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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

#311

Post by JusticeK »

4K will be the revival of PC sales, in two ways:

1. Consumer affordable monitors. You'll need a better GPU, and probably Display Port. I don't expect most consumers wanting 30" 4K display. They'll want 22-27" displays of 4K resolution, a la Retina. (PPI scaling) Everything is still the same size as people are used to (compared to 1080p), but everything is sharp as Retina.

2. 4K adoption of multimedia on the Internet. The more 4K videos that pop up on YouTube, the more people who are going to want to upgrade their hardware. This one isn't specific to PCs though, it could apply to mobile devices as well.

Go to YouTube and find a 4K video (the quality slider goes to "Original"). Now look at the comments. Many of the comments in 4K videos are people complaining how they can't watch the 4K video because of their crappy computer (and sometimes bandwidth).

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

#312

Post by interpol_p »

GuiA wrote: post #190
johngalt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would be better off steering into the skid. History has plenty of examples of people who've tried to hang onto the old ways 'because that's how I learned it'. The way forward isn't to try and keep cheap PCs viable for creativity's sake, but to ensure that creative desires are being met on the newer devices. Would I have learned memory management and dual booting if I'd had a tablet instead of a 386? Probably not.…

As a kid, my parents were really anti-videogames (except for a few educational ones), anti-TV (we had one, but it was in its own room and rarely used), and would only let me use the home computer for homework. As a result, I spent all of my childhood and teenage years reading (mostly fantasy and sci-fi; several books a week, at my peak) and programming. I taught myself programming in 7th grade because I really wanted…

I am unsure if you can attribute your abilities to your anti-TV upbringing. I grew up with parents who had a relaxed attitude about video games and TV, and thus consumed a lot of both.

But I also spent so much of my time drawing, painting, and programming because I love creating things. I am unsure if TV had any negative effects. The ownership and pleasure you get from your own creations is unlike anything that TV or games can provide, and it is utterly addictive.

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

#313

Post by meddlepal »

romaniv wrote: post #85
UVB-76 wrote: post #46

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…

Sounds like a great thing for job security in two decades when almost nobody but people born during the PC era know how to program.

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

#314

Post by thaumasiotes »

X4 wrote: post #222
zalzane wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something l…

People who believe in being able to buy social status are the ones perfectly fooled by advertisements! Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments. What makes one an attractor of popularity is demonstrating power, will and the ability to achieve what you want. Who would be more popular? A) A rich guy who thinks he can buy friends, by i…

> People who believe in being able to buy social status

Trust me, you can buy social status. If you pay enough, you have the status.

> Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments.

Most social environments he exposes himself to, yes. Most social environments, no.

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

#315

Post by jrpm »

TylerE wrote: post #297
ye wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually not true. Modern high end CPUs are multiple times faster than the CPUs from 2008. The architecture changed too, not just the frequency.

I have an i7 920, purchased in December 2008. Please point out which consumer processors (No $3000 xeons) have "multiple times" greater single threaded performance.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

You can have double speed.

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

#316

Post by carterschonwald »

shocks wrote: post #103
carterschonwald wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your problems sound interesting. Could you elaborate?

just plain ole mathematical modeling / machine learning, and associated duct taping the tubes.

I am also going to be releasing the start of a "Numerical Haskell" tool chain sometime (hopefully this fall, but life happens and all that jazz)

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

#317

Post by carterschonwald »

awef wrote: post #145
dikei wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not neccesarily which language is faster, but the which algorithm is faster. He said naively written C, which mean the algorithm may be entirely different and run in O(n2) and much slower than a Haskell version which use a different algorithm and run in O(nlogn).

Right, I read 'naively' as 'natively'. Carry on!

to answer your question

just plain ole mathematical modeling / machine learning, and associated duct taping the tubes.

I am also going to be releasing the start of a "Numerical Haskell" tool chain sometime (hopefully this fall, but life happens and all that jazz)

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

#318

Post by ssafejava »

protomyth wrote: post #307
krallja wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24200+1980+US+dollars+... There are LOTS of under-$570 computers sold at major retailers today.

I don't consider inflation a valid excuse when we continually hear computers get cheaper every year and the Mac mini is selling at the Apple II's old price point. The PC industry abandoned the sub $200 because of Windows licensing, Intel, and Apple taking the old Apple II price as a floor. $570 is a lot father out of reach today for many than $200 in the 80's.

Computers DO get cheaper every year. That Core 2 Duo machine you bought in 2006 might have cost $2000, but those components (if you can even find a place to buy them) would likely cost about $300 today.

It's unfair to say that they don't get cheaper considering that a Mac Mini is an entirely different class of machine from an Apple II, in so many ways that it's ridiculous to even try to list them here.

As for your statement about $570 vs $200... what do you base that on?

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

#319

Post by marincounty »

X4 wrote: post #222
zalzane wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something l…

People who believe in being able to buy social status are the ones perfectly fooled by advertisements! Someone can be butt ugly, poor and stupid, but still have the highest social status and popularity in most social environments. What makes one an attractor of popularity is demonstrating power, will and the ability to achieve what you want. Who would be more popular? A) A rich guy who thinks he can buy friends, by i…

Yea, guys can buy people out of their league, but their wives are usually misserable, and cheat. Women have a hard time doing the same. Actually, the whole success thing works in reverse for women. They become less attractive with money, unless they earned that money with their mind. Even then the men these women want still don't want want them. I was trying to soften the blows I will get for this thread.

In Marin, I see so many attractive women who settled for some fugly dude just because he has money. Maybe, that's what keeps guy's striving for the next Facebook?

I could go on and on about this subject, but I'll get clobbered.

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

#320

Post by Xixi »

josefresco wrote: post #28

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…

Replace 90% by 100%. The use case of the PC at home is disappearing fast. What can you do on a PC that you cannot do on a tablet? If you really think about it, not much at all. On the iPad Apple's creativity apps [1] go a long way: the basics for the amateur who wants to create content are covered. At home the only thing I actually need a "PC" for is to import CDs, I cannot think of anything else.

The rest is a matter of taste, I personally prefer PCs (well, Macs) but I can definitely understand people preferring tablets, if only because they are so much cheaper, and generally so much easier to use (to my astonishment my daughter figured out how to use my iPad to watch videos on YouTube while she was still 0 years old, before she could even speak...).

When it comes to work I need a computer. And event that might change in the future [2].

[1] http://www.apple.com/creativity-apps/ios/

[2] http://thebinaryapp.com/

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