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 plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.
I think I can pinpoint when this happened - It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed.
~~~
Above that, PCs aren't necessary for a lot of people, because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines. For the median person, if you bought a PC in 2006, then got an iPad (as a gift or for yourself) and started using it a lot, you might find that you stopped turning on your PC. How could you justify the price of a new one then?
Yet if there was a major cultural shift to just tablets (which are great devices in their own right), I would be very worried. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.
I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?"
I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?
Tablets are knocking the sales off of low-end PCs, but we as a society need the cheap PC to remain viable, if we want to turn as many children as possible into creators, engineers, tinkerers, and hackers.
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. But now that same money buys a high end tablet and a pile of hours for an EC2 micro instance.
Would I still be me? No, I would be even better. All those weeks wasted fighting with modem racks for my BBS I'd gladly trade for weeks spent on a Nexus 10 and a linode.
I'm starting to see a trend of tablets-as-laptops where people have a case that integrates a keyboard and they type their papers or whatever else on their iPads or other types of tablets.
Having a 1.5 or 2 pound laptop, with a 12 hour battery life that you can detach the keyboard from for $300 is a much better form factor than the current typical laptop. Many of these tablets also come with wacom pen digitizers or touch, allowing a creative input that is missing in many laptop form factors.
Also you can still create web-apps and other such things with things like node.js and so on android tablets today. Javascript really is the BASIC of this generation.
I won't be surprised to see full IDEs that could be viable in creating general purpose apps in near future. I really think Android & iOS will eventually become the next 'desktop' OS with a full suite of apps as powerful as the current desktop set of applications. Concerns about tablets as consumption only devices will go away probably within the next decade as the world transitions to these 'mobile' OSes.
>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 like 70% youtube/facebook and 30% using some word processor.
My point is that the consumer's decision to buy or abandon a product isn't solely driven by how good the product is, the value of the new item as a "status icon" also has to be taken into account. All you need to get the customer to justify that $2000 price tag is a culture of rabid consumerism and the garauntee that they will be cooler than their friends if they buy this extremely expensive laptop that does all sorts of things they will never ever use.
In your example involving the 2006 PC and the new iPad, I would argue that a huge contributor to the consumer's abandoning of the PC is because it's nowhere near the potency of a status icon as an iPad is.
When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.
That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.
This is a common generational worry, right? We learned X a certain way, that pedagogy was necessarily linked to the technology at the time, we worry in retrospect that that specific technology was a necessary condition for ever learning X.
I'm only 28, and I do it, too-- e.g., how will kids expand their imagination and learn about the world without only having paper books to immerse themselves in for hours at a time? How will anyone learn the basics of programming without finding QuickBASIC on an old Packard-Bell 386, playing around with Gorillas or Snakes, or entering their own code from books in the library?
I think there will be a sufficient number of hacker types around for the cynical and simple reason that corporations need to inspire kids to learn how to code so that they can hire folks in two decades. This ought to inspire a token amount of educational support and tool building so that entry-level development will always be accessible to kids.
people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines
I dunno, Facebook and GMail seem to get slower each month. They're unusably slow, even in Chrome on Windows, on both my and my wife's circa-2008 machines.
I would pay for a silent PC. I paid a lot for a quiet Apple PowerPC Mac pro back in the day and built a quiet PC but they are not silent and I have moved to a quieter place and I can hear them (yes the Mac runs Fedora now). I have some silent ARM machines but they don't quite cut it yet though maybe the new quad core one will.
I believe there will be a major cultural shift to tablets/phones/handheld.
The social implications worry me -- mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_, you can't actually install whatever software you want on it.
I don't know if the actual experience of using Android, for non-techies, might end up seeming similar?
The social implications of this worry me. We spend increasing amounts of time on our computers, and have decreasing power and freedom over what software they run how.
I think your concern about it being harder to create on tablets, and the social implications therein -- is also legit, but it worries me less than the loss of control over our devices. People will find a way to create, although the nature of what they create will be affected by the affordances of the device, for sure. (there will be a lot more 140 char poetry, heheh)
Most game makers are targeting consoles, which just went through a longer than usual shelf life. With the new ones coming online, we will see more PC upgrades from gamers.
It's really _only_ code that is harder to create on tablets though, and it strikes me as extremely narrow-minded to write off the music, art, text, huge Minecraft sculptures, photos and videos of singing, dancing, playing, that have been gleefully created by people young and old on these devices.
It's the exact sort of snobbery that has almost completely killed art, dance, drama and music in many schools, as if the only valuable acts of creation left to humanity are engineering and science (which, incidentally, are both wonderfully served by the innumerable education apps on these locked-down, post-apocalyptic devices).
I agree, I brought a high-end Dell 2.5 years ago and it was starting to feel like upgrade time (sluggish performance etc) a few months ago. I then stuck in a 240gb SSD and its faster than it ever was, even when I first got it.
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 won't age that well. I know, I know, ssd's come in larger sizes --- but they become significantly more expensive, and most entry-level notebooks (with ssd's) come with 128gb. As a comparison, it's almost weird that years ago you could get a 500gb harddrive without giving it a second financial thought. As such, I think that if there is anything that a normal person might want, it's more harddrive space as they fill up their small-ish SSDs --- so that they don't need to worry about deleting things when they have too many pictures, games, etc. The average person won't want chrome to take half the number of milliseconds to open a new tab, or their games to go from 40 fps to 60fps. But, to me it seems easy to fill up these smaller harddrives, and many people might be looking for a new computer to deal with that.
Before someone mentions it: YES, cloud solutions and external solutions exist. But is it part of mainstream usage to store your stuff on an external hdd? Also, wouldn't people anyway want a future computer where they didn't need to do that? I'm not claiming they have terabytes of data, but I think over the course of 3-4 years, people could pretty easily accumulate > 256gb of data. Otherwise, is there a free and easy cloud solution that gives > 50gb of space that people use a lot today? (Not to my knowledge)
Same here. I feel like we've reached the end of the relevancy of Moore's Law. My PC at home is from early 2008, and it's still an excellent machine. It played all my games wonderfully, even new ones, even 3D ones. I can't imagine a game looking better than The Witcher 2.
Actually, this isn't entirely true; a few months ago, my WinXP install started to play up, to I bought an SSD and installed Win7 on it. Now it runs better than ever. A recent OS helps a lot, as does a SSD.
I can see one reason why I might still want to upgrade, though: The Witcher 3. I doubt it's going to run well on my by then 6 year old machine. But maybe a new graphics card is all I'll need. Or maybe it'll even just work.
My Macbook Pro is a lot more recent, but it also feels like it might last forever. It can handle everything I throw at it. Why would I ever need something more powerful than this?
If I want anything new from my computers now, it's stuff like smaller size, less noise, less power use, etc. They're powerful enough.
For high performance gaming, I wonder if console gaming has something to do with it. With publishers now focusing on consoles instead of PCs, graphics may be held back to a degree due to that.
But another thing to consider is that the console release cycle has also slowed down, because there's less of a need to upgrade there as well. So you see the lack of desire to upgrade trend emerging for consoles as well as PCs.
I do think that nearly everyone who wants a PC has one at this point. That plus no desire to upgrade means slower sales. If people were actually ditching their PCs entirely, that would be a different story.
I use my 2009 iMac for local heavy lifting and watching TV. (Heavier lifting I use the cloud.) I will upgrade my desktop once the LCD goes retina.
I will continue to upgrade my laptop frequently. Lighter, smaller, faster, longer lived, more durable. Every new laptop has increased my productivity, flexibility.
I just bought a 2013 MBA 13". Most amazing machine I've ever had. Now that I'm accustomed to 13" (vs 15"), I will likely buy a 2013 MBP 13" retina. I'm certain that I'll be very happy.
I agree. Much of this is just because the processing is moving off of the machine too. When you were doing all of your own computations, any incremental thing you did required a stronger PC. Now that computation is happening on the server.
There are programmers, mathematical and financial users who are still stretching their desktops, but for most of the rest of us the need to upgrade is going away. It's almost like it's time to upgrade when there's just too much clutter on the old machine.
I wanted a gaming laptop, but once I got into that category, I'll be honest--the deciding factor for me was keyboard layout. I'm a developer so it's really important to me to have special keys in the right place, and to have them easily distinguishable by touch.
Nothing is worse than arrow keys with no gap separating them, or an F5 that blends in, or page up/down in some unusable position.
> because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines
I agree with your post but just wanted to point out a Facebook/Email PC does not cost 2000 dollars anymore (and has never cost that much for a long time) :) You can get around with a 300 dollars laptop just fine of that kind of usage.
you can use a wireless/usb mouse and keyboard with a laptop or [windows] tablet and its pretty close to a PC... you can also use an external monitor on many of them. PCs need to become the size of a raspberry pi, that's all.
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?
"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 brain's perception loop. If you can type a letter and the letter appears, your computer is fast enough for word processing. But, if you can run a data analysis job and it's done before you release the "enter" key, it just means you should really be doing better analyses over more data. Certain use cases grow like goldfish to the limits of their environment.
Even with gaming there isn't as much of a push as there used to be to constantly be on the cutting edge. This is mostly do to the fact that the industry as a whole focuses primarily on consoles first now and thus consoles tend to be the gating "LCD" target. If your PC is at least as good or a little bit better than a console released in 2005 or 2007 you're set. Of course, there will soon be a bump forward here with the next gen Xbox and Sony systems coming out in a month.
I fit into a lot of the special cases here: Developer, gamer, amateur photographer with many gigabytes of RAW files and even I don't feel the need to upgrade systems like I used to. Now it is about an every 3-4 year thing whereas previously it was yearly or more.
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
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. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session.
But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.
Very true, but the vast majority of computer users aren't pushing the limits of their systems, and I think that's what the author is getting at. If you look at the market as a whole, the need for more powerful computers isn't nearly as big as it used to be.
None of those use cases are going to grow the PC market. The things you're describing have always been a niche (remember Workstation Class PCs?) that may add a few $$ to the bottom line, but they are not going to drive growth.
The PC market has relied on end users - consumers and business users - for it's growth engine for decades, and that appears to be drying up. One of the reasons for that is outlined in the article, for most use cases we don't need faster.
Indeed. I work with RAW photographs fairly often, and simply exporting an album with a few hundred RAW files to JPEG takes a surprising amount of time with fast, modern hardware.
Nothing is ever good enough for a development box when you use an IDE and work with larger and larger projects.
Faster CPUs, more memory, and faster storage are always welcome. I look forward to the day when Eclipse and other IDEs really start taking advantage of GPU stream processors for indexing and validation.
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.
A 64gb model of the iPad costs $700 (because 48gb of storage should cost $200 to pad those juicy margins).
I bought an amazing desktop from HP last year on a black friday sale for $779. For what's in it, you couldn't have assembled it from Newegg at that price.
In another generation or two the typical Chromebook will be superior to the iPad on performance, while being half the price.
You should buy a desktop or laptop because you get drastically more computing power at the same price.
The PC market isn't dead, but then again, the Mainframe market isn't dead either.
The Post-PC devices[1] (tablets / smartphones) are it for the majority of folks from here on out. They are easier to own since the upgrade path is heading to buy new device and type in my password to have all my stuff load on it. If I want to watch something on the big screen, I just put a device on my TV. Need to type, add a keyboard.
The scary part of all this is that some of the culture of the post-PC devices are infecting the PCs. We see the restrictions on Windows 8.x with the RT framework (both x86/ARM), all ARM machine requirements, and secure boot. We see the OS X 10.8+ with gatekeeper, sandboxing, and app store requirements with iCloud.
The PC culture was defined by hobbyists before the consumers came. The post-PC world is defined by security over flexibility. Honestly, 99% of the folks are happier this way. They want their stuff to work and not be a worry, and if getting rid of the hobbyist does that then fine. PC security is still a joke and viruses are still a daily part of life even if switching the OS would mitigate some of the problems.
I truly wish someone was set to keep building something for the hobbyist[2], but I am a bit scared at the prospects.
1) Yes, I'm one of those that mark the post-PC devices as starting with the iPhone in 2007. It brought the parts we see together: tactile UI, communications, PC-like web browsing, and ecosystem (having inherited the iPods).
2) I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the HP-16c had kept evolving.
> I truly wish someone was set to keep building something for the hobbyist
I really don't understand your concern.
Hobbists have a wider selection of computing tools than ever before (altough, that statement was true at any time since the 50's). We have the entire arduino ecosystem for hardware hobbists, throwaway PCs like the Raspberry Pi for embebbing real computers everywhere, several different standards of desktop-capable parts for more powerfull systems, and the server ecosystem for the real beefy ones.
Most of those computer types aren't even able to run Windows or OSX. iCloud and Secureboot won't make them go away.
I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings.
The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound for my setup. However, when it was initially released, Planetside 2 ran like a three-legged dog even on some higher end rigs. It's much better after a few rounds of optimizations by the developers, with more scheduled for the next month or two.
I dual boot Linux boot on the same machine for my day job, 5 days a week all year. For this purpose it has actually been getting faster with time as the environment I run matures and gets optimized.
As good as it is now, I remember struggling to keep up with a two year old machine in 2003.
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 for watching streaming content.
I could have grabbed him a $99 Athlon X4 or C2D on craigslist and it would better than this thing. I'm not sure if he'll ever experience a faster computer so I don't think he'll ever get frustrated with this machine, but it's amazing that they sell an utter piece of shit like this as a new machine.
A tablet is a PC. Especially as x86 processors start taking over arm processors.
Just because it doesn't sit in a big box doesn't mean it's a different class of system. The difference is really the openness of the platform, comparing something like iOS to Win 8 pro.
That said, many tablets are basically what we would have thought of as PCs before. Consider something like the Samsung 500T or similar, or thinkpad helix. Components are small and cheap enough that they can be packed behind the LCD, and you have essentially a laptop that doesn't need it's keyboard.
Will iPads take over PCs? No. They are too limited, not because of hardware, but because of OS limitations. Will tablets take their place though? Quite possibly. The portability is quite handy. That I can dock a tablet with a keyboard and have a normal PC experience, but have it portable when I need it is a selling feature.
The obvious cavaet is that a limited OS is fine as long as the majority of data is cloud based. In that case even development can be done on a closed platform, and the tablet becomes something more akin to a monitor or keyboard. More of a peripheral than a computing device. We might get to that point, but that's not the cause of the current trend.
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 anywhere near where it is today.
In high school I recall lusting after a $4,500 486DX2 66Mhz machine with an astounding 16MB (not GB) of RAM, and a 250MB hard drive. A few months ago I spent a little less than that on a laptop with 2,000X that amount of RAM, 8,000X that amount of hard drive space, and a processor that would have not so long ago been considered a supercomputer.
I for one am glad that we have continued to innovate, even when things were good enough.
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 hardware, play PC games, tweak OS settings and generally use yesterday's general purpose PC will be the ones remaining who keep buying new hardware and complete machines.
The general public meanwhile will only buy a PC if their tablet/smartphone/phablet needs expand beyond those platforms.
The market will shrink but it will turn more "pro". The quicker MS evolves into a modern IBM the better.
They bought a windows machine for what to them is a lot of money (more than a iPad), it didn't last long before it slow and it's got extra toolbars and all sorts of rubbish. What's worse is that this happened last time they bought a PC and the time before and the time before that. They are not going to add a SSD because that's not how they think + they don't how + it's throwing good money after bad + they are dubious of the benefits.
The iPad in contrast exceeded expectations and in the year or two they've had it they had a better experience. They can't get excited about a another windows machine because it's expensive, more of the same and not worth it really.
Backend devs can probably use more computer resources, particularly cores and RAM. We want to simulate whole clusters on our dev machines and instrument them with tools like Ansible and Docker, and then deploy multiple (fairly heavyweight) processes like JVMs to them. But yeah, 4 (fast) cores and 16GB of RAM is available in a laptop these days, along with an SSD and the best display you can buy, for $3k. (Of course I'm speaking of the MBPr).
Games can always use more resources. AFAIK there is still a lot of progress being made with GPUs. 60fps on a 4K display will be a good benchmark. The funny thing is that GPU makers have taken to literally just renaming and repackaging their old GPUs, e.g. the R9.[1] As for the game itself, there is a looming revolution in gaming when Carmack (or someone equally genius-y) really figures out how to coordinate multiple cores for gaming.[2]
But yeah, most everything else runs fine on machines from 2006 and on, including most development tasks. That's why Intel in particular has been focused more on efficiency than power.
It used to be that things got faster at a much faster rate. And until this new E5-2690 v2 was released, the fastest CPU was only 14000 or so, which is less than 2x as fast.
> 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 to pay for. The list goes on.
I bought my current PC on 2009. The previous one still had some components from 2002.
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.
I disagree with "The top of the line smart-phone or tablet you own today will be obsolete by the end of 2014 if not earlier."
I will use my 2011 smart phone until it physically breaks. If a 1.2GHz device with a 300MHz GPU, 1280x720 screen, and 1GB of RAM can't make calls and do a decent job of browsing the web, that's a problem with today's software engineering, not with the hardware.
And if Google decides to doom my perfectly good device to planned obsolence, fuck them, I will put Ubuntu Touch of Firefox OS on it. The day of disposable mobiles is over, we have alternatives now just like we do on PCs.
> When your processor is too slow, buy a new CPU, or you get a new heat sink and over clock it
The motherboards for PCs built 5 years ago are completely different from those built today, and the CPU sockets have changed every other year. New processors from Intel will be soldered on.
The performance of a PC from five years ago is probably adequate for web browsing and office tasks. For anything more demanding, the advances in power consumption, execution efficiency and process node are huge leaps from five years ago.
This reminds me of a piece I wrote a couple years ago: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-g... , which makes a similar point. Both articles are less screechy and less likely to get readers than screaming headlines about OMG DEATH!!!
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.
Of course PC sales will be low. When you don't have enough memory, you buy more RAM. When your processor is too slow, buy a new CPU, or you get a new heat sink and over clock it. You rarely have the need to buy a whole new box.
i agree that the increased (functional) life of pcs is a contributing factor to slowing unit sales, but its laughable to attribute it to the idea that people who once would have bought a new pc are now just buying more ram and upgrading internals.
the percentage of people who would have any idea how to do that, or even consider it as a viable option, is far to small to have any real impact on demand..
I've been prioritizing human interface over raw power for some time with my laptop (more or less my only PC). It's semi-homebuilt - a Thinkpad T61 in a T60 chassis. I would rather work on this machine than any new one.
The CPU is slow by current standards, but a Core2Duo isn't slower than the low-clock CPUs in many Ultrabooks. The 3 hour battery life could be better, but I can swap batteries and many new laptops can't. The GPU sucks, but I don't play many games anyway. DDR2 is pricey these days, but I already have my 8gb. SATA2 is slower than SATA3, but I'm still regularly amazed at how much faster my SSD is than spinning rust. It's a little heavy, but really, I can lift six pounds with one finger.
So the bad parts aren't so bad, but nothing new matches the good parts. The screen is IPS, matte, 15" and 1600x1200. Aside from huge monster gaming laptops, nothing has a screen this tall (in inches, not pixels) anymore. I can have two normal-width source files or other text content side by side comfortably. The keyboard is the classic Thinkpad keyboard with 7 rows and what many people find to be the best feel on a laptop. The trackpoint has physical buttons, which are missing from the latest generation of Thinkpads. There's an LED in the screen bezel so I can view papers, credit cards and such that I might copy information from in the dark, also missing from the latest Thinkpads.
[+] [-] simonsarris|12 years ago|reply
When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.
I think I can pinpoint when this happened - It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed.
~~~
Above that, PCs aren't necessary for a lot of people, because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines. For the median person, if you bought a PC in 2006, then got an iPad (as a gift or for yourself) and started using it a lot, you might find that you stopped turning on your PC. How could you justify the price of a new one then?
Yet if there was a major cultural shift to just tablets (which are great devices in their own right), I would be very worried. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.
I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?"
I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?
Tablets are knocking the sales off of low-end PCs, but we as a society need the cheap PC to remain viable, if we want to turn as many children as possible into creators, engineers, tinkerers, and hackers.
[+] [-] johngalt|12 years ago|reply
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. But now that same money buys a high end tablet and a pile of hours for an EC2 micro instance.
Would I still be me? No, I would be even better. All those weeks wasted fighting with modem racks for my BBS I'd gladly trade for weeks spent on a Nexus 10 and a linode.
[+] [-] mahyarm|12 years ago|reply
Having a 1.5 or 2 pound laptop, with a 12 hour battery life that you can detach the keyboard from for $300 is a much better form factor than the current typical laptop. Many of these tablets also come with wacom pen digitizers or touch, allowing a creative input that is missing in many laptop form factors.
Also you can still create web-apps and other such things with things like node.js and so on android tablets today. Javascript really is the BASIC of this generation.
I won't be surprised to see full IDEs that could be viable in creating general purpose apps in near future. I really think Android & iOS will eventually become the next 'desktop' OS with a full suite of apps as powerful as the current desktop set of applications. Concerns about tablets as consumption only devices will go away probably within the next decade as the world transitions to these 'mobile' OSes.
[+] [-] zalzane|12 years ago|reply
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 like 70% youtube/facebook and 30% using some word processor.
My point is that the consumer's decision to buy or abandon a product isn't solely driven by how good the product is, the value of the new item as a "status icon" also has to be taken into account. All you need to get the customer to justify that $2000 price tag is a culture of rabid consumerism and the garauntee that they will be cooler than their friends if they buy this extremely expensive laptop that does all sorts of things they will never ever use.
In your example involving the 2006 PC and the new iPad, I would argue that a huge contributor to the consumer's abandoning of the PC is because it's nowhere near the potency of a status icon as an iPad is.
[+] [-] Zak|12 years ago|reply
That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.
[+] [-] textminer|12 years ago|reply
I'm only 28, and I do it, too-- e.g., how will kids expand their imagination and learn about the world without only having paper books to immerse themselves in for hours at a time? How will anyone learn the basics of programming without finding QuickBASIC on an old Packard-Bell 386, playing around with Gorillas or Snakes, or entering their own code from books in the library?
I think there will be a sufficient number of hacker types around for the cynical and simple reason that corporations need to inspire kids to learn how to code so that they can hire folks in two decades. This ought to inspire a token amount of educational support and tool building so that entry-level development will always be accessible to kids.
[+] [-] colanderman|12 years ago|reply
I dunno, Facebook and GMail seem to get slower each month. They're unusably slow, even in Chrome on Windows, on both my and my wife's circa-2008 machines.
[+] [-] justincormack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|12 years ago|reply
The social implications worry me -- mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_, you can't actually install whatever software you want on it.
I don't know if the actual experience of using Android, for non-techies, might end up seeming similar?
The social implications of this worry me. We spend increasing amounts of time on our computers, and have decreasing power and freedom over what software they run how.
I think your concern about it being harder to create on tablets, and the social implications therein -- is also legit, but it worries me less than the loss of control over our devices. People will find a way to create, although the nature of what they create will be affected by the affordances of the device, for sure. (there will be a lot more 140 char poetry, heheh)
[+] [-] nahname|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|12 years ago|reply
It's the exact sort of snobbery that has almost completely killed art, dance, drama and music in many schools, as if the only valuable acts of creation left to humanity are engineering and science (which, incidentally, are both wonderfully served by the innumerable education apps on these locked-down, post-apocalyptic devices).
[+] [-] orf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asafira|12 years ago|reply
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 won't age that well. I know, I know, ssd's come in larger sizes --- but they become significantly more expensive, and most entry-level notebooks (with ssd's) come with 128gb. As a comparison, it's almost weird that years ago you could get a 500gb harddrive without giving it a second financial thought. As such, I think that if there is anything that a normal person might want, it's more harddrive space as they fill up their small-ish SSDs --- so that they don't need to worry about deleting things when they have too many pictures, games, etc. The average person won't want chrome to take half the number of milliseconds to open a new tab, or their games to go from 40 fps to 60fps. But, to me it seems easy to fill up these smaller harddrives, and many people might be looking for a new computer to deal with that.
Before someone mentions it: YES, cloud solutions and external solutions exist. But is it part of mainstream usage to store your stuff on an external hdd? Also, wouldn't people anyway want a future computer where they didn't need to do that? I'm not claiming they have terabytes of data, but I think over the course of 3-4 years, people could pretty easily accumulate > 256gb of data. Otherwise, is there a free and easy cloud solution that gives > 50gb of space that people use a lot today? (Not to my knowledge)
[+] [-] mcv|12 years ago|reply
Actually, this isn't entirely true; a few months ago, my WinXP install started to play up, to I bought an SSD and installed Win7 on it. Now it runs better than ever. A recent OS helps a lot, as does a SSD.
I can see one reason why I might still want to upgrade, though: The Witcher 3. I doubt it's going to run well on my by then 6 year old machine. But maybe a new graphics card is all I'll need. Or maybe it'll even just work.
My Macbook Pro is a lot more recent, but it also feels like it might last forever. It can handle everything I throw at it. Why would I ever need something more powerful than this?
If I want anything new from my computers now, it's stuff like smaller size, less noise, less power use, etc. They're powerful enough.
[+] [-] etler|12 years ago|reply
But another thing to consider is that the console release cycle has also slowed down, because there's less of a need to upgrade there as well. So you see the lack of desire to upgrade trend emerging for consoles as well as PCs.
I do think that nearly everyone who wants a PC has one at this point. That plus no desire to upgrade means slower sales. If people were actually ditching their PCs entirely, that would be a different story.
[+] [-] specialist|12 years ago|reply
I will continue to upgrade my laptop frequently. Lighter, smaller, faster, longer lived, more durable. Every new laptop has increased my productivity, flexibility.
I just bought a 2013 MBA 13". Most amazing machine I've ever had. Now that I'm accustomed to 13" (vs 15"), I will likely buy a 2013 MBP 13" retina. I'm certain that I'll be very happy.
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
There are programmers, mathematical and financial users who are still stretching their desktops, but for most of the rest of us the need to upgrade is going away. It's almost like it's time to upgrade when there's just too much clutter on the old machine.
[+] [-] sejje|12 years ago|reply
I wanted a gaming laptop, but once I got into that category, I'll be honest--the deciding factor for me was keyboard layout. I'm a developer so it's really important to me to have special keys in the right place, and to have them easily distinguishable by touch.
Nothing is worse than arrow keys with no gap separating them, or an F5 that blends in, or page up/down in some unusable position.
Got some Asus model, and it's great.
[+] [-] ekianjo|12 years ago|reply
I agree with your post but just wanted to point out a Facebook/Email PC does not cost 2000 dollars anymore (and has never cost that much for a long time) :) You can get around with a 300 dollars laptop just fine of that kind of usage.
[+] [-] Zoomla|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ye|12 years ago|reply
What's your framerate in Battlefield 3 on a 64 player map at 1920x1080, high settings? Or Crysis 3?
[+] [-] fiatmoney|12 years ago|reply
The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brain's perception loop. If you can type a letter and the letter appears, your computer is fast enough for word processing. But, if you can run a data analysis job and it's done before you release the "enter" key, it just means you should really be doing better analyses over more data. Certain use cases grow like goldfish to the limits of their environment.
[+] [-] georgemcbay|12 years ago|reply
I fit into a lot of the special cases here: Developer, gamer, amateur photographer with many gigabytes of RAW files and even I don't feel the need to upgrade systems like I used to. Now it is about an every 3-4 year thing whereas previously it was yearly or more.
[+] [-] carterschonwald|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JVIDEL|12 years ago|reply
Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session.
But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.
[+] [-] RussianCow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|12 years ago|reply
The PC market has relied on end users - consumers and business users - for it's growth engine for decades, and that appears to be drying up. One of the reasons for that is outlined in the article, for most use cases we don't need faster.
[+] [-] rallison|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|12 years ago|reply
Faster CPUs, more memory, and faster storage are always welcome. I look forward to the day when Eclipse and other IDEs really start taking advantage of GPU stream processors for indexing and validation.
[+] [-] UVB-76|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] romaniv|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
A 64gb model of the iPad costs $700 (because 48gb of storage should cost $200 to pad those juicy margins).
I bought an amazing desktop from HP last year on a black friday sale for $779. For what's in it, you couldn't have assembled it from Newegg at that price.
In another generation or two the typical Chromebook will be superior to the iPad on performance, while being half the price.
You should buy a desktop or laptop because you get drastically more computing power at the same price.
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
The Post-PC devices[1] (tablets / smartphones) are it for the majority of folks from here on out. They are easier to own since the upgrade path is heading to buy new device and type in my password to have all my stuff load on it. If I want to watch something on the big screen, I just put a device on my TV. Need to type, add a keyboard.
The scary part of all this is that some of the culture of the post-PC devices are infecting the PCs. We see the restrictions on Windows 8.x with the RT framework (both x86/ARM), all ARM machine requirements, and secure boot. We see the OS X 10.8+ with gatekeeper, sandboxing, and app store requirements with iCloud.
The PC culture was defined by hobbyists before the consumers came. The post-PC world is defined by security over flexibility. Honestly, 99% of the folks are happier this way. They want their stuff to work and not be a worry, and if getting rid of the hobbyist does that then fine. PC security is still a joke and viruses are still a daily part of life even if switching the OS would mitigate some of the problems.
I truly wish someone was set to keep building something for the hobbyist[2], but I am a bit scared at the prospects.
1) Yes, I'm one of those that mark the post-PC devices as starting with the iPhone in 2007. It brought the parts we see together: tactile UI, communications, PC-like web browsing, and ecosystem (having inherited the iPods).
2) I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the HP-16c had kept evolving.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|12 years ago|reply
I really don't understand your concern.
Hobbists have a wider selection of computing tools than ever before (altough, that statement was true at any time since the 50's). We have the entire arduino ecosystem for hardware hobbists, throwaway PCs like the Raspberry Pi for embebbing real computers everywhere, several different standards of desktop-capable parts for more powerfull systems, and the server ecosystem for the real beefy ones.
Most of those computer types aren't even able to run Windows or OSX. iCloud and Secureboot won't make them go away.
[+] [-] gtaylor|12 years ago|reply
The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound for my setup. However, when it was initially released, Planetside 2 ran like a three-legged dog even on some higher end rigs. It's much better after a few rounds of optimizations by the developers, with more scheduled for the next month or two.
I dual boot Linux boot on the same machine for my day job, 5 days a week all year. For this purpose it has actually been getting faster with time as the environment I run matures and gets optimized.
As good as it is now, I remember struggling to keep up with a two year old machine in 2003.
[+] [-] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
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 for watching streaming content.
I could have grabbed him a $99 Athlon X4 or C2D on craigslist and it would better than this thing. I'm not sure if he'll ever experience a faster computer so I don't think he'll ever get frustrated with this machine, but it's amazing that they sell an utter piece of shit like this as a new machine.
[+] [-] zeidrich|12 years ago|reply
Just because it doesn't sit in a big box doesn't mean it's a different class of system. The difference is really the openness of the platform, comparing something like iOS to Win 8 pro.
That said, many tablets are basically what we would have thought of as PCs before. Consider something like the Samsung 500T or similar, or thinkpad helix. Components are small and cheap enough that they can be packed behind the LCD, and you have essentially a laptop that doesn't need it's keyboard.
Will iPads take over PCs? No. They are too limited, not because of hardware, but because of OS limitations. Will tablets take their place though? Quite possibly. The portability is quite handy. That I can dock a tablet with a keyboard and have a normal PC experience, but have it portable when I need it is a selling feature.
The obvious cavaet is that a limited OS is fine as long as the majority of data is cloud based. In that case even development can be done on a closed platform, and the tablet becomes something more akin to a monitor or keyboard. More of a peripheral than a computing device. We might get to that point, but that's not the cause of the current trend.
[+] [-] downandout|12 years ago|reply
In high school I recall lusting after a $4,500 486DX2 66Mhz machine with an astounding 16MB (not GB) of RAM, and a 250MB hard drive. A few months ago I spent a little less than that on a laptop with 2,000X that amount of RAM, 8,000X that amount of hard drive space, and a processor that would have not so long ago been considered a supercomputer.
I for one am glad that we have continued to innovate, even when things were good enough.
[+] [-] josefresco|12 years ago|reply
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 hardware, play PC games, tweak OS settings and generally use yesterday's general purpose PC will be the ones remaining who keep buying new hardware and complete machines.
The general public meanwhile will only buy a PC if their tablet/smartphone/phablet needs expand beyond those platforms.
The market will shrink but it will turn more "pro". The quicker MS evolves into a modern IBM the better.
[+] [-] rythie|12 years ago|reply
They bought a windows machine for what to them is a lot of money (more than a iPad), it didn't last long before it slow and it's got extra toolbars and all sorts of rubbish. What's worse is that this happened last time they bought a PC and the time before and the time before that. They are not going to add a SSD because that's not how they think + they don't how + it's throwing good money after bad + they are dubious of the benefits.
The iPad in contrast exceeded expectations and in the year or two they've had it they had a better experience. They can't get excited about a another windows machine because it's expensive, more of the same and not worth it really.
[+] [-] javajosh|12 years ago|reply
Games can always use more resources. AFAIK there is still a lot of progress being made with GPUs. 60fps on a 4K display will be a good benchmark. The funny thing is that GPU makers have taken to literally just renaming and repackaging their old GPUs, e.g. the R9.[1] As for the game itself, there is a looming revolution in gaming when Carmack (or someone equally genius-y) really figures out how to coordinate multiple cores for gaming.[2]
But yeah, most everything else runs fine on machines from 2006 and on, including most development tasks. That's why Intel in particular has been focused more on efficiency than power.
[1] Tom's Hardware R9 review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-280x-r9-270x-r...
[2] Carmack at QuakeCon talking about functional programming (Haskell!) for games and multi-core issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A&feature=youtu.be...
[+] [-] bhouston|12 years ago|reply
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=Intel+Xeon+E5-2690+v...
It used to be that things got faster at a much faster rate. And until this new E5-2690 v2 was released, the fastest CPU was only 14000 or so, which is less than 2x as fast.
[+] [-] gordaco|12 years ago|reply
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 to pay for. The list goes on.
I bought my current PC on 2009. The previous one still had some components from 2002.
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] null_ptr|12 years ago|reply
I will use my 2011 smart phone until it physically breaks. If a 1.2GHz device with a 300MHz GPU, 1280x720 screen, and 1GB of RAM can't make calls and do a decent job of browsing the web, that's a problem with today's software engineering, not with the hardware.
And if Google decides to doom my perfectly good device to planned obsolence, fuck them, I will put Ubuntu Touch of Firefox OS on it. The day of disposable mobiles is over, we have alternatives now just like we do on PCs.
[+] [-] dankoss|12 years ago|reply
The motherboards for PCs built 5 years ago are completely different from those built today, and the CPU sockets have changed every other year. New processors from Intel will be soldered on.
The performance of a PC from five years ago is probably adequate for web browsing and office tasks. For anything more demanding, the advances in power consumption, execution efficiency and process node are huge leaps from five years ago.
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evo_9|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simba-hiiipower|12 years ago|reply
i agree that the increased (functional) life of pcs is a contributing factor to slowing unit sales, but its laughable to attribute it to the idea that people who once would have bought a new pc are now just buying more ram and upgrading internals.
the percentage of people who would have any idea how to do that, or even consider it as a viable option, is far to small to have any real impact on demand..
[+] [-] Zak|12 years ago|reply
The CPU is slow by current standards, but a Core2Duo isn't slower than the low-clock CPUs in many Ultrabooks. The 3 hour battery life could be better, but I can swap batteries and many new laptops can't. The GPU sucks, but I don't play many games anyway. DDR2 is pricey these days, but I already have my 8gb. SATA2 is slower than SATA3, but I'm still regularly amazed at how much faster my SSD is than spinning rust. It's a little heavy, but really, I can lift six pounds with one finger.
So the bad parts aren't so bad, but nothing new matches the good parts. The screen is IPS, matte, 15" and 1600x1200. Aside from huge monster gaming laptops, nothing has a screen this tall (in inches, not pixels) anymore. I can have two normal-width source files or other text content side by side comfortably. The keyboard is the classic Thinkpad keyboard with 7 rows and what many people find to be the best feel on a laptop. The trackpoint has physical buttons, which are missing from the latest generation of Thinkpads. There's an LED in the screen bezel so I can view papers, credit cards and such that I might copy information from in the dark, also missing from the latest Thinkpads.