What if one of the reasons we don't need new PCs yet is not that tablets and smartphones are replacing the need for them entirely (although for some people they are), and not that PCs are lasting longer on their own either (although they probably are, too), but that tablets and smartphones are helping PCs last longer by reducing the wear and tear we give them?
I'm still running fine with my 2007 Macbook, but I think my iPhone has extended its life because now my laptop almost never leaves the house and sometimes doesn't even get used in a day, whereas pre-smartphone I used to cart my laptop around rather frequently and use it every day.
People snack on smartphones, dine on tablets, and cook on PCs. A lot of people don't want to cook, so are happy with smartphones and tablets. Why buy a desktop or laptop when an iPad will do everything you need for a fraction of the price? That's what people mean when they sound the death knell for the PC.
It's as if the PC is some sort of professional tool, like a truck.
> You rarely have the need to buy a whole new box. This is the number one reason why I love the PC above any other kind of computing machine. Need more disk space? Sure, go get a new disk, you may not even need to remove any of the others. Want a better graphics card for that new game? Easy as pie. Your processor died because the fan was malfunctioning? Too bad, but luckily those two are the only things you'll have t…
In the enthusiast PC world you swap out parts and upgrade your system bit by bit.
In the emerging post-PC world you just sell your old device and get a new one, not unlike how cars are treated. I doubt anyone has trouble unloading their old iPad 3, they probably get a decent amount of money for it if it's in good condition. This just does not happen with homebrew systems, the risk is too high.
It's not that people don't need a new PC because their old PC does just as good a job as it did 5 years ago. It's also not because your average mom and pop are upgrading their own rigs themselves that new PC sales are slow. It's that when tablets hit the scene, people realized they don't need their PC for 90% of what they do on a "computer". Email, social networking, shopping, music, video etc. Us old geeks who swap…
If 10 % of their needs aren't met by a tablet, they need something more that do, which is my problem with recommending a tablet over a PC. Sure, buy a tablet and use it 90 % of the time, but own a PC as well for when the tablet isn't enough.
People snack on smartphones, dine on tablets, and cook on PCs. A lot of people don't want to cook, so are happy with smartphones and tablets. Why buy a desktop or laptop when an iPad will do everything you need for a fraction of the price? That's what people mean when they sound the death knell for the PC.
Why cook when you can eat chips and order pizza? Probably because it's better for you and because cooking has cultural significance that goes beyond simply replenishing calories.
People who cheerfully proclaim that PCs are dead forger that PCs aren't just devices, they also attained a certain level of cultural significance. IF the death of PCs also means the death of PC culture (which involves things like game modding, hobby website making and so on), then the death of PCs is a really, really bad thing.
CPUs have not gotten significantly faster in the last couple years, especially at the high end. Back in Q1 2010 I got an Intel Core i7 980X which benchmarked at 8911 according to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+X+980+... Now in Q2 2013 (3 years later) the very top of the line processor available, an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2, is only twice as fast at 16164: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=In…
Can you give an example of a faster rate in the past?
It was pretty typical to get +4x performance in less than 2 years before after an upgrade cycle. The problem is that encryption standards aren't increasing at a logarithmic rate like CPUs were, so DoD had to step in and adjust the marketplace. By 2010, it was well known in certain cirles that the i7 would be the last serious CPU in the desktop space, that future CPUs would be targeted to cloudian budgets and applications, where they can be managed and hidden away from people who might use real modern cpus you've may have heard about like Tile-x that are used by NSA to do the very thing they were afraid normal people might do, like break https, farm personal data and use it to affect the market, and basically have control over their lives outside of the financial system. Now that surveillance state is complete, they don't really have to worry about drug dealers breaking away from the financial system anymore.
"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more than good enough if your software environment is kept in order. Audio / video / photoshop, gaming, developing software that does math, data analysis - you can never get fast enough. The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brai…
In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience.…
4GB is plenty of RAM for a web browser with many tabs, especially with an SSD for backing virtual memory. If it isn't there is a memory leak, and if there is a leak, 8GB is as bad as 12GB.
My MBA has 4GB and I constantly forget, because it is enough, and I am constantly surprised that it doesn't have 8GB.
All modern web browsers save and restore sessions across restarts.
People snack on smartphones, dine on tablets, and cook on PCs. A lot of people don't want to cook, so are happy with smartphones and tablets. Why buy a desktop or laptop when an iPad will do everything you need for a fraction of the price? That's what people mean when they sound the death knell for the PC.
Why cook when you can eat chips and order pizza? Probably because it's better for you and because cooking has cultural significance that goes beyond simply replenishing calories. People who cheerfully proclaim that PCs are dead forger that PCs aren't just devices, they also attained a certain level of cultural significance. IF the death of PCs also means the death of PC culture (which involves things like game moddin…
You took the cooking analogy too far. Programming a hello world app isn't any better for you than writing the great american novel.
"For what" is the obvious question. Web development with a remote testing environment, office applications, email, web browsing - sure, a Core 2 Duo is more than good enough if your software environment is kept in order. Audio / video / photoshop, gaming, developing software that does math, data analysis - you can never get fast enough. The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brai…
Emphatic agreement. I wind up helping folks a lot with writing high performance software, and it's very easy to get to the point where the time to run a model is totally determined by how fast the CPU and IO are. I'm talking problems where naively written C would take an hour, but if I'm careful and use some blend of very clever c or Haskell, the computation is done in 2-5 minutes
What kind of problems are those? I would love to find problems, ultimately examples, where smart Haskell and c blends are superior to pure c.