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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

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Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#171

Post by benched »

handzhiev wrote: post #65
evo_9 wrote: post #35

The PC is dead, it's just not dead for computer professionals, and never will be. But for the rest of the world - think mom, dad, gramps,grammy - why on earth do the need the headaches of a full PC (mac or windows)? A good tablet is basically enough for almost everyone else.

I'll never get this point. Laptop - fine, yes, but a tablet? How do you chat, post FB status, or write an email from the virtual keyboard? It's painful. Especially if you are 50+. I don't see my mom or dad using these devices.

I do all of those things from a phone. It must be a little easier from a tablet.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#172

Post by Touche »

UVB-76 wrote: post #105
romaniv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Division of labor. Not everyone has to be a producer in every sphere; it's okay to be a producer in some, and a consumer in others. Plenty of people are too busy with other aspects of their lives — doing things which may, for all we know, be of great cultural significance — to spend time being a producer in the digital sphere as well. Some people devote their lives to cooking for others; others devote their lives to…

That's where the analogy falls apart, people who only eat out are a small percentage of the overall popular whereas people who only need a tablet are purportedly the norm.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#173

Post by Touche »

rayhano wrote: post #142

This is an over-simplication. Yes, PCs aren't ageing as fast as they used to. But they are obsolete beyond 'not being portable'. Here is why tablets are winning: 1. Instant on. I can keep my thoughts in tact and act on them immediately. No booting, no memory lags, no millions of tabs open in a browser. 2. Focus. Desktop interfaces seem to be desperate to put everything onto one screen. I have a PC and a Mac (both lap…

You probably own a really nice PC but most people do not. I'd wager that an iPad is at least as expensive as the PC that it is replacing in most homes.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#174

Post by TylerE »

ye wrote: post #119
simonsarris wrote: post #96

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…

You're just not playing the latest games or doing any intensive computations, or just don't care that you could finish your task 3 times faster than on your 2008 CPU. What's your framerate in Battlefield 3 on a 64 player map at 1920x1080, high settings? Or Crysis 3?

That's the thing...most games are still not multi-threaded well, and single threaded performance hasn't gone up more than maybe 20-30%, they just tacked on more cores.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#175

Post by nazgulnarsil »

asafira wrote: post #141
simonsarris wrote: post #96

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…

I agree with the general consensus here regarding how computers in general have been aging better now. Especially with different computing devices available today, it's hard for the average person to justify buying a new computer within 3-4 years of theirs. At the same time, I think even the "average" person would want more than a 128gb ssd, and therefore today's entry-level harddrives equipped with these small ssd's…

everyone I know has a 64-128GB SSD and a 1TB internal HDD, and a 1TB external HDD for backups.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#176

Post by B-Con »

asveikau wrote: post #80
JVIDEL wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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. I suspect a few people on HN will be reluctant to see their role in this arrangement. ducks

Don't duck, it's the truth.

We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance scripting language with a poor performance visual-rendering language and half the people who build with it seem to think that anything done in a web browser is free.

"Modern" CSS for even a simple site is pretty silly. So many horribly inefficient rules, sometimes dozens of levels of overwriting properties, etc. And gobs upon gobs of Javascript that does very little but is constantly running, checking input boxes, animating every tiny little detail, doing things that can be done without Javascript, etc.

I have better system performance when running a Windows 7 VM, a semi-bulky image editor, or compiling the kernel than I do with a few bulky webapps in Firefox. And this is on a desktop built just 4 years ago.

I have a light-weight Linux setup that uses 80MB of RAM after logging in. It has 1GB of RAM. I can't run GMail and Facebook Firefox and browse the Internet at the same time with minimal open tabs. It's sad.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#177

Post by solnyshok »

bluedino wrote: post #64

Don't worry, PC manufacturers are currently selling machines that are already obsolete. My dad went to Walmart and bought a computer (why he didn't just ask me to either advise him, or ask if he could have one of my spare/old ones I don't know) and monitor for $399. It's an HP powered by a AMD E1-1500. It's awfully slow. Chokes on YouTube half the time. My dad is new to the online experience, so he basically uses it…

future is distributed unevenly. some retail outlets are still in the past.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#178

Post by gboudrias »

shocks wrote: post #111
gtaylor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was surprisingly easy. I'm not saying you over-paid, but for $2,500 I could have built something pretty ridiculous. Most of my money went into processor and GPU, which are typically your two big ticket items. I trolled around Newegg looking for upper-middle tier components with a higher quantity of good reviews. A lot of the times you won't see a lot of the recently released stuff with useful reviews, so some of t…

Post your specs to give your post some legitimacy… I hope you didn't skimp out on your motherboard… 2010 $1000 rig running all 2013 AAA titles at the highest settings sounds unlikely to me…

More like impossible. The Internet has many PC building communities and none of them could do it. Hell an i7 and good GPU at the time easily brought you over 600$, which means very little money for a motherboard than can keep up.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#179

Post by schrodinger »

asafira wrote: post #141
simonsarris wrote: post #96

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…

I agree with the general consensus here regarding how computers in general have been aging better now. Especially with different computing devices available today, it's hard for the average person to justify buying a new computer within 3-4 years of theirs. At the same time, I think even the "average" person would want more than a 128gb ssd, and therefore today's entry-level harddrives equipped with these small ssd's…

Flickr gives you a terabyte free.

Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

#180

Post by worldsayshi »

downandout wrote: post #115

If everyone adopted the attitude of the author of this blog, all innovation everywhere in the world would cease instantly because, for most of us in the developed world, everything is good enough already. There are many points throughout computing history at which existing hardware was overkill for the things that we were asking our computers to do. Had we stopped innovating because of that, the world wouldn't be any…

No innovation would hardly die but hopefully focus on something important. We will hardly run out of need for innovation any time soon. We rather have a problem of innovative people focusing on the wrong things, because incentives.
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