2 ms·

I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for W

I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for Windows and office i.e corporate use. And all the major companies are looking at game streaming i.e home use. Education is moving towards chromebooks i.e education. The rest of the uses for PC's like media consumption has already moved to smart devices and smart phone/tablets. So apart from enthusiasts with money to burn on PC's the actual use case for PC's will be gone hence the current form of PC's will be gone.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Well, when you can put computing power on par with a whole cloud in a single box, which you can nowadays, the equation changes again. Cloud is limited by Amdahl scaling like everyone else, but distances and latencies between nodes are higher than in a single box. So instead you should think of time sharing like in the ancient days of supercomputers. Most tasks do not require neither massive parallelism of a cloud or cluster nor computational resources of a supercomputer. If it's the question of ownership or price... Why not make it free? (Ignore this junk, make libreoffice etc. better.) Just think of it as a PC that gets smaller. You cannot quite go super small unless you replace input and output devices. That will require more understanding of our own sensorium.