The midrange computer dies | Hacker News Reader

The midrange computer dies

esr.ibiblio.org

42 pointsjgrahamc54 comments

This statement is wrong for a large class of users

This is more power than a typical desktop user would know what to do with, by a pretty large margin -absurd overkill for just running an office suite or video editing or gaming or whatever.

His "Great Beast of Malvern" custom computer (http://www.catb.org/esr/hardware.html) is under powered for high end gaming and doesn't meet Virtual Reality minimum specs (http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/vr/system-require...). It is fair to argue that gaming, and especially VR or 4K gaming is a niche market that isn't a relevant consideration in his arguments, but he does explicitly mention desktop computers as overkill for gaming.

The only thing he's missing is a graphics card, and that's because his use case is different (it would be easy to plop in). High end workstations and High end gaming are identical except for that. My rig (with very close specs to his, plus a 980TI) runs my Rift just fine.

You helped prove my point by mentioning that he could easily make his machine VR ready by buying a $600 GPU for a workstation he already considers overkill :).

He needs to replace a $550 card (7950 price when he bought it) with a $300 card (GTX 970 current price).

An AMD 7950 was the high end card when his computer was built, and is only ~20% slower than the minimum recommendation. It should run most VR games just fine.

I strongly disagree with this, from experience. The minimum specs are not joking when it comes to VR (and he's off in terms of both CPU and GPU--VR is CPU-intensive too). Even at the minimum there are games that have stuttering, and stuttering is the literal worst thing that you can have in VR. Oculus forces games to fade out/black out before any load because having the head tracking stop even for a split second can make you literally fall over; dropped frames, especially during a big or sweeping motion can make you want to puke.

Honestly, my second-biggest worry (after the specter of a much more intrusive kind of harassment, which has already started to happen, hooray!) with VR is people trying it on machines that were built to save a few bucks and being turned off by the nausea of not having the necessary perf characteristics to deliver.

But it isn't -absurd overkill like he is boasting/assuming, but pretty standard in these realms. (Gamers probably would pick higher speed and only 4 cores, no clue what video editing tools prefer. Probably even more RAM if possible?)

I have friends who do professional video post production. Things like major television ads, tv shows and feature films.

Their machines are absolute monsters - and necessarily so. I don't know what kind of video editing he is talking about - but video editing is obscenely compute heavy if you are editing for 4k - which is what you have to do nowadays - and you need to do include composite graphics, effects and run color correction to be viewed, in real time (on the array of a dozen different monitors, displays and TVs of various sizes that are in your editing bay) without upfront rendering - which is what is expected. To be able to replay the same hugely complex portion of video 30 times in a row with zero lag after making a change that requires the entire thing to be re-rendered.

I can think of few single-station use-cases, in fact, that are more computationally heavy than commercial grade video editing. You've got dozens of gigabytes of source material which has to be parsed quickly, loaded into memory, modified, composited and rendered at 29.97 - and the lag between commands and playback has to be effectively zero if you don't want your editors to blow their own brains out.

Maybe he means people using iMovie.

Yup yup. I'm not even doing professional video and a big part of why I recently upgraded my workstation (an i7-6700K, 64GB of RAM, and a 980Ti) was that even consumer-level 4K video is an enormous pig. I probably over-bought for my own needs--though hey, now I might play Dwarf Fortress at a reasonable speed--but there's little enough headroom that the monstrosities bought for commercial video make so much more sense.

I think ESR is ignorant of the computing needs for large swathes of people he has little-to-no interaction with. My guess is he's never seen a real video editing setup (my system cost over $15K and makes his Beast look positively anemic), "enthusiast" gamer system (typical buildout costs start at $3K and go up rapidly depending on your GPU budget), or even the typical engineer that has a system which probably cost $2K+ and regularly works pretty hard depending on what tools they use to do their job.

All of that said, despite his ignorance of the demands these users have, he's right that they represent a very small percentage of all computing done today, and the "middle" tier computer is getting hollowed out by people moving down to smaller devices.

I'm not sure there's anything insightful to this, though: this has been happening for over 10 years now. Worse, it's a re-play of the same trend from the 90's with high performance workstations moving from expensive enterprise-only systems to Intel, which itself is a re-play of the same trend with the intro of the PC in the 80's. Computing gets smaller, cheaper and (largely) slower -- by the standards of the stuff it's replacing, anyway.

Geez. That's just embarrassing. I took him at his word that his rig was beefier than most video editing rigs, and now I feel like an idiot. Thanks for the link.

Just guessing from the "final parts list from the builder", and that he misformatted the memory total on the CPU cooler line, he way overpaid for something built for him that he doesn't fully understand.

He could have ended up with 16 cores and 128GB building around the E5-2670, which is dirt cheap on eBay and elsewhere these days. $500 for motherboard, both CPUs, and 128GB (granted, DDR3 and not DDR4 per his build): http://www.natex.us/product-p/intel-s2600cp2j-128gb.htm

Confusing title. For a second I thought IBM was discontinuing the AS/400 / iSeries / IBM i midrange[1] systems.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrange_computer

I didn't find it particularly confusing. I feel as though most people would take "midrange computer" to be what the author intended. Might just be projecting my own ignorance of the IBM systems however.

The term "midrange computer" to me is more synonymous with "minicomputer" (ala AS/400, etc.) than it is with "desktop tower PC" or whatever. My guess would be that most people would interpret it the same way, given that "midrange systems" is a pretty established and well known term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrange_computer

That's what I thought he meant as mid-range in terms of price/performance is always relative and changing. Maybe I should've known better.

> most people would interpret it the same way

For most people, a computer is PC.

That was my immediate thought too, and I half expected to see 20 year old article. First thing I looked at was the date and I thought, "I wonder what this guy is writing about".

If so, we should start seeing effects on pricing: as the volume of midrange computers drops, price goes up until it gets close enough to that of a high end computer. At which point people who would normally buy midrange computers (like us devs) end up buying $3000 Xeon workstations instead.

Luckily, gamers are keeping the mid range market alive, and it seems quite likely that VR enthusiasts will ensure that it stays alive for a few more years.

If you dont need gfx, you can still turn a 6th Gen NUC into a pretty "mid range" pc. (also the author of this post is wrong about the Intel NUC being fanless)

i7 NUC - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk...

NVME SSD - http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisit...

32GB DDR4 - http://www.corsair.com/en-us/corsair-memory-32gb-2x16gb-ddr4...

When I was buying some NUCs for a project at work I am pretty sure I saw a few diffrent models some with passive cooling and some with fans.

all the ones i have taken apart have a fan in the lid.

Hell, if you really wanted gfx, that thing's got a thunderbolt port.

It's just a misleading title. It isn't about the death of the midrange computer in general, just about one person phasing out a form factor. All he says is that "for me" the midrange computer is dead. VR is definitely a huge potential for midrange computer growth in the next few years.

The upcoming nVidia Pascal and AMD Arctic Islands will likely meet minimum VR specs with under 50 watts of power, so VR laptops and NUC's will be very feasible quite soon.

Minimum specs. But what about when we want 8K-per-eye VR? It will always be possible to get better performance out of a bigger machine. Small form factor is great, but I wouldn't sacrifice quality for a smaller box when it's just going to sit in the corner anyway.

Not exactly a counterpoint, but maybe a more interesting vantage:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/

> [T]he quality and design of recent Thinkpads has gone utterly to shit. The new keyboards are particularly atrocious.

I've never owned a Thinkpad until recently. I purchased a Thinkpad T450s and I love it. I also think the keyboard is quite nice as well. Now I'm curious how the older Thinkpads were. Were they considerably better? Did I buy a bad product and not even know?

The W540 has really awkwardly placed Ctrl and Fn keys, and the trackpad is terrible. Not sure what the timeline is between W520 and T450. But I do know that the W520s were the predecessor to the W540, and it didn't have all those issues.

They aren't that bad compared to other brands, but compared to what they used to be, they are quite a bit worse.

This is partly because travel distance has been reduced to make devices thinner, and also because of perplexing layout choices.

Edit: I should probably point out that I was just talking about the keyboard here.

Yes, in my opinion the Thinkpad peaked somewhere around the T43 or the IBM-made T60 (which was also made by Lenovo). Good keyboard layout, travel distance, spring distance. Even silly stuff like the shape of the key and the precise type of plastic were somehow better.

And everything apart from the keyboard was solid too. How many non-Macbooks can be picked up by any edge or corner? How many laptops have a metal hinge for the screen? A magnesium rollcage inside? Clever drains that divert water out of your keyboard and out holes on the bottom, all without damaging the electronics? Easily user-accessible battery, RAM, HDD…even more advanced components like the screen and the wifi card?

Pretty sure the T60 was designed and manufactured entirely by Lenovo but they had permission to use the IBM logo on it.

Nobody makes laptops like IBM used to :-( I know they seem to strongly prefer low-volume high-margin industries but I really would like to see what they could do today.

Had a T60 but didn't know about the drain. That's really cool.

The old keyboard wasn't merely "quite nice". Apart from the short travel (which was still quite long by notebook standards and rather easy to get used to), it had a feel very like a good full-sized desktop keyboard. No, it wasn't a Model M or anything, but it was head and shoulders above most of the crop. I used the old USB Thinkpad external keyboard with my desktop as well as my laptop (when it was on the docking station). Unfortunately, it's been discontinued as well.

I personally much prefer the newer thinkpad keyboards to the older one. I however, don't consider either keyboard to be good enough to do serious work on. For that I have a real ergo keyboard and real mouse.

I recently got a t540p and the keyboard feels like mushy crap, but it has a ten-key and trackpoint and it's backlit so at least I can find the weirdly spaced keys in the dark. Anyway the screen is fantastic and the rest of the build quality is nice so I'm not complaining, they're just not what they used to be.

The fact that their keyboards are spill-proof is one of the best aspects

This is like asking for people's personal religious experiences.

I upgraded from a T60P last year, and opted for a used W520 (circa. 2011). The W520 has been good so far, but I should have gotten something a little lighter. That was the last year before the keyboard went down the road of shedding functionality. It's not just the island-style keys, but moving and discarding keys isn't that beneficial to me.

My T60P survived a lot of abuse. I've had to replace some parts and the cpu fan, but it was easier than having to upgrade to a new machine. I would have kept using it a little longer if not for the 4gb ram cap on it.

Current models just seem too much like Mac "Me Too" machines. Becoming too much like a Mac and people have an easy choice of just getting a Mac instead.

> What it adds up to for me is that midrange PCs are dead.

Yeah, I might even go as far to say: it's mostly just smartphones, laptops, and servers now. ESR admits as much: ", except that [my high-end PC] is really more like a baby supercomputer"

At this point, basically the only reason for a normal person to get a desktop rather than a laptop or a big-screened all-in-one is if they want a big graphics card.

Even that's starting to go away with systems like the Razer Core. The only thing holding back more external enclosures is that most laptop hardware makers haven't embraced the idea yet.

I do wonder if the licensing cost have been an issue there.

Also, USB-C makes it easier to fit into the design.

I think all-in-ones are generally still considered desktops.

And they have the disadvantage that when the hardware fails you have to discard the entire device instead of only the part that failed, which is becoming more important as hardware doesn't have to be replaced for being too slow as often anymore. The traditional format also allows you to use the big monitor for multiple devices, e.g. if you have a PC and a laptop dock or a fast PC and a Mac mini for OS X testing etc.

"And they have the disadvantage that when the hardware fails you have to discard the entire device instead of only the part that failed, which is becoming more important as hardware doesn't have to be replaced for being too slow as often anymore. "

BOOM! That and greater hardware customization are where desktops and servers have a benefit at all price ranges.

I'd definitely be tempted to just dump that computer into a cupboard and remote into it from the laptop

The exception being content creation needing graphics horsepower and for the near future, the requirements from VR headsets like Vive and Rift.

not everyone keeps a tower PC as a workstation, and there are other uses for a tower PC besides "mailserver."

many people purchase desktop PC's because they are best bang for your buck when it comes to building a PC specifically for gaming.

this article screams "out of touch" in the worst way possible. just because your tower can be replaced by a raspberry pi doesn't spell the death of midrange desktop PCs. in fact, that's an ignorant thing to say. full stop.

as long as PC gaming exists, there will always be a market for midrange power in a tower.

It died few years ago for me. I scrapped my big honking tower (I would not even call it desktop as the only logical place was the floor) and purchased: MBPr that works as an actual desktop computer if I am not on a trip, attached to Thunderbolt display, Synology NAS to store data, and small Linux computer for Linux-y server-y stuff precisely the paperbook size ESR describes.

When I hear "Midrange Computer" I think IBM iSeries. Was briefly confused by this article.

Yup...I immediately thought "Really? Someone is predicting the final demise of the AS/400? Like someone has every year for the last 20 or so?".

Eric Raymond writes: "fast memory access to extremely large data sets (as in, surgery on large version-control repositories)" and I'm wondering just how "extremely large" these things are.

The last couple years he's been blogging about converting old open source CSV repositories (FreeBSD, etc...) to git. Here's a post where he talks briefly about FreeBSD being 18GB, and GCC being > 32GB: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6830

Pretty small compared to a lot of proprietary repos.

2012 called. If you had disposable income that is.

> 2012 called. If you had disposable income that is.

One of the points in the article, near the end. We've hit a crossover point where these small form factor computers are both cheap and capable, rather than one or the other.

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