Outshone by Smaller Screens, PCs Aim to Be Seen as Cool Again

My educated guess is that this won't win over the masses who love tablets and it will further alienate the PC core audience.

They went chasing television viewers with 16:9 glossy screens and all the productivity types held onto their old machines and wept for the future.

I don't want a paper thin Netflix viewer. I have a tablet and a huge tv for that. And I sure don't want to do work on a tablet PC.

I want to see some context on the code I am editing or view a PDF full page. Sure you can go side by side on a huge 16:9 screen but on a compact laptop my vision can't do it even at retina levels.

I get sick of squinting at everything through a mail slot.

Lets get back to productive screens and keyboards and sensible designs that aren't going to sacrifice battery life or functionality to be the thinnest and shiniest.

Dell and HP are going to be the last places to look for innovation. I suspect 90% of what they do these days amounts to slapping a badge on a generic Chinese machine.

Most of the innovation seems to be from Microsoft, Apple and Google. The future of PCs will likely come from Surface, Pixel and whatever Apple does next.

I think there will always be a divide between "create" and "consume" uses of computers, of any display size. For me, the dividing line is that I need a keyboard to create stuff. As a secondary issue, I have to be able to position the display to avoid eyestrain and neck fatigue, limiting my ability to use a laptop for real work. That could just be a concession to old age. But my creative apps -- code editors, compilers, and Jupyter, require very little real computing power.

My desktop computer is a glorious, glorious device. I have millions of different bits of software for it, many operating systems, open source, proprietary, etcetera. It's all there. It really feels like my machine. If I don't want Windows, I blow it away and install Linux, BSD, Plan 9, code my own bootloader, whatever.

My laptop is a bit less so (can't find the perfect form factor for me, can't upgrade it, etc) but it's very similar. It's mine. I have spice, vnc, rdp, ssh, sftp, ftp, irc, as commandline tools that just work and aren't filled with adverts or in app purchases or 'please add this to your google account'.

Phones and tablets? Complete write off. My smartphone is basically a toaster. Android and iOS make what could be a general purpose computer into a Fisher Price experience. It's really sad to me.

I'd love a modern version of the Psion Series 5. The Pyra (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/) looks like a decent candidate. All I need is a Linux distribution with an API or commandline 'sms' and 'call' tool.

The mainstream is basically focused on creating a slightly more interactive version of a portable television, which I find deeply saddening.

Part of it is that the smartphone can do everything they need from a computer. Browsing the internet, messaging and email, etc. But that answer alone isn't very satisfying, because even when doing nontechnical stuff on a smartphone, like browsing reddit or watching youtube, I find it very inconvenient compared to a desktop.

I think the real reason is, when she needed to use her computer for something, it took 15 minutes to start up. That's super inconvenient. People talk about how small 15 second delays can discourage behavior and cause frustration. 15 minutes is just ridiculous, and really discourages using the thing unless you really need to.

I installed a pure copy of windows 7 on an old computer recently. Nothing installed on it at all, no connection to the internet, nothing put on it by the manufacturer. And the specs weren't that good. Yet it took 30 seconds to boot up. I was amazed, I didn't think that was possible for a modern PC. Even my phone takes longer to boot up.