but they could be more. Not to mention that the peripherals which could make using them better are almost always total afterthoughts and poorly integrated.
If Apple had allowed mice, would the iPad have gained more ground from PCs?
No because it would have allowed software makers to get lazy (in a different way) about how the device would be used. Look at styluses for an example. Software makers tended to use these as nothing more than mice when given the chance even though a stylus makes a terrible mouse. Styluses are best for drawing and only drawing and to treat them as a substitute for a mouse (or worse keyboard) is a recipe for failure. If you want a mouse get a machine designed with that in mind - aka a PC. Tablets have finger input and it's not really easy to reconcile that with mouse input. Microsoft has come closest with their Surface machines but there are problems with that they haven't yet overcome.
As it is tablets are basically supersized smartphones which creates a whole different set of lazy design decisions by software makers. They basically make a smartphone app and then don't change much for the tablet. This means that the tablet is underutilized.
Personally I think the way tablets should differentiate themselves is through pen input. They should be the ultimate note taking and document editing machines. Anywhere you would use a pad of paper you should be able to use a tablet instead. Finger input of course and keyboards when helpful but no mice.
"What's a computer?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQB2NjhJHvY
One also has to wonder if the move to laptops for gaming has anything to do with the scarcity and inflated prices of dedicated GPU cards due to crypto mining? The pricing on laptops is not going to be as affected by crypto mining since people aren't buying laptops to strip out the GPU chip. Not to mention performance wise laptops have been on par with desktops for the better part of a decade, in the past a laptop generally meant a performance hit in comparison to a similarly priced desktop machine.
The only issues with laptops is thermal management and throttling on "slim laptops" Though these really aren't issues on workstation or gaming class laptops since they generally have the room for a proper cooling solution.
Yes, the examples you give, of yourself and the people you know, and most especially your Mom, you've completely won me over. Oh wait, no you haven't.
"...all we need is a better interface."
Jeezus, do you have any idea of how long the touch interface took to implement? How many attempts failed, and variations were tried? It's practically a miracle of determination against a wall of failure that we have viable touch interfaces at all!
All it took was:
1). New operating systems (actually downsized and heavily modified versions of the desktop OSes);
2). New applications (complete re-writes);
3). New hardware;
4). A new application distribution mechanism;
5). A new way of paying developers for their apps;
6). Always on, wireless networking.
While I agree that "better interfaces" are required, birthing those things seems to take forever and a near bottomless pit of money to fund the effort.
People aren't buying as many traditional personal computers.
While there is some truth to the idea that some activities are more convenient on a phone or tablet, I think the larger culprit in declining PC sales is their increased longevity. We are long past the point where the computational power of a PC has exceeded the needs of many users, where a new computer has no perceptible performance increase over a three year old computer for many users. Now granted I installed ample RAM in my 8 year old PC when I built it but it is still a useful machine, even for many video games with a video card upgrade every 2-3 years.
Phones are now personal computers--while it can only do about 50% of what a personal computer can do, it can do 100% of what most people want to do with their personal computer.
Perhaps "many" not "most". For longer endurance activities, outside of gaming, larger screens and real keyboards are more necessary. Phones and PCs will likely remain complementary devices, in the developed world people will likely continue to have both. Tablets and PCs, there we may have convergence, a "laptop" becoming a "dock" and a detachable "screen".
My Mom is no longer subsidizing my cheap hardware by buying the three year-old model of what I bought.
Similar story in my family. The "retired" folks who just wants email, Skype, web browsing and online shopping in moderate proportions is finding a tablet quite satisfactory. And this includes people who had used computers for many years at work.
But for people in school or still working, I think PCs will be hard to replace with tablets.
Much as Apple et all would like it to.
Corporatism != Free Market
If the "consumer" market for desktop computing dries up, the market for home-tinkerable desktop computing will expand in comparison.
My Mom doesn't care about soldered-down RAM and SSDs, but I do, a lot.
Anything that makes the market in general (and Apple in particular) listen more to people who just want to add more RAM later when they actually need it, is a good thing in my book.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I remember when the claim of a post-pc era hit slashdot. I laughed. I was more than a little skeptical. Then I was a little scared. In the weeks and months that followed, I argued passionately that there will be no end of the pc era. That these devices are toys, useless, no good to anyone. And they were. The early dozen generations of mobile devices really sucked for anything but playing thumbzilla and watching netflix. It all seemed like a waste.
My job never changed. Not really. Now the corporation makes me use a mac instead of a thinkpad. The tools I use to write code continue to get better in leaps and bounds, and it's a lot less painful to do the kind of work I do than it used to be.
But you know something?
My brother owns two android phones and a tablet. He barely knows how to read, hates computers, and lives on disability. In fact, most low income people I know now check their email. I hired a mechanic on craigslist, one of these little guys from the sticks, and even he's got an iphone.
Mobile devices are everywhere. Just as a matter of course, these days, we build for responsive, rather than adaptive control sets with a mobile first approach, because the sites we work with have more mobile traffic than pc traffic. Especially on the local level, for services that you might try to find as you're driving. We only use the full resolution version of any given site as a sales tool, to show clients how cool their business looks. But we know full well that they'll get most of their leads from people on mobile.
I still don't see mobile becoming more useful than PC's. It's made some headway, but it's just not here yet. Then again, I don't know if it matters now since the advent of home ai's that tie all of your devices together, and can do things like stream to your tv, and tell terrible pun laden jokes.
Anyway, I think we are living in a post pc age, if by post pc, you mean an age in which the PC is no longer the sole media/internet center of everyone's life. Just don't know if Jobs really deserves credit for predicting that.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
That's interesting. I see fewer desktop machines as well, but I think there's more laptops hiding around in backpacks or a desk.
Basically 3-4 mainboard manufacturers and 2 CPU/GPU manufacturers are entirely enough, especially as things have massively slowed down performance-wise. That means hardware designs live longer and hence design cost is lower. Manufacturing cost is not that much of an issue either, as savings from large volumes only go so far. Even if the PC market drops down to 10% of its current volume, it will not go away. And since PC gaming is also not going away, it will remain much larger.
My take is the "end of the PC" stories are and always have been just clueless "journalists" looking for some doom-and-gloom story to write.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think the reason PCs didn't get replaced by tablets is that there didn't arrive any reasonable method for content creation on touch-only machines. This can be done (think Minority Report) but requires a tremendous amount of work in establishing a sufficiently sophisticated input method, way beyond what's available on today's smartphones, and that never happened. I think people quickly realized that tablets are great for content consumption, but beside putting cute little ears and noses on pictures, not so much for content creation.
As a photographer, I really thought, years ago, that there would come a time when I could leave my PC at home and bring a tablet into the field for post-processing. There were even products that looked like they were going to provide that function, but years later they're still toys. Great for preparing photos taken with the built-in camera for publishing on social media, not sufficient for serious work.
And I totally realize -- this is what the market wants. There just isn't enough demand for feature rich content creation on a tablet to do the work necessary to get there. But I'm not surprised at all that now that the shininess has worn off, tablets have settled into their own little niche, which only intersects partially with the PC feature set.
I own a tablet, but haven't booted it up in quite awhile. My PC is immensely more capable, and my phone is more portable. (In fairness, I don't use entertainment streaming services. Wife does, and she uses her tablet daily. But that only serves to illustrate the point.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> Steve Jobs' vaunted, much quoted 'Post-PC Era.
His Steveness should've called it the Post-Mac era. I don't think many would've objected to the idea.
We just need to wait a few days to see how far off-base I still am this year.
... Yes, we are in a post-hammer world now. Screwdrivers have displaced them, and now rule!
For fuck's sake people, how about 'the right tool for the job'? Some stuff that PC's were used for in the past can now be conveniently handled by phones and tablets. Some can not.
Some tasks require keyboards and big displays and tons of storage and RAM and CPU, and some do not.
And some of us old geezers need keyboards and big displays, because we don't have the eyesight we once did.
And some of us who fought in the trenches of the PC Revolution in the 70's and 80's are appalled to see the trend back to mainframe/terminal. Which is all this 'Cloud' crap is - don't kid yourself. Your stuff is out of your control, and your stuff is being finely sifted to build a profile of you.
I am not OK with that.
for: making and editing videos (like with screenflow and others), doing cad (like with autocad and others), doing reverse engineering (like with IDA PRO and others), the list goes on...no tablet does that...and never will...
nothing to see here - move along
Is the future. A hybrid
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
What do you think windows 10 is you idiot?
Neither Windows 10 nor Intel Trusted Execution Technology blocks use of games purchased from GOG, Itch, Humble, or publishers' own websites (such as EA's Origin).
For early-stage startup game developers and their users, the most worrying DRM measure was introduced long before Windows 10. It's Windows 8 SmartScreen, which establishes a "reputation" system for executables downloaded from the Internet and strongly recommends that users delete executables that have not yet had a chance to build reputation. The only way to allow a publisher's reputation to leak from one application from another from the same publisher is to buy a code signing certificate, as SmartScreen appears not to allow self-signed code signing certificates to build reputation. And the only way to skip SmartScreen entirely is to form a corporation or LLC and use its D-U-N-S number to buy an EV code signing certificate.
What, do you get your word definitions from politicians?? If this is how you 'win', then I don't want to win. Winning by dying isn't winning, it's losing.
You could have said that some of the ideas that Netscape and Sun promoted carried on and achieved success, but merely suggesting those ideas alone 'won' is wrong. Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" is more dominant and successful, I'd say. Netscape's "The Browser Is All You Need" is a weaker concept and has never come to full acceptance, except for low end users who do little but some casual surfing and the odd e-mail.
And if you doubt that last piece, take a look at the tablet and smartphone space, which defines the low end space for most. Apps have taken over and the idea of the browser as the universal client is 100%, completely dead there.
You can take my desktop from my cold dead hands!
Just thought I'd mention that "they" have been calling for the death of the desktop for ages. Sure there are more laptops now, but they haven't gone away. They said the same thing for tablets and phones (silly).
If anything, bitcoin has probably had a bigger impact on the availability of desktop PC's due to the skyrocketing price of video cards as a result...
Even if you leave the GPU price issue out (or skirt around it e.g. buy a used GTX 970) you have to buy the ancillaries for a desktop, that is to say the monitor, case, keyboard, mouse, speakers. That's all built into a laptop and it's cheapo components at factory price for 10,000 units.
It's shocking for low end desktop vs low end laptop build (both with a "real" CPU not Atom, RAM slots, storage slots and the laptop a full 15.6" laptop)
The laptop even has a virtually free Windows license whereas an assembled desktop does not.
To make it cheaper like the old days you should make a linux gaming desktop, use an old case (they're compatible 20 years back but you may want bigger/better ones or modify them to put bigger fans, etc.), use an old keyboard (PS/2 is a tiny bit better anyway) and speakers don't get outdated or incompatible but at worst you might use the crap in monitors plus headphones.
With a linux desktop you don't need an SSD for the OS (you're free to get one to put any data you might want there)
What pains me if the RAM prices. I would want 16GB so that I can run a game without quitting the web browser, as I did in my old Windows 98 and XP days, and then having some breathing room (software, media server, VM, emulator)
This does not get any better if I skimp on the motherboard and the GPU (old or low end one). See, you can at least run things if your GPU is small, even if it's an Intel one. You need a fast CPU, enough RAM and enough storage capacity. I stopped keeping up with games because of missing one, two or three of these things.
2019 is year of linux on the desktop, when 16GB becomes cheap again.
the trend was to move all new big budget games into locked down games
Your issue is with specific publishers of big-budget games. Had Valve not introduced Steam digital restrictions management, there would be more disc-based DRM and game installers that install DRM-related rootkits. There would also be even more publisher-specific online DRM platforms for PC games than there are today: Blizzard's Battle.net, EA's Origin, Ubisoft's Uplay, and Microsoft's Microsoft Store (formerly Windows Marketplace).
But a PC user has the choice to abstain from these abusive publishers' output and choose smaller-budget games instead. Console gamers lack this choice because console operating systems lack a way to install a program with no online or offline DRM. Both disc games and downloadable games on consoles have offline DRM. This goes all the way back to code signing on the Atari 7800 ProSystem and the MCUs in the Control Deck and Game Pak on the Nintendo Entertainment System that run a synchronized RNG. Thus a smaller-budget game might get released on consoles later if ever.