The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds?
futureoftheinternet.org
futureoftheinternet.org
Because nerds are still using their PCs to create mobile and web-based software. The PC may (just may) be dead for the hordes of average consumers out there, but it'll never be dead for those people creating things -- that is, until you can adequately create a mobile or web application on an iPad/iPhone.
Does anyone truly believe that scores of software developers writing financial software for banks are going to trade in their PC to type on an iOS device? Don't bet money on that (at least for the short-term).
In the post-PC world, a home(especially in low income homes and the developing world) having iPads are much less likely to have Windows or Mac machines (on which an enterprising kid might install and play with Eclipse, Visual Studio Express or XCode, or even Linux).
This effect will be further amplified when the PC prices rise to lower demand.
While now it is a given concept that there will be a consumer level device, but sooner or later a new generation of home-based hackers will work up some new ways to be productive within these walled gardens, those will be exploited into apps and companies will be doing business on them - and then it will have started all over again.
I wouldn't consider it an end but part of a progression.
This is a real problem and is not alleviated just because you still use a PC to write software.
Plus, Apple is restricting the browser on purpose, to make it less useful. Tell me, how can you create an online image editing software, if Apple doesn't allow you to upload files from iPhone's browser?
And what Apple is doing today would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Censoring the web is perfectly within their grasp and you should see that, otherwise you're not seeing the forest from the trees.
So, I don't think there is anything all that novel about the iOS approach and I find it hard to think of such things as an erosion of control when consoles predated the PC in most peoples homes and tended to be far more draconian than iOS. Do you even remember how bad phones and their app stores where like pre Apple?
PS: Microsoft had no problem getting skin into this game and started taking their cut well before Apple produced iOS. Despite what the article says.
However, the best games have always been running on PCs first, often with exclusivity. Starcraft, The Sims, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Counter Strike, SimCity, Quake, Diablo 1 & 2 and the list can go on.
I own a Wii as it came free with my Internet subscription. It's gathering dust since last year. The games are simply not addictive. And this feeling I had on PS 2 too - the games feel too dumb and non-engaging, lacking taste. Which is why I never bothered.
Some people like these games consoles. I never did.
Confirmation bias. See Mario, Contra, Chrono Trigger, Sonic, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Halo, Alan Wake, Uncharted, Metroid, Heavy Rain, Sega Rally, Gran Turismo, Tekken, Street Fighter, Soul Edge, Forza Motorsport and the list can go on.
At least, I've never seen even the faintest hint of a games console implying it could be used to email the boss a copy of the spreadsheet you created on it.
edit: grammar, attitude.
We shouldn't make it easy.
I know a lot of people that have a tablet in addition to their PC, but that hardly makes the PC dead for them.
When tablets become much more powerful and able to integrate seemlessly with things like additional large monitors, keyboards, and mouses (or whatever eventually really replaces keyboards and mouses) then the PC will likely become a niche product, but then tablets will also have become hard to distinguish from a PC with an added ability to undock one monitor to take it with you.
I just don't get all this tablet love - I can make my laptop sit on my lap without stressing my hands. The display is big enough that I can do whatever I want on it, like when watching movies, the bigger, the better. I can type ~ 100 WPM on it. I can save a file on my desktop from one app and then open it from another (basic functionality that's just fucked up on the iPad).
The iPhone or the competing Android phones ARE GAME CHANGERS. But the big difference between an iPhone and a tablet is that an iPhone sits in your pocket and goes with you everywhere, even when you're at your local grocery store, buying some milk, even when you're inside a public toilet. A phone is always with you. That's progress.
But a Tablet? It's just a cool-looking but dumb device. It has potential, true. But not until it can do all of the things a laptop can.
Also, I would suspect that your wife would highly prefer a tablet if given the chance to try it out. The netbook experience is truly horrible -- she just might not know that something better is out there.
The netbook experience is indeed horrible, however you can attach a real mouse, a real keyboard and a real monitor to it, or a combination of those, any time you want.
My colleague has an iPad. He doesn't use it. It just sits there on his desk. I played with it and it has potential because of the touch-screen. However, as long as it is a dumbed-down device, it's not useful enough to bother.
Of course, time will prove me wrong if I am.
My desktop is the focus of my digital world. I use it for my programming, for writing papers at school as well as for gaming and media consumption when I am at the house. It does things like run multiple VMs and compile code in a reasonable time that none of the others manage. With its dual monitors and easy ability to handle numerous programs at once, I find it tops the others even for tasks like e-mail and web browsing that the Ipad does handle well. All of those others combined cannot replace what I do with my desktop. Even with her fairly high-end laptop and access to the other tools, my wife often borrows my desktop when she is doing serious writing for her PHD.
The others supplement my desktop for niche tasks. I take my netbook to class to take notes and it is good enough for light programming/paper writing and writing when I am on a trip (and I consider it a small PC, not a PC competitor. Also, I find the netbook quite nice for its good-enough travel computer and in-class-note-taking.). My smartphone is a game changer since it is always with me. The kindle is by far the best device for reading and I now prefer it over physical.
The Ipad though? It mostly has games for the kids since it is simple enough for even my 3 year old to use. I sometimes take it with me to places like the airport or DMV where breaking out my netbook would be a touch awkward and it has a pretty good Go program on it.
In short, I think for people doing serious content creation or serious gaming the PC will live on for the forseeable future.
You need Flash? Various Android devices and the Touchpad both have Flash. You need the screen to face you? Every tablet has a stand you can use. Personally I cross my legs then tuck my tablet behind my knee. You need to type quickly? Almost every real tablet has bluetooth where you can pair a keyboard.
If you need something the iPad doesn't offer, then stop using an iPad and actually find a tablet that offers the functionality you need. They exist. If you need something that no tablet offers, then buy a laptop and stop bitching. Motorcycles coexist with pickup trucks because they're built for different needs.
> Does anyone truly believe that scores of software
> developers writing financial software for banks are
> going to trade in their PC to type on an iOS device?
> Don't bet money on that (at least for the short-term).
iPad, wireless keyboard & SSH and I can do all my work more or less the same way I do now
There are times when I cannot test my code on the tablet, but at the very least I can write it wherever then push it back to Git and pull it to my test machine when I get back.
Apple realized first what this lack of knowledge can do: the ability to lock-in a product so that it runs only your AppStore's apps is not only good for the high-end of the market that is willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of usability and beautiful design, but rather more importantly it's good for the ignorant masses that don't even realize this fact when they buy the product just because it's fashionable to do so.
The point is that people cannot tell the difference without marketing to try and exaggerate one thing over another. Its why people buy inferior products at inflated rates and don't get upset. It is also why marketing is so very important in a saturated marketplace.
This is exactly what happened in your scenario. The well thinking mothers were lead to believe that any `laptop` can be just as good as another because someone told them it can be. They believed it without understanding it was all a ploy to gain a customer.
I'll happily get my 2 year-old a Leapfrog/LeapPad type device and he'll be happy with it and learn from it. Even if I could get a laptop at the same price point, I wouldn't. Why?
The LeapFrog type devices are made to be handled by toddlers. That means they can take being thrown across the room, tossed out a window, and used as a hammer and still come up smiling. Try that with a laptop! Not to mention that with the specialized device I don't need to be concerned about loading DVDs, CDs, etc: the media is similarly rugged.
Don't be too quick to discount what those parents were doing: they may have a better idea than you what type of environment the device operates in.
Around the same time I noticed a book in the school library on BASIC and put the two together. That cheap Christmas gift turned me on to computers and programming and though I’m now writing a thesis in Scala rather than hangman in BASIC, I’m glad I had that toy to get me started.
They're great devices. They can reach kids for education and let them learn in a format that will be useful to them going forward. I wouldn't buy a young child a full-fledged laptop, it'd be a waste of money and that's too much freedom to afford a kid if you don't know how to lock it down for malware or scams.
"I saw in the supermarket the other day a group of parents buying for their young child a so called "army man" and I realized how difficult it is for a 5 year old to join the military."
The truth is a lot simpler than that. They aren't trying to enslave humanity. They are just control freaks with a culture of creating art. It's ingrained in their corporate culture that people shouldn't decide how to use Apple's products. They believe that they should control that.
Whether you agree with that or not is your own choice. But it's just plain stupid to say that there is some kind of plot against "freedom" here.
1) Less need for IT support for family and friends;
2) I'm well-served with the computers I assemble and purchase, and even if mainstream operating systems continue their slide towards not serving my needs well (from my vantage point looking at OS X Lion and Windows 8), I am confident that there will be solutions out there, possibly increasingly exemplified by Linux, that facilitate web development and mundane user empowerment;
3) The web has become the democratic platform for publishing interactive content to the masses, which no vendor would dare attempt to exert control over.
Now, the real question is who's going to capitalize on this amusingly-phrased headline and come out with the Angry Nerds mobile game, where you launch a variety of nerds at iPads hidden in the temporary safety of their elaborate Apple Stores? Let's see, there's the fat, bearded nerd, the pale, skinny, tall one, the kid with glasses, the token girl nerd with freckles and glasses, and the $1.99 in-game purchase Darth Vader helmet nerd.
[Edit]
Looks like I wasn't the first one to think along these lines:
http://www.atlassian.com/en/angrynerds
[/Edit]
I don't want to be paranoid, but I feel like what Apple has done is brilliantly nefarious. They've given developers an offer they can't refuse: for 30% we'll sell your software frictionlessly. Sure you are giving up control, but how much does requiring a payment form and non-standard, non-obvious, potentially painful installation process cost an indie developer. 30% is always far less than the losses of a traditional website sales funnel, potentially by 2 orders of magnitude. The App Store simply sells more software.
Of course it has corrosive effects on the developer community in that prices are driven down (maybe not as much as volume increases, but still) and control is forked over the Apple. But what can developers do? It's a game theory problem. If everyone refuses to play Apple's game then maybe developers and innovation win, but if one breaks the line they stand to make a fortune.
I'm really not looking forward to the day when Macs go App Store only. If that happens it will probably mean I have to switch to Linux. It saddens me that the future of computing may be completely locked down, but it's hard to argue against it if for no other reason than it offers the most promise for actually making users safe as malware proliferates and becomes more sophisticated. Part of me thinks the free software and Internet as we know them today can not last, and if it wasn't the App Store it would be some other powerful interest eroding our digital freedom in the name of profit or control. This line of thought makes me think that maybe RMS is not such an extremist after all, but merely an equal counterbalance to the forces of power and greed shaping out future.
I don't understand how your maths works. You are asserting that a traditional website sale costs 3000%, thus losing the seller 29 x the price of the item? Obviously I am misunderstanding you but I don't know how to make sense of what you are saying.
I'm always curious about the people who say 30% is a good deal. I sell software directly over the web. PayPal charges me something like 0.50 + 2.5%. I do host my web site but I would have a web site anyway. Bandwidth associated with sales is negligible, support is a cost but again, Apple wouldn't do that for me. 30% is bigger than the cut I give to generic resellers who actually come to me to ask to list my software in their stores. I can see that Apple's store can increase volume (but then, we have nothing to compare it to - we will never know how well iOS software might have sold without the app store) - but I don't see how it's anything other than extremely expensive in terms of a way to sell software.
The role of the PC may be changing, but that is far from meaning that it's dead.
JailbreakMe is a website that can root your iOS - so let me emphasize this - a freaking website that can get root access on your iPhone just by visiting that website.
It originally relied on some bug in the PDF reader. Then Apple released an update. Then JailbreakMe got upgraded to use a FreeType parser security flaw, again in that same PDF reader and so it works with iOS 4.3.3 - then Apple released iOS 4.3.4 to patch it. But now an update for iOS 5 is apparently in the works.
At this point you may now feel that Apple is in control, that they are patching iOS at a rapid pace and so on. However, these vulnerabilities are PUBLIC. Even the source-code for JailbreakMe was published. Bad people don't do that ;-)
So you can argue all you want against malware, a broken OS or about evil people stealing your data, however the iOS platform is nothing more than security theater - it keeps the script kiddies out, it gives you an illusion of safety, but it won't keep out the people with the right resources and experience. And those people are the people you should be worried about.
You should be worried about the script kiddies too. Security is all about layers and vectors. Installing an innocent looking wallpaper pack by casual users shouldn't lead to malware infestation. That is much easier for the bad guys to do rather than get people to visit a malicious website.
Reducing the attack surface definitely makes you safer on relative terms. It does not make you absolutely safe.
>Do you feel secure when using an iPhone?
If I had an iPhone I would feel safer installing a whole bunch of unknown third party apps compared to doing the same on, say an Android phone. I would not feel "secure" though.
You should be worried about the script kiddies too
However, when you're compromised by just connecting to the network or just by visiting a compromised website (and lots of high-profile websites have been compromised before) - then all bets are off.
Malware has been distributed on many major websites most people would consider "trusted", either via ad networks or through simply cracking the servers.
On the Internet, you can't "trust" anybody not to be a vector for malware onto your client. Your client must be able to protect itself.
The world is an ugly place, full of bad people. That doesn't mean I need to barricade inside the house and give Apple the key.
Which websites do you trust, exactly?
On Windows - I either buy my software, or I'm getting known open-source software from their respective websites. I can't remember the last time my anti-virus (commercial, kept up to date) detected anything.
First of all, I don't trust anyone from my social circle not to be a vector for malware on the Internet, just as I don't trust them to not be a vector for real-life viruses and bacteria. If they have been compromised, they can be an unwilling vector. Toward that end, I have an immune system, as well as additional strategies such as vaccinations, hand washing, good nutrition, etc., to help protect myself.
Websites that have been compromised can be a vector for malware. Even HN could be a vector for malware. You can't simply trust that it isn't.
Second, your "answer" has nothing to do with my question. I asked which websites you trust, not which software repositories you trust. Browsers can and have had flaws that permit malware installation and other arbitrary code execution without an affirmative action on your part.
So I say again, more forcefully, which websites do you trust so completely that you believe they can never be a vector for malware?
Yeah, I do. There is a site that can take advantage of some vulnerability? Not impressed. Until there are tons of such sites, like they are for PCs, and until there are tons of actual iPhones harmed that way, as PCs are, I feel secure.
"however the iOS platform is nothing more than security theater - it keeps the script kiddies out, it gives you an illusion of safety, but it won't keep out the people with the right resources and experience."
I don't care about those people. I'm not targeted by some Dr. No style guy. I care about general experience and the law of large numbers.
And, statistically, I'm totally safe using an iPhone. When that changes, you can write to me again.
until there are tons of actual iPhones harmed
that way, as PCs are ...
So you can feel safe, but only because your platform is not popular enough right now, or useful enough for anybody to bother (PCs are wonderful for building botnets).
I don't care about those people. I'm not targeted
by some Dr. No style guy.
And, statistically, I'm totally safe using an iPhone.
Seriously?
That's a stupid fallacy. In the 90's the Mac had a tiny marker share, nothing like the near 10% it has today, and it still had tons of viruses. And even platforms like the Amiga and Atari had viruses, while having insignificantly less market share than PCs at the time. The OSX Macs, on the other hand, has only seen a few trojan horses and no actual virus distributed outside of some lab or something.
So, it's not just numbers or units, or relative percentage of market share. Other things count, stuff like the UNIX like permissions OS X had from the start, compared to the silly Windows 3->XP user being automatically admin.
"""Statistically? I just gave you as an example a freaking website that can do whatever the author wants on your iPhone and you're giving me statistics?"""
I'd care about that website when ACTUAL iPhones in the wild ACTUALLY VISIT websites such as this and are hacked, in large numbers.
Until then, I could care less.
It's the difference between being scared of violence in a seedy neighborhood and being scared of being targeted by a serial killer. Yeah, they do exist. What are you chances?
who needs malware when all these locked devices already come with location logger, key typing logger, remote wipe and other stuff we yet to discover.
Poor timing on your part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295341
Look at it this way, assume in the not so distant future you can do it all on the tablet as opposed to the desktop and no longer nead desktops, having them die a slow, slow death: Counter-Strike, WoW, Development (Github text editing, Cloud9 IDE,... etc), word processing, browsing, you get the idea.
But instead, the applications are vetted and controlled by the tablet OS maker. Now instead of law makers trying to get every search engine to block something, or tear-down registars all over the world, they just go to tablet OS maker 1 and 2 and have them take down access to website/app. No more website/app for anyone as desktops are dead and the tablet is so locked to shit you can't change a thing (secure boot anyone?)
Now, I'm not sure death is as current as suggested, but I see the trend the blog post is referring too.
Considering how "smart" the general human population is they will be happy to opt in for no choice just to have the latest iOS device and think they are cool.
It seems silly to imply the situation is somehow more plausible/likely with a tablet-based computing landscape.
Now, we are not in this scenario right now no matter how horrific you think walled gardens are. Probably not worth speculating too much further as the future is hard to predict, and this is just a possibility of the blog post trend extrapolated forward X number years.
How about, in 10 years most people just get a tablet + keyboard or something, and the PC doesn't die, but get's 4-5 times more expensive because of lack of demand?
Why would that happen? Tablets are simply low power PCs wrapped in a touchscreen LCD. If these tablets were optimized for performance instead of battery life many of them could outperform most consumer PCs.
My point is that PCs won't disappear, their functionality will simply transition into tablets as they become capable. A tablet + keyboard + mouse = a PC.
It's not that simple. What you describe is desktop PC vs laptop.
Tablets on the other hand have different operating systems (at least the only tablet that people > 1% actually buy, the iPad) than PCs.
We can imagine a feature where most people use tablets, perhaps equally capable as any PC, but WITHOUT today's full PC OS flexibility, and PCs are left for only small professions (programmers, creatives, etc).
This is only true in today's world. In a future where tablets are so capable and ubiquitous that they've displaced laptop and desktop computers, both paradigms will have long merged. Microsoft, Google, Canonical, and others are all in the process of transitioning their platforms into x86 or ARM (whichever they lack). Additionally, AMD and Intel both have true x86 answers to ARM on the horizon. The flexibility of the x86 platform is not going anywhere any time soon.
Edit: just today a new store opening nearby got several cargo pallets of new Dell's PC based hardware (POS and pure PC).
In the next few years 5+ billions of people will get their first computing device (and the rest 2 bilions - their first 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... computing device). The vast majority of this growth will not be a PC. That's clear. Yet this growth in mobile devices will "synergize" an unprecedented growth in PC/server hardware dwarfing whatever we've seen so far.
By the way, on an unrelated note, did you know mainframes are still IBM's biggest business?
Maybe they are consulting for their mainframe customers?
Having a computer makes programming more convenient and less theoretical (bugs happen occasionally despite correct code), but it's not essential to learning. It's a lot less likely to happen in that way in the current environment (with ubiquitous PCs), but if we ever get to the point where PCs (or their equivalent) aren't everywhere anymore, the interested geeks will find a way -- just like we did in the old days.
Also, its not too hard to imagine a day when Microsoft follows Apple and makes their own marketplace. Probably won't be anytime soon, but it would be naive to say it could never ever happen. The main thing stopping them is probably the fact that they're still the big dog and can't get away with doing what Apple does. People judge them differently. In a few more years though, I could see them pointing at what Apple does and saying, "There's precedent here. Let's go for it." Some people would jump ship and move onto Linux, and say "I still have freedom" but what about your mom and dad who will keep buying the Walmart special every Black Friday? As an indie developer these things are limiting what you can do.
I think the solution here is to take a look at what people like about these marketplaces - a convenient way to find apps, and duplicate it - without the bad stuff. Make a marketplace and don't limit what goes on it. Also, make less profit for yourself than what your competitor (Google and/or Apple) makes. The toughest thing is traction. Getting it in front of eyes as something to use instead of the other one. Get past that, and you're set. Am I missing anything? Has this been done and I just don't know about it?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-8-app-store-will-...
The PC isn't dead and it won't be for a long time. Although there are a lot of lines being blurred between devices (tablets vs. smartphones vs. laptops), there's still a TON of people working at large corporations who you'll have to pry their PC's out of their cold, dead hands.
I found these devices to be very uncomfortable for my tipical usage. The only good addon I've got in my smartphone was the GPS navigation.
I could never browse the internet on a smartphone and I could never look at a tablet more than 30mins while also being comfortable in using it.
And if I had to plug in into a tablet a standard keyboard and a nicer monitor to make it "usable", I would rather buy some mini PC.
Mobile is the big wave, yet I don't know anyone who says "I have a phone, I sure don't need a desktop/laptop."
The closest possible thing is a tablet. Yet, the most common refrain about any tablet to do that I've heard is "well, it doesn't do this" or "it doesn't do that". On the flip side, I've yet to hear anyone state that they wished they didn't own a PC, since their tablet does everything they need.
Kids 5 years from now will find desktop computers and current laptops strange and kludgy.
Looks like about $2k or more.
While it would be great to be able to coordinate all the streaming media using my phone as a remote, my phone doesn't do most of the 'computing' tasks I like, and reading HN on a 4" screen is handy, but not optimal.
I think his point is exactly that if I want everything to work, I need an Apple and a Windows machine running (nevermind whether it's legal to run Apple in a VM, I'm under the impression they don't want you to, but if I purchase a copy of OSX, it's not clear I wouldn't have the right), and maybe a Chrome machine, because they DON'T WORK TOGETHER BY ARBITRARY RESTRICTIONS.
I think there is another guy that likes to rant about this walled garden approach. Personally, I've been trying to use iTunes on a windows box to play to an apple tv recently and it is sucking. Music plays fine from an iPhone. So now, my wife is all ready to pay the Apple Tax for a new computer. To just get music to play. They fact that apple makes a cool device is fine, the fact they don't want to play nice with any of my other equipment makes me loathe to buy a new one, but apparently I'm not with the mainstream on this one. But count me as one of the angry nerds.
Besides being faster, this kind of machine is far cheaper than a hand held, locked down device. Here are the costs of ownership, about $2000 for two years: http://www.steamenginefinancialcoaching.com/2011/02/14/the-r...
High Risk Website Blocked
Location: futureoftheinternet.org/the-pc-is-dead-why-no-angry-nerds
Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/ObfJS-CB has been found on this website.The empowerment of the censor. Scary words.
The monopoly issue is a different beast to the retail cut issue.
And every app sold for the iPhone would have 30 percent of its price (and later, that of its “in-app purchases”) go to Apple. Famously proprietary Microsoft never dared to extract a tax on every piece of software written by others for Windows—perhaps because, in the absence of consistent Internet access in the 1990s through which to manage purchases and licenses, there’d be no realistic way to make it happen.
Microsoft never provided a complete distribution channel for software, either.
Complying with Apple requirements and limitations is annoying. However, the consumer gets reasonably vetted software, and the developer gets a single method of distribution.
What's the complaint, again?
Sure, Mussolini was a dictator, but he made the trains run on time.
The point isn't that Apple is just like a violent dictator.
The point is that these statements are (mostly) irrelevent to each other. The trains can run on time without a dictator.
The user can have a fine walled-garden experience but still retain the option to (in a reasonably supported way) tear down the walls.
What is the solution to make the gatekeepers and the gatekeeper-supporters obsolete?
I don't need them- why do you?