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I refuse to believe the PC is dying, evolving perhaps but not dying. People have been saying PC's are dying for the last 10 or so years and yet here we are, com

I refuse to believe the PC is dying, evolving perhaps but not dying. People have been saying PC's are dying for the last 10 or so years and yet here we are, commenting on HN using our PC's and Mac's (which are PC's at the end of the day). Tablets in my mind will never work for programming or designing. I will always need a large screen and peripherals like a keyboard at the very least to do my job. Could anyone else here imagine developing on a tablet screen? I couldn't.

jarcoal 14y ago
It doesn't need to die for Intel to bleed. Power users (developers, designers, etc) are such a small fraction of overall users we might as well be 0%.
hkmurakami 14y ago
The key distinction of "creation" vs "consumption" of computing and media. For creators, PCs are indispensable. Like you, I couldn't fathom using an iPad to write code or prose. However, consumers don't need the creative powers and capabilities of a PC. In this paradigm, phones and tablets are a simpler, more portable consumption terminal. Creators, both business and otherwise, will need machines that let them design, code, write, and analyze. Consumers never needed these capabilities, and now that there are compelling devices that offer an arguably superior media consumption experience, creation machines will be put on the margin. A significant minority of non-professional users of computing devices are consumers, rather than creators of content. But the defection of this significant minority is enough to impact the bottom line of companies like Intel.
xoail 14y ago
I agree with other commenters here. But regarding PC being required for creators to do their job will also go down as technology progresses. It wont be too long until developers and designers will hook up their tablets to external screens and keyboards and start creating. One great concept could be to AirPlay onto an external screen while your tablet's screen acts as a touchpad, plus a bluetooth keyboard. Tablets could very well become a terminal to consume as well as a platform to create.
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I think a lot of creators will need PC's for the foreseeable future. Could you imagine a motion designer editing and colour grading 5tb of raw video footage on a tablet? The problem with tablets is storage. There's no doubt tablets will be as powerful as an i7 PC, but because of their small form factor and current storage technology there is no way to cram 3tb of storage into a tablet without the size of it being blown way out of proportion. The perception of tablets is they have to be smaller than laptops, lighter and fast. With current storage technology a tablet would be indistinguishable from a laptop because of weight, cooling and size factors.
rayiner 14y ago
It's not that people no longer need their PC's with their big screens and keyboards to do their work, it's that only a small fraction of those people need more CPU power. Heck, my mid-2010 MBA still makes a perfectly good developer machine, and it's only got a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo. Indeed, Apple was lambasted by the press at the time for putting a two and a half year old chip into the machine. And really it's just a ULV die-shrink of the Conroe core. I'm excited about Haswell, but only because it's supposed to come in under 10W. I feel like MBA battery life took a step back with Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge (the mid-2010 model lasts forever on a charge).
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I agree on the CPU power front. My core i7 machine will easily last another 5 years without needing to upgrade, because in my opinion Intel have reached a point where they can't better themselves at this point in time. But what about storage? An iPad for a 64gb model is super expensive, about as expensive as a laptop with at least 500gb, sometimes 750gb of space and a decent screen + CPU. Sure not everyone needs space, but we are living in a day and age where more people are downloading than ever. A 64gb tablet vs my 3.5tb of PC storage with option of buying another $70 1tb drive and adding it in when I need more, tablets can't quite compete on that scale.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    But relevant to Intel: do you upgrade your PC or get an external drive? Even if everyone still has a PC, longer upgrade cycles mean less revenue.
    - DigitalSea 14y ago
      Exactly. Upgrading a hard drive doesn't benefit Intel. They've become their own curse. Intel provide such powerful chips like the i7 series that people don't need to upgrade as often. Power has become irrelevant even a Core i5 is super fast and future proof.
yk 14y ago
Technically a tablet can be powered by an Intel processor, as well as a development platform can be powered by non x64 architectures. So the need for a large screen and a keyboard does not mean that the PC will survive, since you could just hook up a TV and a bluetooth keyboard to an tablet. ( Actually one of the underexplored possibilities of UI design.)
sleepydog 14y ago
I would like to see the rise of the home server. Cloud services have latency and privacy issues. Imagine a small, powerful and energy efficient server that you could tuck away in a closet and connect to your gigabit or faster network. This server would provide all the horsepower, centralized storage, and session management (think IRC chat etc) that you need -- and you can access it on any device in your house. Imagine a keyboard running a tiny OS that could detect the nearest registered display. You could write code on the TV for a few hours, walk over to a desk and pick up where you left off. That's what I would eventually like to turn my home into (by setting up a Plan 9 network and writing terminal clients for android set-top boxes), but it's hard to find the perfect home server.
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I've been dreaming of a home server revolution for years myself, but sadly due to the fact in Australia the Internet is slow and we're only just now rolling out a national 100mb fibre network which won't be finished for quite a few years and will be expensive with little guarantee of a decent data allowance doesn't give me much hope. Cloud storage is definitely not ready for the prime-time yet, I don't trust it and as Amazon has proven even they haven't even quite worked out how to reliably provide cloud services.
vor_ 14y ago
> People have been saying PC's are dying for the last 10 or so years And they have been, losing sales first to consoles and then to smartphones and tablets. Children are growing up on Xboxes and iPads, not PCs. Desktop PCs will be like pickup trucks, to reference Steve Jobs's famous analogy. Someone will always need them, but most people won't have them.
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  A pretty slow death in my opinion. It's not the massive coronary rupture we've been told it is, more like an untreated paper cut very slowly but surely bleeding. I might not be in the majority then, but the thought of using a tablet tethered to a screen doesn't feel like it'll ever be a decent alternative (well at least not an Apple tablet). Tablets as they stand aren't going to kill anything, much like phones and consoles because they're so heavily restricted in what you can do as well as what storage capacity they have and storage capacity as an avid Bittorrent user is important to me. The day that providers start releasing tablets with 1TB of storage and ability to add-on additional storage with ease is the day a tablet can compete with a computer. We live in the day and age of extreme data consumption, tablets with their minuscule 64gb of storage aren't enough to store the modern day PC users information. Cloud storage might eventually fill that gap one day, but the Internet even in some of the most developed countries is still unbelievably behind and bandwidth still expensive (and I would know, I live in Australia and people in New Zealand pay even more for less) not to mention cloud storage as proven by Amazon's constant downtime isn't reliable enough to store information that is guaranteed to be accessible all of the time nor can you access cloud data without an Internet connection and wireless Internet connection options like 3G or 4G are very expensive for so little in data allowances.

jarcoal 14y ago

It doesn't need to die for Intel to bleed. Power users (developers, designers, etc) are such a small fraction of overall users we might as well be 0%.

hkmurakami 14y ago

The key distinction of "creation" vs "consumption" of computing and media. For creators, PCs are indispensable. Like you, I couldn't fathom using an iPad to write code or prose. However, consumers don't need the creative powers and capabilities of a PC. In this paradigm, phones and tablets are a simpler, more portable consumption terminal. Creators, both business and otherwise, will need machines that let them design, code, write, and analyze. Consumers never needed these capabilities, and now that there are compelling devices that offer an arguably superior media consumption experience, creation machines will be put on the margin. A significant minority of non-professional users of computing devices are consumers, rather than creators of content. But the defection of this significant minority is enough to impact the bottom line of companies like Intel.

xoail 14y ago

I agree with other commenters here. But regarding PC being required for creators to do their job will also go down as technology progresses. It wont be too long until developers and designers will hook up their tablets to external screens and keyboards and start creating. One great concept could be to AirPlay onto an external screen while your tablet's screen acts as a touchpad, plus a bluetooth keyboard. Tablets could very well become a terminal to consume as well as a platform to create.

DigitalSea 14y ago
I think a lot of creators will need PC's for the foreseeable future. Could you imagine a motion designer editing and colour grading 5tb of raw video footage on a tablet? The problem with tablets is storage. There's no doubt tablets will be as powerful as an i7 PC, but because of their small form factor and current storage technology there is no way to cram 3tb of storage into a tablet without the size of it being blown way out of proportion. The perception of tablets is they have to be smaller than laptops, lighter and fast. With current storage technology a tablet would be indistinguishable from a laptop because of weight, cooling and size factors.

rayiner 14y ago

It's not that people no longer need their PC's with their big screens and keyboards to do their work, it's that only a small fraction of those people need more CPU power. Heck, my mid-2010 MBA still makes a perfectly good developer machine, and it's only got a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo. Indeed, Apple was lambasted by the press at the time for putting a two and a half year old chip into the machine. And really it's just a ULV die-shrink of the Conroe core. I'm excited about Haswell, but only because it's supposed to come in under 10W. I feel like MBA battery life took a step back with Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge (the mid-2010 model lasts forever on a charge).

DigitalSea 14y ago
I agree on the CPU power front. My core i7 machine will easily last another 5 years without needing to upgrade, because in my opinion Intel have reached a point where they can't better themselves at this point in time. But what about storage? An iPad for a 64gb model is super expensive, about as expensive as a laptop with at least 500gb, sometimes 750gb of space and a decent screen + CPU. Sure not everyone needs space, but we are living in a day and age where more people are downloading than ever. A 64gb tablet vs my 3.5tb of PC storage with option of buying another $70 1tb drive and adding it in when I need more, tablets can't quite compete on that scale.
- rayiner 14y ago
  But relevant to Intel: do you upgrade your PC or get an external drive? Even if everyone still has a PC, longer upgrade cycles mean less revenue.
  - DigitalSea 14y ago
    Exactly. Upgrading a hard drive doesn't benefit Intel. They've become their own curse. Intel provide such powerful chips like the i7 series that people don't need to upgrade as often. Power has become irrelevant even a Core i5 is super fast and future proof.

yk 14y ago

Technically a tablet can be powered by an Intel processor, as well as a development platform can be powered by non x64 architectures. So the need for a large screen and a keyboard does not mean that the PC will survive, since you could just hook up a TV and a bluetooth keyboard to an tablet. ( Actually one of the underexplored possibilities of UI design.)

sleepydog 14y ago

I would like to see the rise of the home server. Cloud services have latency and privacy issues. Imagine a small, powerful and energy efficient server that you could tuck away in a closet and connect to your gigabit or faster network. This server would provide all the horsepower, centralized storage, and session management (think IRC chat etc) that you need -- and you can access it on any device in your house. Imagine a keyboard running a tiny OS that could detect the nearest registered display. You could write code on the TV for a few hours, walk over to a desk and pick up where you left off. That's what I would eventually like to turn my home into (by setting up a Plan 9 network and writing terminal clients for android set-top boxes), but it's hard to find the perfect home server.

DigitalSea 14y ago
I've been dreaming of a home server revolution for years myself, but sadly due to the fact in Australia the Internet is slow and we're only just now rolling out a national 100mb fibre network which won't be finished for quite a few years and will be expensive with little guarantee of a decent data allowance doesn't give me much hope. Cloud storage is definitely not ready for the prime-time yet, I don't trust it and as Amazon has proven even they haven't even quite worked out how to reliably provide cloud services.

vor_ 14y ago

> People have been saying PC's are dying for the last 10 or so years And they have been, losing sales first to consoles and then to smartphones and tablets. Children are growing up on Xboxes and iPads, not PCs. Desktop PCs will be like pickup trucks, to reference Steve Jobs's famous analogy. Someone will always need them, but most people won't have them.

DigitalSea 14y ago
A pretty slow death in my opinion. It's not the massive coronary rupture we've been told it is, more like an untreated paper cut very slowly but surely bleeding. I might not be in the majority then, but the thought of using a tablet tethered to a screen doesn't feel like it'll ever be a decent alternative (well at least not an Apple tablet). Tablets as they stand aren't going to kill anything, much like phones and consoles because they're so heavily restricted in what you can do as well as what storage capacity they have and storage capacity as an avid Bittorrent user is important to me. The day that providers start releasing tablets with 1TB of storage and ability to add-on additional storage with ease is the day a tablet can compete with a computer. We live in the day and age of extreme data consumption, tablets with their minuscule 64gb of storage aren't enough to store the modern day PC users information. Cloud storage might eventually fill that gap one day, but the Internet even in some of the most developed countries is still unbelievably behind and bandwidth still expensive (and I would know, I live in Australia and people in New Zealand pay even more for less) not to mention cloud storage as proven by Amazon's constant downtime isn't reliable enough to store information that is guaranteed to be accessible all of the time nor can you access cloud data without an Internet connection and wireless Internet connection options like 3G or 4G are very expensive for so little in data allowances.