It already happened. I cannot seriously buy a laptop under € 1000 for work.
The screen, keyboard, case and battery quality are a joke in most offerings, not to mention most lack dedicated GPUs or specific BIOS features.
The screen, keyboard, case and battery quality are a joke in most offerings, not to mention most lack dedicated GPUs or specific BIOS features.
Granted, it's not as productive (trackpoint or riot!), but it works.
But with the increasing tivoization of computing? Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding? People in developing countries? Poor people in developed countries? Not everyone can afford a 1000€ price tag. Should these people really be excluded from everything that isn't mindless passive consumption?
The same way we learned since the late 70's on the home computers.
Installing some kind of application that allows coding.
The only difference being that BASIC or Forth were already builtin.
Secure Boot is the best example for that:
• On Windows RT devices it always was mandatory and could not be disabled.
• On Windows 8 devices, manufacturers must give users an option to disable it.
• On Windows 10 devices, it is now in the manufacturer discretion whether it can be disabled or not.
The next step is obvious.
I suppose it's no surprise. It goes something like this: a) underwrite the device (not necessarily lose money on every sale, just lower the margins), b) introduce an app store, c) take a cut of every transaction.
As long as users and developers need your OS, your device - your appstore - you will make money.
I see at least one clear profit motive for the industry here, let's say you have a "Desktop enabled, smart" smartphone, you'll probably want to buy a dock, screen, keyboard, mouse, productivity software, etc.
Supermicro XnSAE workstation motherboard: 215
3.3GHz 4 core Xeon E3-1226 CPU w/HDMI out: 217
32 GiB DDR3 1600 ECC Kingston memory: 240
Low end 1/3 w/year for 5 years data center 80GB Intel SATA SSD: 100
Seagate "enterprise" <550/TB/year 4 TB hard disk: 210
Plus backup, however you do that (make sure critical stuff is offsite!). And, say, a man-week of your time to configure, order, build, install and configure Linux. The result will be very fast and rock solid (well, if put behind a good UPS) workstation class machine with a 5 year design life.
Simple enough; they'll code on tablets.
I'm actually currently working on a prototype for how a simple, useful development environment might look on a phone or tablet. It's a stack-based concatenative array language with a zoomable user interface. Instead of representing code as lines of text, it takes a more Smalltalk-like approach of a live environment. The benefit of being a concatenative language is that it naturally lends itself to a tree-like format where each word can be viewed and edited on a phone screen. Since semantically it's closer to a weird mashup of J and Perl(!), it can be concise (hopefully still readable) and the vector aspect makes drawing graphics pretty straightforward.
The downside, of course, is that it can be quite hard to reason in. Truthfully, I'm not really sure how to work around that—and I don't think most children will easily think in a function composition/matrix manipulation way. That said, I'd like to find something since I'm fairly sold on the idea that tacit programming with arrays is key to making coding on a tablet work (I think it's fairly clear that imperative or even conventional function languages would be a royal pain to use in such an environment). Maybe something Lisp-like where the user zooms around the AST would be an alternative.
> Poor people in developed countries?
Much cheaper phones and tablets are already vastly more popular than laptops or desktops among poor people. The solution is to move coding forward on mobile, not simply keep rather trashy cheap laptops around.
I see you've chosen well known readable languages as your inspiration ;)
There's plenty of free, on-device code editor, compiler/interpreter, etc. apps for Android, including ones that will allow you to run code in the app, or build, package, and install (given that you've enable non-Store installation) Android apps right on the device.
I and many others did learn computing on those systems, so apparently it isn't a show stopper to learn.
I don't remember getting any compiler or interpreter for Amiga, Atari or Apple Mac. You had to pay for them and the schematics were part of the OS SDK, also commercial.
Also going besides the ROM BASIC or Forth meant buying a compiler/interpreter.
The app stores are full of them, just pick one.
AFAIK Arexx was part of Worbench? But yes, you did need to get a compiler/interpreter for that. I thought you were talking about stuff like the C64 generation of computers.
I remember there were GNU tools available for the Amiga, and some magazines came with various development tools -- eg: Blitz Basic. But most were certainly commercial (including Blitz Basic) - but one must consider that even with aminet - there was nothing like the essentially free distribution of today (eg: push to github).
According to this site, Amiga Basic was actually bundled with the machine (note-section: "bundled basic language interpreter (free with machine)"):
http://www.classicamiga.com/content/view/5044/175/
> The app stores are full of them, just pick one.
Did Apple change their policy of allowing development tools? They certainly don't allow the creation of apps on the ipad/iphone as far as I know?
A few of the best ways to learn coding on the move
Codea
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171?mt=8
Pythonista
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pythonista/id528579881?mt=8
GLSL Studio
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glsl-studio/id481421644?mt=8
Lisping
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lisping/id512138518?mt=8
There are plenty more, one just needs to search for them.
Also they are pretty cheap compared to what I used to pay for, back in those days.