Comment by VonLipwig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VonLipwig | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the post.

"""The slope of this graph is the whole story. The complicated general purpose computers are at the bottom, and the simpler specialized computers are at the top."""

This is a terrible graph. The Mac has always been a premium niche computer. 28 years ago computing was in its infancy and computers were expensive, unnetworked with limited benefit to the average household.

Compare this the iPad / iPod Touch and iPhone. These are main stream devices that achieved immediate traction. It is unrealistic to compare Mac sales with those of main stream devices.

You then have the desktop market as a whole. If you compare any single company or brand of desktop against iPad sales, desktop sales would look in trouble. However, if you compare desktop sales to tablet sales it is clear that tablets are still only in their infancy.

BUT TABLETS ARE SELLING FASTER THAN DESKTOPS!

I don't know if this true but it doesn't matter and it doesn't say much about the state of desktops. Everyone has a computer, the market is saturated. No one has a tablet. It makes sense that tablet sales would rocket.

Buying tablets also make a lot of sense for people who just consume content. The fact is though that the iPad isn't great for productivity. It is far better for consuming content. This is what most people do.

However if you want to program, edit images, write a novel, maintain spreadsheets, make movies etc a desktop / laptop is what you need.

The PC isn't dead and it isn't dying. It has reached a point where people only buy replacements. Now yes, some people may switch perminantly to a tablet. Thats fine. For the forseeable future though there will be a large market of business and consumers who require more than a tablet can provide.

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The article also touches on how great the new iPad screen is. I don't think its all that. I walked past the demo of 'the new iPad' twice before asking a sales guy to point to which one was 'the new iPad'. Yes, if you put the screen close to your face you see less pixelation on icons. For general web surfing though I saw no perceived difference. Hell, I don't really see any pixelation on my iPad2. Perhaps I am not holding it close enough to my face...

As has been pointed out in the replies about 30 times already, PostPC doesn't mean the PC is dead, it only means that the PC market is mature and innovation slows way down as everyone focuses on newer more dynamic markets. The fact that people feel no need to upgrade their PCs anymore yet they are still rushing out to buy the new iPad is symptomatic of that. Surely I'll buy a new PC in the future to replace my old one, but I don't expect my sister or dad to do the same.

I once had a workmate in 1999 whose sentiment was similar to your post, just focusing on a different device. We got into an argument about whether the desktop PC market was over or not. He didn't really believe that laptops were really more than niche devices, they were too slow, displays were too small, that most people would use desktop PCs for decades to come. That you could never do more than surf the web on it, you couldn't hack serious code with it.

That tablets are for consumption only...really? Diagramming (e.g., OmniGraffle), vector graphic production, sketching, mixing and producing music, editing images, updating a spreadsheet...why not? Many are using tablets for production already. Every year someone says iPad can't do X, the next year someone releases something that does X and it actually doesn't suck.

I often use my iPad 2 in bed (~1 foot distance), the screen is really close and I can see the pixels. The new iPad is absolutely frigging amazing, I'll never look at my crappy DELL/HP monitors at work in a positive way again (yes, I can see the pixels!). Why have we been stuck at the same crappy 1920x1200 pixel resolution for at least 5 years now? Could it be that no one care about innovating in the PC market because they can't make any money? That a 10" iPad has a higher resolution than my 24" PC monitor is totally Post PC.

Simply wait ;-) probably with age your sight will decrease and at one point you simply will stop to see difference. I guess that 70% or more of people in theirs 30's will have problem with seeing difference (except brighter colors). Of course in one or two years everything will have screens with more pixels, but from some point it will be always only marketing thing.

As for now if you look on 22 cm long screen with resolution 1280 pixels for width, and you keep screen in 0.5 m distance it means that one pixel have size of 1.17 minute, so some, and maybe even most of people aren't able to distinguish single pixels.

Some people are using tablets for work, some are doing the same on phones, but for many computers are much more comfortable. It is very personal thing, for me tablet is cool for playing in some addictive games like Cut the Rope or Where's my water? but I will kill anybody who will propose to change my computer which I'm using for development for any tablet. The same, after reading several books on tablet I much more like reading on Kindle, it hasn't this ugly glossy screen when I can see me instead of text ;-)

Higher PPI is more important, not less, as your eyesight degrades. Turns out pixelation is bad for your eyes. The advantage to having a higher PPI is that things are clearer, not smaller as some windows aficionados have come to expect.

Nobody is significantly investing in desktop pc display technology right now as far as I know, not samsung or LG, it's very stagnate. That's the point, PC R&D seems as good as dead. It's a big shame, I would really love a decent display for my workstation.

Back in The Day, they had some nice quality dot-matrix printers. They were pretty nice, much more flexible than my parents' letter-quality daisy wheel printer. You could print out cool banners with Print Shop! You could even play music on them. I'd guess they were about the same resolution as the iPad1. I don't remember anybody complaining about being able to see the pixels.

When 300 dpi laser printers arrived, nobody looked back. You could almost imagine that your school reports were typeset. It looked so professional! (If only the writing had been professional...) With 300 dpi iPad's you can almost imagine you're reading a book. People who are visual will care about this. I can see the subpixel coloring on my 20" monitor. If I turn it off, my antialiased text still has blurry vertical lines. It drives me nuts!

Or maybe the best example (again, back in The Day) was when my friend got his 32-bit Nintendo. He demoed a game and I said, "meh, it doesn't really seem all that better." Then he brought out Super Mario 3 on the 8-bit Nintendo and wow, was it painful.

> 32-bit Nintendo

Gamecube?

He might be talking about the N64 (which IIRC most games used the set of 32-bit instructions because they were faster and "accurate enough" at the time. - Not sure, though.)

I'm assuming prewett meant 16 bit, which would be the SNES. The only comparison I've seen people make between the N64/Gamecube and NES/SNES is that sprite-based games aged better than early 3D games.

Sorry, I meant the Super Nintendo, which I guess is 16-bit. I knew 32-bit sounded a little wrong...

> This is a terrible graph. I suppose it depends on the perspective. From an investor's perspective it's actually a very interesting graph that visually (partly) explains the ongoing explosion of AAPL profits.

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