Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

> it was already clear that arguably the most important company in Silicon Valley’s history was in trouble: PCs, long Intel’s chief money-maker, were in decline, leaving the company ever more reliant on the sale of high-end chips to data centers;

Where PCs were replaced, they were succeeded by laptops, and for the most part they use Intel processors.

View on HN

The term “PC” refers to both desktops and laptops. Both are in decline as general purpose computing moves to the smartphone.

More like "as general purpose computing dies, replaced by the smartphone."

People are doing everything on smartphones they used to do on "personal computers", the form factor doesn't change that.

As far as extensibility and/or openness of the platform goes, that may define general purpose computing for you but the industry has abundantly shown that it doesn't for most people.

I don't know about the other poster's opinion, but mine is that it isn't a personal computer unless I can program it with itself. The ability for anyone to write and distribute software was what made PCs great. Current smartphones fight the idea that the user can own their device and can do whatever they want with it, preferring a walled garden approach that's helpful to consumers, but not personal computing.

It's a disturbing trend but I see some dim hope. Everywhere across the world the importance of programming education is recognized. The BBC:micro is probably the epitome of this, with the the aim of the entire population knowing how to program a device at some point in a future.

The people who learned to program in this way will appreciate the ability to control a device in this way and will naturally steer towards platform allowing them to do so.

Moreover, even Apple is changing these days. Making Swift available is a step towards more ubiquitous app development. And with Swift Playgrounds you can learn to actually program on your device, even though it's not the same as controlling it the way we're used to. It's not unthinkable they make further concessions and at some point iOS devices could be programmable to a certain extent.

I'm also of the opinion that current smartphones are not "personal computers" in the original sense of the term. The power is in the hands of the OS and apps, they are the real users, making the decisions of how to use the computer - while the consumers are just that, consuming programs that other people/companies designed.

> People are doing everything on smartphones they used to do on "personal computers", the form factor doesn't change that.

I don't think folks are doing programming and graphic design on their phones...

True, but we've gone from millions of people using PCs to billions using smartphones, and a majority of the people using PCs never used them for programming or graphic design.

There are billions of pcs.

There are certainly more than a billion PCs in existence. I'm skeptical there are much more than a billion PC users.

Right now it takes about 4 years to sell one billion PCs[1]. Considering that includes business sales, a significant chunk of that includes people with multiple PCs.

Compare that to smartphones, which sell well over a billion per year[2].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

[2]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/smartphone-sales-be-flat-y...

A "billion per year" is clearly unsustainable, given the world population. I mean, shouldn't we step back and observe that clearly if they're selling at this rate, some grave defect in human behavior is being exploited to the extent that something will dramatically collapse soon? Also keeping in mind the end of Moore's law as people have mentioned.

You started by claiming 1-several orders of magnitude difference in pc users to mobile "millions vs billions" which is clearly nonsense.

Now you are using sales as a proxy for users which is nearly as false.

People buy and rapidly dispose of phones for a variety of reasons.

They break, are lost, get stolen. Having a new model is a status symbol. Current models are supported by the manufacturer for only a few years on the Android side. Newer models are significantly better than last years.

PCs easily last 5-7 years. Decreasing revenue from new models annually doesn't imply that the users or the platform is no longer relevant.

Reports of the death of the pc are greatly exaggerated.

Not even writing text. The interface is just terrible for that.

Obviously a day may come where people plug their phones into docking stations that are equipped with a keyboard and a monitor, but it seems likely that we'll stick to lightweight laptops for a long time.

Even if they do, it is just as form factor, everyone doing serious work with 21" screens or higher will be using docking stations and will be business as usual.

Is that an absolute decline now, or just relative?

(I'm asking about usage, not sales - I know the latter have fallen off a cliff since Moore's Law topped out.)

https://bgr.com/2016/11/02/internet-usage-desktop-vs-mobile/

Mobile internet usage worldwide blew past desktop usage in October of 2016 and hasn't slowed down since, and even that's just looking at web page views. I'd argue that holistically, smartphones have been the dominant technology platform for many years even before that, since apps are the primary interface to most services on the platform.

This may mean so many things... From "people who use desktops/laptops do it in a work environment and use the Internet less" to "mobile apps use bandwidth more intensively than local apps (which is pretty normal in an office environment)"

Thanks, but that doesn't answer the question. It's showing percentages, not absolute numbers.

Isn't the web the biggest platform still? All platform users use web sites/web apps, even though on mobile the percentages are a bit smaller, for now, because of mobile apps.

I wouldn't overestimate the impact of smartphones. It's just that PCs (both in desktop and laptops) don't need upgrades anymore from year to year. You can use your PC from 2012 (Intel i5-2xxx if you remember), possible even farther back and you'd still be fine for almost all tasks. Gamers and other high-performance tasks are a niche. The biggest performance gain for these machines is a SSD, not a new PC.

The same will happen to smartphones. You can already see it. Manufacturers trying so hard to invent features nobody needs, just to have an excuse to buy a new device.

That's the point. The so-called "post-PC era" has never arrived. Personally I don't know any adult who doesn't own a computer. We no longer upgrade so often but we use them on a daily basis. Pretty much anyone doing any kind of white-collar work will use a PC (that includes Macs...) Your needs outside of the work environment will vary, but people are still not throwing their laptops away just because they use their phones more often.

The question is: do new adults (think 18-24 year olds) buy desktops or laptops?

At least one, yes? There's no university student without one, and there's no white-collar worker without one.

Literally nobody is typing up their 10-page essay on their phone.

Tablets + keyboards.

Tablets remain truly mediocre devices, in the case of Android running a mediocre os.

- garbage multi tasking

- slightly laggy typing

- no real ability for multiple apps to work on the same data

-10" is still a tiny screen and almost as unwieldy as a small laptop 7" is too tiny yet still not pocket size.

Since a tablet usually does not have by definition a cellular modem it can't replace your phone plus the cameras and microphone normally blow.

I find the idea that most people are using a tablet in place of a real computer laughable.

if gaming is an issue: desktop. Laptop in the other case. Or both, you can get cheap laptops for 300€ which will work just fine because of the reasons in the parent.

Perhaps the post PC era did not arrive in your immediate bubble, however I assure you it happened.

There are whole parts of non first world societies where laptops are not a thing and everything is done on phones and tablets.

Heck, I'm a gamer, and I'm still using a rig with an i5-2500K at its core. I've upgraded the graphics card twice since I put the machine together, and put in an SSD to use as a boot drive, but I've never felt a burning need to upgrade the CPU. That's just not where the bottlenecks are anymore, even for games.

> The same will happen to smartphones. You can already see it. Manufacturers trying so hard to invent features nobody needs, just to have an excuse to buy a new device.

Unfortunately, smartphones exist in this world where everyone has far tighter control over hardware/software integration. So, its much harder to run the latest software on an old smartphone than it is to run the latest software on an old PC.

Of course its not because the hardware is necessarily incapable, but more because everyone assumes they can get away with new market/platform/support rules "because mobile."

As long as the apps from the appstore are installable, this is a non-issue for non-technical users.

Mobile sales are plateauing now as well. Moore's law has hit them just as hard. It would be foolish for Intel to dump everything to jump into a market just as it matures and peaks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com