Life after the personal computer
cringely.com
cringely.com
"What matters is the data and keeping it safe, but the cloud is already handling that chore for many of us, making the hardware more or less disposable."
No the cloud is not handling that chore for most or many people. What it's handling is the data we always wanted to have, but are willing to lose. IOW, that snapshot that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to DL from my phone, but am more than willing to post with Instagram.
When the cloud allows me to store my 4TB of photos and videos and other creative work for a price that is competitive with a HD, and at an upload and download speed where I can use the data where it is (rather than spend a week uploading and pre-downloading a large file), THEN I will agree the cloud is at a point where I could use it instead of a PC with storage.
If I used a portable disk drive I'd have to make sure it's always offsite.
I pay $50 a month for the privilege of and 8mb down/ .5mb up connection.
It's painful for me, as I came from having 35 down and 1 up not long ago. However, it has opened my eyes to the fact that many people in the US (especially in rural areas) do not have access to decent internet.
Um... all of us? It has been at least five years since I last made a phone call with a landline phone. An invention over a hundred years old at the time that quote was written is now serving us in a way Cringley apparently couldn't envision twenty years ago. I think it's quite reasonable to expect the personal computer still has a trick or two up its sleeve.
If the smart phone is going to replace the PC it will have to offer much of what the PC does now - to the point where the distinction becomes irrelevant. In fact I believe the distinction is already irrelevant and in fact downright stupid. It only serves those who for whatever reason want to limit what those pocket sized computers we all have can do.
A smart phone can replace the traditional PC - but only when it starts to offer the functionality a PC has now. By which time it will seem funny to call it a phone.
But the PC as we know it will be kept around for a long long time by gamers alone.
See also, another shining success, the Palm Folio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo
And on an even lamer note, the BlackBerry PlayBook requiring a paired handset to do email.
The problem with this thinking, is that consumers won't tolerate difficulty or inconvenience. The iPhone simply becomes an application now, and apps have shrunk to fit this metaphor.
It is fast, it is convenient, and for many people, their needs can be entirely satisfied by these small handheld apps.
Gaming will stay on desktops for some time, until at least it's effective from a pricing point to go mobile.
Here in the UK at least I can't remember the last office I went into where desktops weren't dominant.
Also, I have been to a steadily increasing number of offices in recent years where everyone had laptops (typically Dell, I think) with docking stations and monitors. This is usually to make it easier for presentations, attending conferences/training days and working from home.
They are mostly utter garbage, more in the Zynga 'social' angle than anything else. The majority of what's left have incredibly simple gameplay mechanics, because the control schemes open to you just don't allow any more complexity. apart from the gyroscope, which I'm not convinced anyone will ever use well, all your input methods involve you obscuring the screen with your fingers!? And can never provide feedback to the user!? Madness.
Mobile gaming is huge, and it makes money, but mobile gaming is a bit like 'social' gaming: it is not actually 'gaming', as gaming is on other platforms. These things exist side by side, one does not replace the other.
On the social gaming side, I agree that very little of what you do in things like FarmVille actually seems like gaming, but then that was also my experience with much of World of Warcraft…
I think you just have to give it time -- gaming on mobile devices will probably grow up with the users, who seem to be predominately younger folk and teenagers from what I've seen (referring to mobile gamers here, not smartphone users in general).
Also, I have high hopes for the low initial cost and easy in-app purchases finally leading to some decent story-driven episodic games.
Imo, mobile gaming is good at: - The tiny subset of games where the controls are naturally dragging your finger over glass (Fruit Ninja, those airplane landing games, not much else) - Turn-based games where the primary form of interaction is suited to a one-click mouse / finger. Turn-based because there is not enough feedback for accuracy in real-time games, and because it means you pick them up and put them down really easily (as long as state is remembered) which suits on the go play.
So stuff like Civilisation, turn-based 4x games, final fantasy style RPGs and XCOM style games are all good deep game genres that will hopefully make a competent jump to mobile.
I see that Frozen Synapse (XCOM style-ish) is coming to iOS, which is particularly awesome (more awesome if it was on tablet android, but that's just my selfishness talking)
In addition to those you list, I would say that anything largely mouse controlled on PC should work reasonably well on mobile devices -- RTS games, Diablo-type games (looking forward to infinity blade dungeons) and sim games (theme hospital, etc.).
In fact, the only games I'm really missing on iOS are the FPS games. And it really is just the attempt to have virtual dual-stick controls that I dislike -- the games are there (mass effect infiltrator, dead space, etc.). If someone could just produce a decent Bluetooth controller and get developers to support it, I'd say that iOS could be the most well rounded gaming system out there -- capable of both console-style gameplay as well as game types that are weak on consoles (RTSs and the others listed above).
I'm also excited about onlive, which I already use with the TV-connected box. I think they were also working on a universal controller…
Even with them all replaced with tablets or whatever, PCs will still live long and prosper in their original niches.
Gaming and visual apps in general still require vast amounts of horsepower, far more than most mobile computers can provide. Hell, I'm on something very close to a top-of-the-line PC for 3D purposes, and Skyrim can still get my computer to chug.
And if you want to discount gaming, forget Skyrim - Photoshop and After Effects will happily chew through as much RAM, processor power and GPU as you can throw at them.
Also, I really don't see a problem with the form-factor. Big, colour-balanced, carefully-placed screen, ergonomic chair, easily-accessible printer, second monitor, decent sound system and high-quality condenser mic, sit-stand desk - I'll take that over hunching in a coffee shop staring at a tiny screen with sciatica-inducing posture and uncomfortable earbuds any day. Sure, I can move around with a mobile device, but how often do I really want to?
Mobile devices have their uses, and iPads and similar are clearly awesome for some use cases, but as a universal replacement? I think not.
I'm reasonably sure that improvements in AI, rendering, image processing and similar things will continue to absorb processing power for some time to come. Hell, on the rendering front, I can probably spend a few hours researching and tell you precisely which techniques will become usable with 2, 3 and 5 years' improvement at current rates.
F'r example: true multi-bounce real-time ray-tracing through "Brave"-level hair and fur. Looks awesome. Is, erm, some way off being possible computationally speaking. Or, for that matter, the sort of hair physics simulation they used on the same movie - to the best of my knowledge, also Not Yet Doable In Realtime (and some way off).
Tablets are great for consuming content, and creating certain types of content, but as much as you can write a novel on one, a real keyboard is better for writing one.
(yes I know you can buy a keyboard dock, but that sort of misses the point, doesn't it?)
And as much as I can play games on a tablet, unless it's a very specific niche where the gameplay revolves around your input method being a static slate of glass (e.g. Fruit Ninja, arguably Angry Birds) having actual buttons for input is better for gaming.
So I can totally see 'normal' people just owning one device that does everything OK-ish (but at least it does everything) and I think for all 'new' normal people that's basically happening, but I really don't think you're going to see other form factors go away. Authors still want to type quickly, gamers still want actual controls where they can exercise muscle memory, and I hackers still want to be able to tinker with their devices and build cool new shit.
The closest I have seen to a "desktop killer" is the MS surface devices, but I have a feeling that people will still refer to these as "PCs".
The desktop as a form factor will never go away. I know for me personally the day I need to turn in my machine (including keyboard/mouse/large monitors) for a smart phone or tablet is the day you can go ahead and just shoot me to put me out of my misery.
Monitors and mice might be replaced with a device which tracks your head and eye movements and paints an image on your retinas with a laser. Keyboards could be replaced by pre-speech recognition, measuring the impulses sent to your jaw and mouth muscles, probably in the form of a headset.
Your "desktop" computing needs are filled by a headset which occupies your entire field of view with its environment, and your "mobile" computing needs are filled by the same headset, but it only occupies the periphery of your field of view. When you sit at your desk and face forward, the environment goes full-screen, and when you look away or go away from your desk, the environment retreats to your peripheral vision.
At the end of one day of using that my neck and back were so sore I could barely stand to sit at my desk!
With cloud services, documents/bookmarks/media/apps/settings/etc can all be effortlessly in sync all the time between all the different devices so the question is just one of form factor.
I don't want to give up any of my main form factors (phone, tablet, laptop computer, desktop computer) because there are times when each is significantly better than the other for the task at hand. But I don't want to be having to plug and unplug one into the other to make the whole thing work - I just want to grab/sit-down-at whichever is most appropriate for my context and get right to work (or "work").
It'd be different if a processor+RAM+GPU+enough-flash-storage-to-be-usable-in-a-mostly-cloud-environment weren't all shrinkable to a tiny chip that costs nearly nothing to make.
But since they are [1], why should we have to deal with the hassle of docking/undocking and not being able to use our tablet (as a tablet) while we use our computer? Or have to unplug our phone (and not be able to use our "computer") when a phone call comes in?
The one place I use such a solution is that all my (personal) computing happens on a tiny laptop that I occasionally plug into a larger monitor with wireless keyboard/trackpad. That works really well, but it's still a bit of a hassle. If that monitor had the smarts in it to actually be a computer and it was constantly up-to-date with all the data from my laptop, then I'd rather just have it be separate. Why not?
So I think we'll continue to have separate form factors and they'll all only increase in "smart"ness. Anything else is going to be a tough sell to customers and have marginal cost savings, at best.
[1] How much does it cost Apple to make the A5 chip in the Apple TV and the iPad 2 at this point? How much less would it cost them to make a chip that was just for handling networking/display/user input/etc? Barely any less at all — in fact it'd probably be cheaper for them just to keep using A5s because they've already got full OSes to run on them.
* The SoC + display is the unit of computing.
* The CPU + GPU is the unit of compute.
And storage is an opaque object storage device, with backup in the cloud.
Who knows maybe we'll see blank white walls solely for staring at as a polite area to stare at instead of someone's ass.