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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 ha

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.

thom 13y ago
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).
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  Code is harder because editing text is harder. Text input and manipulation is just not very good on tablets. Even if you plug a keyboard into iOS editing is still worse than WordPerfect circa 1988. You might type stuff in OK, but manipulating text is awful.
  - thom 13y ago
    Yeah, I have no idea how Shakespeare got anything done.
    - robotresearcher 13y ago
      Sure. 884,421 words[1]. And with that workload, I bet he used the most efficient technology available at the time to do it. [1] http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/ http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/
justincormack 13y ago
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.
- maxmem 13y ago
  There are passive coolers for i7s out there. You can even find passively cooled GPUs and PSUs. It's pretty cheap to build a silent pc.
  - mcv 13y ago
    Those passive coolers generally still rely on some airflow. With no case fans at all, I'm told they won't be able to hold up under any decent load.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    It's tricky getting a passive GPU to actually work, mine has a tendency to overheat and halt the system rather than throttle down under load. It required a fair bit of tweaking to case fans and driver underclock settings to get it stable.
- Jakub77 13y ago
  https://store.tinygreenpc.com/tiny-green-pcs/intense-pc.html https://store.tinygreenpc.com/tiny-green-pcs/intense-pc.html Very silent fanless pc. I have one and I am glad.
- fredsted 13y ago
  Mac mini has fans but is basically silent.
  - justincormack 13y ago
    things with fans are not silent enough - the mac pro seemed ok but now it seems too noisy
nahname 13y ago
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.
- zanny 13y ago
  Also resolution stopped at 1080p for a decade. Now that 4k is happening, there is an easy path to performance for gpu manufacturers.
  - Zak 13y ago
    Resolution dropped High-end for 4:3 was 2048x1536 (3 megapixels) High-end for 16:10 was 1920x1200 (2.2 megapixels) High-end for 16:9 was until very recently 1920x1080 (2 megapixels)
    - pdwetz 13y ago
      Just to clarify, high end for last two ratios are 2560x1600 and 2560x1440. Both were available at least two years ago when I built my current machine, although after some quick research the 16:9 format had some available as early as 2007.
      - Zak 13y ago
        My laptop bias is showing. Those were the highest resolutions available on laptops. They were also the highest commonly-available resolutions for desktop screens, though none of those was the highest that existed.
mahyarm 13y ago
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.
- mncolinlee 13y ago
  Android-based IDEs already exist. I should know. I was looking for one the moment I bought my ASUS Transformer a couple years ago. I found the only thing I couldn't do with the device was write and compile programs. I would bring it to hacking sessions, but I couldn't test code on it. At the time, the only option was a text editor that could style and check code syntax. The main downsides of these devices for programming is screen real estate, CPU speed, and support from major IDE/compiler vendors. Example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui
- solnyshok 13y ago
  I am following you, but cannot make myself comfortable with non-elastic screen size. I like my tablet to be 8", while anything less than 12 is not good for a laptop (I tried with UMPCs and Netbooks). However, I certainly can imagine myself plugging 8" inch tablet into 27" monitor and keyboard/mouse combo for comfortable work at office.
ye 13y ago
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?
- sejje 13y ago
  You just picked the most expensive calculation you could, more or less, and asked how a general-purpose PC handles it. A brand new general-purpose PC handles that situation equally well--unplayable.
  - ye 13y ago
    No, the most expensive would be a 3-monitor setup at 2560x1440 on ultra settings.
- TylerE 13y ago
  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.
  - ye 13y ago
    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.
    - TylerE 13y ago
      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.
      - jrpm 13y ago
        http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html You can have double speed.
johngalt 13y ago
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.
- solnyshok 13y ago
  I do not disagree, just wanted to mention that nowadays it is still possible to learn multi-booting with Android tablets and custom ROMs
- quantumpotato_ 13y ago
  I fear the ergonomics of mobile computers do more damage than desktops. Source: own experience
- GuiA 13y ago
  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 to play Sim City, but having no gaming computers/consoles, I couldn't. However, I did have a programmable calculator for my math class. I spent all of middle school and high school programming my own games on this underpowered (a few mhz of CPU and a few kb of memory), inconvenient (typing thousands of lines of code on this tiny keyboard is a feat) device (and yes, I did make a turn-by-turn Sim City for the TI-82). While I was doing this, a lot of my friends were playing Warcraft 3, The Sims, and watching dumb TV shows (early to mid 2000s, reality TV was just becoming big in France). Similarly, my girlfriend's parents were very anti-TV etc. As a result, she spent her childhood and teenage years drawing, and eventually she went to a top art school (RISD) and now makes a living from her illustration and teaching art. I'm not sure who I would be if I had grown up with an iPad and a playstation, or who my girlfriend would be if her parents had let her watch TV; no one can tell. However, I think our situations worked out really well for us; and when I have kids/teenagers (not for another decade or so), I will most definitely give them a life analog to what I experienced rather than a media-consumption heavy one. For instance, I haven't had TV ever since I moved out of my parent's house (I do have a projector for watching movies from the computer), and intend to keep it that way. I obviously have a fairly tech heavy life right now, as a tech worker in SF, but I am trying to cut down. I am noticing that I whip out my phone every time I have a spare 30 seconds, I have several laptops and iPads laying around the house, etc. - and I like it less and less. I'm slowly selling away my excess devices, and am thinking of getting rid of my iPhone when my contract runs out (and just get a dumbphone as a replacement for emergencies). I bought a really cheap netbook, installed archlinux+xmonad on it, and am using it as my primary machine at home for web browsing + programming + LaTeX. It's harder to get distracted with this machine. In 2011, Tom Preston-Werner said the only hardware he had at home were a waffle maker, a microwave and a bike[0]- I like that mentality. 19 year old me would have pre-ordered a Google Glass from day one and used it with religious fervor; now, I am absolutely not interested in such a device, as I know it is just the ad billboard of the 21st century manufactured by Google. I still have a few guilty digital pleasures; for example, I buy a lot of used video games that I wanted to play in my childhood and never could (mostly Game Boy Advance/Game Cube- the upside is that you can get 20 of those games used on Amazon for the price of 3 new current-gen games). My hope is that over the next few months and years, I will revert to reading as much as I used to, and spend less time on Facebook/Twitter/etc. (HN is not completely in that bucket, as it leads me to write introspective comments like this, which I think is good). I think a big part of it is removing the devices that will call for your attention. My Game Boy Advance or MP3 player will never call for my attention- it just waits for me to use it. However, my iPad or iPhone will call for my attention every few minutes, which is not liberating at all. Tech should be liberating. YMMV :) [0]: http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com
orf 13y ago
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.
Zak 13y ago
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.
- solnyshok 13y ago
  I also enjoy quite old laptop (HP2530p, 2009, 12", Core2 Duo 1.9GHz, sturdy, lightweight). I upgraded to 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. Plenty enough for the next couple of years, me thinks :) Perfectly runs W8.1/LinuxMint/Android-x86ICS
  - josteink 13y ago
    Completely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion at hand, but if you are going run Android as a Netbook OS on stock PC hardware with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, I've found that everything from Jellybean and up is incredibly much better to work with than Android 4.0. They've done some deep level fixes which just makes everything flow and stick together as one "netbook" user-experience in a much better way. My experience is mostly from Asus Tarnsformer type devices and not regular X86 laptop hardware, but I suspect the same improvements should be valid in X86 country. You certainly have nothing to lose by trying it [1]. My 2 cents. [1] http://www.android-x86.org/releases/build-20130725 http://www.android-x86.org/releases/build-20130725
    - FeloniousHam 13y ago
      Agree, and to wander further afield: how's your luck running apps? The Google apps work great, I use Opera and some hack to get Flash games to work, but the vast majority of apps just fail to load. In spite of the problems, it's amazingly fast and usable, esp. compared to Windows/Ubuntu. running the stable android-x86 on a Samsung NB505
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  I have the same laptop running debian. Even runs small VMs ok and has survived multiple liquid accidents and dropping
Zoomla 13y ago
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.
colanderman 13y ago
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.
- bluedino 13y ago
  HTML5 combined with crazy CSS can make a C2D crawl these days. It's not just Flash anymore that's sucking CPU power down.
- meerita 13y ago
  I still use Facebook on old iPad 2. And it goes faster as the same day I've bought it.
  - telephonetemp 13y ago
    That's generally the solution to the problem of accessing the Web on old PCs: request the mobile version of the website. Heck, with enough trickery you can even get Opera Mini to run.
asafira 13y ago
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)
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  everyone I know has a 64-128GB SSD and a 1TB internal HDD, and a 1TB external HDD for backups.
- schrodinger 13y ago
  Flickr gives you a terabyte free.
  - hnha 13y ago
    surely no one wants to rely on a third party service that is only available online and at the service's whim for their photos.
sejje 13y ago
I agree with the point about keyboard and screen. 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.
specialist 13y ago
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.
textminer 13y ago
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.
- kazagistar 13y ago
  These days, everyone has access to an excellent cross platform learning platform for programming: the browser. So yeah, I think if anything programming is more accessible then ever.
  - jl6 13y ago
    Not that I disagree with what you've said, but browsers aren't a platform for learning to program on a tablet.
- davidsong 13y ago
  The worry isn't unfounded though and in the case of programming it has actually been measured, the decline in quality of CS students is what inspired the Raspberry Pi project: http://www.raspberrypi.org/about http://www.raspberrypi.org/about
zalzane 13y ago
>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.
- X4 13y ago
  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 inviting everybody to an expensive cocktail to an exclusive restaurant? B) A guy who own lots of expensive high-tech and luxury car + his own house? C) A guy with charme and charisma, who can make anyone feel special, or have a fun time, even in the dirtiest place? Choose yourself. I believe you all experienced A,B and C already. But I would rely on the scientific evidence that C) has a higher long term chance of staying an attractor of popularity. (I'm sorry, I couldn't put the references together, but hope you understand) Side story: A weird guy in my old class possessed a bluetooth wireless headphones with integrated mp3 player in 2006, a 3000EUR laptop and all sorts of other very expensive gimmickry. That didn't make him cooler at all. People still didn't like him and it just made him more vulnerable to attacks of the some of the more primitive pupils.
  - 13y ago
mathattack 13y ago
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.
mcv 13y ago
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.
jrochkind1 13y ago
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)
- josteink 13y ago
  Not disagreeing with your overall concern about locked down platforms... mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_ With a 80% market-share[1] I think it's safe to safe Android is by far the most popular handheld platform, with iOS being for the niche market. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-share-in-global-smartphone-shipments-as-ios-and-blackberry-share-slides-per-idc/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-sha...
ekianjo 13y ago
> 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.
etler 13y ago
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.

thom 13y ago

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).

robotresearcher 13y ago
Code is harder because editing text is harder. Text input and manipulation is just not very good on tablets. Even if you plug a keyboard into iOS editing is still worse than WordPerfect circa 1988. You might type stuff in OK, but manipulating text is awful.
- thom 13y ago
  Yeah, I have no idea how Shakespeare got anything done.
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    Sure. 884,421 words[1]. And with that workload, I bet he used the most efficient technology available at the time to do it. [1] http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/ http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/

justincormack 13y ago

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.

maxmem 13y ago
There are passive coolers for i7s out there. You can even find passively cooled GPUs and PSUs. It's pretty cheap to build a silent pc.
- mcv 13y ago
  Those passive coolers generally still rely on some airflow. With no case fans at all, I'm told they won't be able to hold up under any decent load.
- bcoates 13y ago
  It's tricky getting a passive GPU to actually work, mine has a tendency to overheat and halt the system rather than throttle down under load. It required a fair bit of tweaking to case fans and driver underclock settings to get it stable.
Jakub77 13y ago
https://store.tinygreenpc.com/tiny-green-pcs/intense-pc.html https://store.tinygreenpc.com/tiny-green-pcs/intense-pc.html Very silent fanless pc. I have one and I am glad.
fredsted 13y ago
Mac mini has fans but is basically silent.
- justincormack 13y ago
  things with fans are not silent enough - the mac pro seemed ok but now it seems too noisy

nahname 13y ago

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.

zanny 13y ago
Also resolution stopped at 1080p for a decade. Now that 4k is happening, there is an easy path to performance for gpu manufacturers.
- Zak 13y ago
  Resolution dropped High-end for 4:3 was 2048x1536 (3 megapixels) High-end for 16:10 was 1920x1200 (2.2 megapixels) High-end for 16:9 was until very recently 1920x1080 (2 megapixels)
  - pdwetz 13y ago
    Just to clarify, high end for last two ratios are 2560x1600 and 2560x1440. Both were available at least two years ago when I built my current machine, although after some quick research the 16:9 format had some available as early as 2007.
    - Zak 13y ago
      My laptop bias is showing. Those were the highest resolutions available on laptops. They were also the highest commonly-available resolutions for desktop screens, though none of those was the highest that existed.

mahyarm 13y ago

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.

mncolinlee 13y ago
Android-based IDEs already exist. I should know. I was looking for one the moment I bought my ASUS Transformer a couple years ago. I found the only thing I couldn't do with the device was write and compile programs. I would bring it to hacking sessions, but I couldn't test code on it. At the time, the only option was a text editor that could style and check code syntax. The main downsides of these devices for programming is screen real estate, CPU speed, and support from major IDE/compiler vendors. Example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui
solnyshok 13y ago
I am following you, but cannot make myself comfortable with non-elastic screen size. I like my tablet to be 8", while anything less than 12 is not good for a laptop (I tried with UMPCs and Netbooks). However, I certainly can imagine myself plugging 8" inch tablet into 27" monitor and keyboard/mouse combo for comfortable work at office.

ye 13y ago

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?

sejje 13y ago
You just picked the most expensive calculation you could, more or less, and asked how a general-purpose PC handles it. A brand new general-purpose PC handles that situation equally well--unplayable.
- ye 13y ago
  No, the most expensive would be a 3-monitor setup at 2560x1440 on ultra settings.
TylerE 13y ago
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.
- ye 13y ago
  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.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    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.
    - jrpm 13y ago
      http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html You can have double speed.

johngalt 13y ago

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.

solnyshok 13y ago
I do not disagree, just wanted to mention that nowadays it is still possible to learn multi-booting with Android tablets and custom ROMs
quantumpotato_ 13y ago
I fear the ergonomics of mobile computers do more damage than desktops. Source: own experience
GuiA 13y ago
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 to play Sim City, but having no gaming computers/consoles, I couldn't. However, I did have a programmable calculator for my math class. I spent all of middle school and high school programming my own games on this underpowered (a few mhz of CPU and a few kb of memory), inconvenient (typing thousands of lines of code on this tiny keyboard is a feat) device (and yes, I did make a turn-by-turn Sim City for the TI-82). While I was doing this, a lot of my friends were playing Warcraft 3, The Sims, and watching dumb TV shows (early to mid 2000s, reality TV was just becoming big in France). Similarly, my girlfriend's parents were very anti-TV etc. As a result, she spent her childhood and teenage years drawing, and eventually she went to a top art school (RISD) and now makes a living from her illustration and teaching art. I'm not sure who I would be if I had grown up with an iPad and a playstation, or who my girlfriend would be if her parents had let her watch TV; no one can tell. However, I think our situations worked out really well for us; and when I have kids/teenagers (not for another decade or so), I will most definitely give them a life analog to what I experienced rather than a media-consumption heavy one. For instance, I haven't had TV ever since I moved out of my parent's house (I do have a projector for watching movies from the computer), and intend to keep it that way. I obviously have a fairly tech heavy life right now, as a tech worker in SF, but I am trying to cut down. I am noticing that I whip out my phone every time I have a spare 30 seconds, I have several laptops and iPads laying around the house, etc. - and I like it less and less. I'm slowly selling away my excess devices, and am thinking of getting rid of my iPhone when my contract runs out (and just get a dumbphone as a replacement for emergencies). I bought a really cheap netbook, installed archlinux+xmonad on it, and am using it as my primary machine at home for web browsing + programming + LaTeX. It's harder to get distracted with this machine. In 2011, Tom Preston-Werner said the only hardware he had at home were a waffle maker, a microwave and a bike[0]- I like that mentality. 19 year old me would have pre-ordered a Google Glass from day one and used it with religious fervor; now, I am absolutely not interested in such a device, as I know it is just the ad billboard of the 21st century manufactured by Google. I still have a few guilty digital pleasures; for example, I buy a lot of used video games that I wanted to play in my childhood and never could (mostly Game Boy Advance/Game Cube- the upside is that you can get 20 of those games used on Amazon for the price of 3 new current-gen games). My hope is that over the next few months and years, I will revert to reading as much as I used to, and spend less time on Facebook/Twitter/etc. (HN is not completely in that bucket, as it leads me to write introspective comments like this, which I think is good). I think a big part of it is removing the devices that will call for your attention. My Game Boy Advance or MP3 player will never call for my attention- it just waits for me to use it. However, my iPad or iPhone will call for my attention every few minutes, which is not liberating at all. Tech should be liberating. YMMV :) [0]: http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com

orf 13y ago

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.

Zak 13y ago

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.

solnyshok 13y ago
I also enjoy quite old laptop (HP2530p, 2009, 12", Core2 Duo 1.9GHz, sturdy, lightweight). I upgraded to 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. Plenty enough for the next couple of years, me thinks :) Perfectly runs W8.1/LinuxMint/Android-x86ICS
- josteink 13y ago
  Completely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion at hand, but if you are going run Android as a Netbook OS on stock PC hardware with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, I've found that everything from Jellybean and up is incredibly much better to work with than Android 4.0. They've done some deep level fixes which just makes everything flow and stick together as one "netbook" user-experience in a much better way. My experience is mostly from Asus Tarnsformer type devices and not regular X86 laptop hardware, but I suspect the same improvements should be valid in X86 country. You certainly have nothing to lose by trying it [1]. My 2 cents. [1] http://www.android-x86.org/releases/build-20130725 http://www.android-x86.org/releases/build-20130725
  - FeloniousHam 13y ago
    Agree, and to wander further afield: how's your luck running apps? The Google apps work great, I use Opera and some hack to get Flash games to work, but the vast majority of apps just fail to load. In spite of the problems, it's amazingly fast and usable, esp. compared to Windows/Ubuntu. running the stable android-x86 on a Samsung NB505
dobbsbob 13y ago
I have the same laptop running debian. Even runs small VMs ok and has survived multiple liquid accidents and dropping

Zoomla 13y ago

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.

colanderman 13y ago

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.

bluedino 13y ago
HTML5 combined with crazy CSS can make a C2D crawl these days. It's not just Flash anymore that's sucking CPU power down.
meerita 13y ago
I still use Facebook on old iPad 2. And it goes faster as the same day I've bought it.
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  That's generally the solution to the problem of accessing the Web on old PCs: request the mobile version of the website. Heck, with enough trickery you can even get Opera Mini to run.

asafira 13y ago

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)

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
everyone I know has a 64-128GB SSD and a 1TB internal HDD, and a 1TB external HDD for backups.
schrodinger 13y ago
Flickr gives you a terabyte free.
- hnha 13y ago
  surely no one wants to rely on a third party service that is only available online and at the service's whim for their photos.

sejje 13y ago

I agree with the point about keyboard and screen. 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.

specialist 13y ago

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.

textminer 13y ago

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.

kazagistar 13y ago
These days, everyone has access to an excellent cross platform learning platform for programming: the browser. So yeah, I think if anything programming is more accessible then ever.
- jl6 13y ago
  Not that I disagree with what you've said, but browsers aren't a platform for learning to program on a tablet.
davidsong 13y ago
The worry isn't unfounded though and in the case of programming it has actually been measured, the decline in quality of CS students is what inspired the Raspberry Pi project: http://www.raspberrypi.org/about http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

zalzane 13y ago

>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.

X4 13y ago
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 inviting everybody to an expensive cocktail to an exclusive restaurant? B) A guy who own lots of expensive high-tech and luxury car + his own house? C) A guy with charme and charisma, who can make anyone feel special, or have a fun time, even in the dirtiest place? Choose yourself. I believe you all experienced A,B and C already. But I would rely on the scientific evidence that C) has a higher long term chance of staying an attractor of popularity. (I'm sorry, I couldn't put the references together, but hope you understand) Side story: A weird guy in my old class possessed a bluetooth wireless headphones with integrated mp3 player in 2006, a 3000EUR laptop and all sorts of other very expensive gimmickry. That didn't make him cooler at all. People still didn't like him and it just made him more vulnerable to attacks of the some of the more primitive pupils.
- 13y ago

mathattack 13y ago

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.

mcv 13y ago

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.

jrochkind1 13y ago

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)

josteink 13y ago
Not disagreeing with your overall concern about locked down platforms... mainly that the most popular handheld devices (iOS) are _locked down_ With a 80% market-share[1] I think it's safe to safe Android is by far the most popular handheld platform, with iOS being for the niche market. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-share-in-global-smartphone-shipments-as-ios-and-blackberry-share-slides-per-idc/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/android-nears-80-market-sha...

ekianjo 13y ago

> 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.

etler 13y ago

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.