Wintel is dying
Microsoft doesn't care, they moved on to Azure and AI
Intel kinda cares, but they are moving on to being a fab provider
Dell, Lenovo, Acer...they're screwed...they have no other play but Wintel
Microsoft doesn't care, they moved on to Azure and AI
Intel kinda cares, but they are moving on to being a fab provider
Dell, Lenovo, Acer...they're screwed...they have no other play but Wintel
The main problem I see is the slowing of Moore’s law and Dennard’s scaling. It used to be that you didn’t have to innovate on a laptop. You only needed to get the state-of-the-art chip on board to beat the competition. This is less so nowadays as can be seen from the Apple laptops which have improved on all layers on the stack. The newest Intel or AMD laptop doesn’t necessarily beat a 2 years old Apple laptop performance and usability wise.
Regarding Windows, Microsoft does care according to the build conference from yesterday: they announced plugins inside Windows and other cool new features. However, according to Nadella, Google makes more money on a typical Windows laptop than Microsoft does. I think this partially explains why Windows seems to have stalled innovation wise.
Movie making and editing is still pretty compute intensive, as is animation. Thanks to YouTube, a lot of people have video editing work streams and they're looking for ways to get their work done faster and make their content stand out so that viewers will click those 'Like' and 'Subscribe' buttons so that they make more money.
Music making is getting more and more compute intensive, especially nowadays as all the what once were physical processors in the signal chain are all being virtualized. Add in amp simulators, cab simulators, AI drummers, and of course nobody wants any latency, and you need some modern processing muscle to make it all work.
Apple makes the Mac Studio for a reason - and it's not for gamers!
As far as developers are concerned, no, you don't need much horsepower to "compile a lot of code", but you may need a lot of horsepower to run that code if it's in one of the aforementioned software categories.
> gamers(who mainly use consoles anyway)
Listen here, I'll have you know PC gaming is almost half of the entire gaming market: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Newzoo_PC...
Overall I think there's also a slight decline in desktop/laptop usage as a whole, as younger people grow up doing everything on touch devices instead, but that's more of a slow generational shift.
Normal people around here (W Europe) dont even know about 'Windows'. They know about their 'computer'. And 'the Internet', which is actually the web browser in their laptop. These are not uneducated dumb people either. Any normal, non-techie person, including other white collar professionals. They mostly know about various software that is heavily used in business though - Excel, Word, Powerpoint etc. Or SAP etc, if they are more specialized professionals.
...
What Im thinking is that the reduction in demand of computers and laptops is because existing hardware has developed quite beyond the needs of the majority of users. An average, 75%ile gaming laptop that comes in for ~1500-1700 euros these days, is capable of running most AAA games with good quality visuals and performance. They are capable of running any game from the last decade and earlier. And they are as cheap as an equivalent desktop - which may or may not bring any visible performance and quality improvement. This is the most taxing application that the majority uses and other stuff like business software are in no way anything demanding compared to these, so why someone who bought a new laptop 2-3 years ago need another one today...
This could only change with a new paradigm like consumer-grade, locally installed AI applications or virtual reality bumping up the hardware requirements. Or, through (probably soon to be illegal) planned obsolescence.
>And they are as cheap as an equivalent desktop - which may or may not bring any visible performance and quality improvement
They will. Either cheaper or better performance for same price.
I found them pretty competent. An Asus ROG G17 easily gives at least ~80% performance of what the components would give if they were in a desktop. (RTX 3070, Ryzen 9). And does it with almost ~50% less power consumption...
1. Gamers depend on market and games. Have fun playing CSGO2 on a console.
2. If you even do web browsing, youtube/netflix and documents work on a PC its nice to have a beefy one that does not lag. You can skip the GPU but a nice i5 or i7, 32GB RAM and big SSD is really nice to have and use. Plus all the extras.
I hadn't thought about it, but that's absolutely true! When you think of the Adsense network and the amount of money Google is making by typical consumer browser behavior, Google is making a lot more money than Microsoft on a typical Windows laptop.
The OS is now a commodity. Microsoft needs a new strategy.
Unfortunately they're taking the Google approach. Removal of Windows local accounts, telemetry (with all of the privacy issues), advertising, etc.
This is why MS is, and has been for a long time, desperate to get into the ads space. They have continually failed.
There is also the PR/image aspect. Google can non-stop show ads for Google products on Android and no one bats an eye, Microsoft asks people if they want to store files on OneDrive (which is a really nice service!) and people freak out about evil ads in Windows.
I'll occasionally get an ad from Google books.
These can be turned off (notification channels), but I'm assuming most users don't know how to, and they are certainly on by default.
In reading the current state of things (and seeing how craptastic Windows 11 is on my son's Lenovo X1 Carbon), I actively do not want to buy a Windows machine. There are very few hardware vendors that seem to actually give a crap about providing a high quality product & user experience, and - although I was fanatical about my Thinkpad T40 back in the day - I've become jaded by my Pixelbook that "just works", and now my MacBook.
I don't believe, because only Google & Apple are able to control the whole stack, anyone building Windows-based laptops is actually able of creating the level of quality & polish consumers would like to see. That's said, but not unexpected. Microsoft & Intel should have anticipated this.
This is news to me - got any links?