PC obsolescence is obsolete
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
More than half of MSFT's revenue (http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money-updated-20...) comes from Windows and Office (and over half the profit, Windows http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-defer-revenue-windows-upgrad...).
Back in the 90s and early 00s, the rate of change in the PC market was amazing. The hardware you could buy in 1998 basically didn't exist in 1996, so there always was something new and exciting to spur new hardware sales.
New hardware sales represent the bulk of Microsoft's Windows licensing (the so-called "Microsoft Tax") revenue and so a large part of MSFT's profits. All MS had to do was be the default OS and their profit would grow without lifting a finger (obviously that's greatly simplified, MS had to do a lot of things).
Now that this hardware revolution is no longer taking place, MS' Windows licensing rev (and thus the huge profits) are threatened. Competition in the PC market have driven hardware profits to zero. MS and their clone makers have painted themselves into a corner.
Contrast this with Apple's strategy - produce desirable hardware that people buy for non-technical reasons (design, fashion, software, etc.) instead of raw figures (CPU, Memory, etc.). Folks will upgrade because they want to, not because they need to. That's a lot harder to pull off, but Apple seems to be doing a great job of it.
Ultimately, I think Apple's strategy is going to make a lot more sense in the long run. Drive the cost of the operating system upgrades to zero (I'd be shocked if the next OSX upgrade costs anything; I was quite surprised that Mountain Lion was {edit: not} a fee upgrade), limit the age of device that can run it, and create products that people want.
This doesn't make a great deal of sense for Microsoft, what does is driving down the price of hardware. Their strategy has always been to treat the hardware as a commodity because it is in their interest to do so.
Now that folks aren't upgrading very often, the cost of the Windows license is starting to be a much bigger proportion of the total cost, basically creating a price floor of PCs. This sucks if you're an OEM - you have a baked-in cost you don't control (aka MS Tax). Microsoft must naturally drop the licensing price to OEMS in order for OEMs to eek out some profit.
Long run Windows OEM license fees tend to zero. It's already happening with Windows 8 upgrade pricing (Mac OS X has already started this trend) and I expect it to continue.
MSFT knows this which is the primary reason to making their Surface Tablet (and Office online, to get SaaS recurring rev). I don't believe for a minute that they are only doing this as a "reference" implementation.
My knowledge of American anti-competition laws is lacking, but I remember back when they were able to release iOS-upgrades for the iPhone, but not the iPod Touch for free. At the time, there was supposedly something on the legal side of things which they were afraid to run afoul with by releasing free iPod Touch updates.
I suppose, if they were to release new versions of OS X for free, they may risk being sued for trying to push competitors out of the market by giving away a product that others are trying to sell.
No, it doesn't seem right to me, but sometimes laws are outdated or simply abused.
The R&E credit is a pork barrel scam for big companies with clever accounting departments, of course. But if it's there, why not take it?
"In 1996, 1999 and 2000, for instance, the California Legislature increased the state’s research and development tax credit, permitting hundreds of companies, including Apple, to avoid billions in state taxes, according to legislative analysts. Apple has reported tax savings of $412 million from research and development credits of all sorts since 1996."
$412M on the hundreds of billions Apple has earned since 1996 are pennies. That doesn't seem that much... Are there more?
this might serve to explain why the latest version of windows seems to be tailored for mobile devices, TVs, and other consumer electronics instead of traditional PCs. You can't sell somebody a new desktop every year anymore, but you absolutely can sell the same person a new tablet every year.
Eventually the iDevice market will "settle down" just like regular PCs, and so I think Apple's strategy of software and design lock-in makes a ton of sense. In the long run, it's much easier (comparatively speaking) to innovate on the software end than on the hardware end. Once the iDevice gold rush is over, the software lock-in will keep me in the Apple family.
With more and more things moving to the "cloud" I think that will continue to make phones and tablets "disposable" in the way PCs aren't. Apple is trying to get there with the App store and iCloud, but they are still long off from "buy a new MacBook Air, sign in to iCloud, and it's just like your old computer!"
(aside: device subsidies never really worked for PCs, wasn't ePC some sort of a leased computer model?)
Of late I've been contending that specs are excuses admitting inadequacy.
Until recently, every new computer (broadly defined) was listed with a proliferation of specifications (_.__MHz CPU _GB RAM ___GB HD ...). Now, in particular with the iPad and trending with other machines, no specifications (beyond what amounts to "small, medium, or large") are given. Why? specifications are needed to convince buyers the product is good enough when it isn't.
Most users just want something that's capable enough that they don't have to think about the technical limitations. Most users glaze over at random-looking numbers associated with meaningless abbreviations denoting implementation details they don't understand; their question isn't "how many gigahertz is the processor?" it's "if I click something will I be annoyed by the delay?" The real answer to the latter question is "yes, you will". To obscure that dissatisfying answer, sellers toss out the profusion of specifications in an attempt to convince buyers that the product is good enough to buy anyway. Users, able to at least evaluate whether X > Y, compare the numbers and convince themselves that those numbers are as large as they can be and still have an affordable package.
Apple's goal is to sell hardware. With the onset of "retina" displays, flash memory, multi-core processors, iCloud, etc. all those specifications transition from confusion to "good enough". Doesn't matter what the number of pixels are, you can't discern them so it's good enough. Doesn't matter what the storage capacity is, between terabytes local and near-bottomless cloud behind it you won't run out. Flash is so fast you mostly won't care. Processor speeds equal supercomputers of recent past. It's all "good enough" - making the comparison between Apple products and "lots of incomprehensible random numbers & abbreviations" easy.
PC makers still flaunting specifications are saying "no, really, it's good enough - see?" making customers hesitate their purchase. Apple is going for "details are irrelevant, it's good enough - period."
I mean, you compare a Dell laptop to an HP laptop, or a $500 Dell laptop to an $800 Dell laptop for that matter, they're all running Windows 7. How would you market one product over another without admitting their differences?
Admittedly, PC makers might be wise to stop fighting one another for market share and instead focus on fighting Apple for market share.
Subjective experience. Most people don't compare horsepower & engine volume & torque & etc. in cars, they just walk into a showroom, try out a few, and go "I'll take that one."
Apple is winning despite not "admitting their differences" in speed, capacity, etc. vs HP vs Dell vs Dell. Apple's opposition have to resort to mutual fights over specifications precisely because they don't have anything better to appeal to; give the user specifications so good they don't care, refine the end-to-end experience, cut costs without cutting quality & experience, and buyers will flock.
Anecdote: I loved Sony products. Raved about them for years. Finally gave up because enough corners (hardware, software, UX) were cut that my enthusiasm was shredded.
To use a car analogy, imagine all car makers built their car on a Toyota Camry chassis. They can put in any engine they like (that's your CPU and whatnot), they can paint it and add aftermarket body kits (that's your keyboard, trackpad and plastic screen bezel) and they can hang an air freshener from the rear view mirror (that's your preinstalled software like the 30 day McAfee trial). The Toyota Camry chassis is Windows.
Ultimately, all those Camry-based cars are going to have a very similar driver experience because, at it's core, it's a Camry. When one Camry-based-car maker is competing with another they talk about paint job and engine because the paint and the engine are the only differences between their products.
Apple, in this analogy, is the only major car maker that isn't building on a Toyota Camry chassis.
A big, big factor in the slowdown of obsolecense is that the current generation of consoles has stretched out far longer than is normal. Because the consoles have fairly PC-esque capabilities (arguably more parity than there has ever been before), many games released today are released on consoles and PC, often on a single code-base, at the very least on a single asset base.
Once the next generation of consoles is out, we will see games taking advantage of that extra power, and in turn PC requirements for new games will start to climb again.
It seems to me that problem here isn't cannibalization -- if Microsoft hadn't done it, someone else (Sony?) would have -- but the "let's leverage our monopoly-driven money tree" mindset. XBox was dumped on the market at a loss, subsidized by Office/Windows and leveraged by Microsoft's dominance of desktop gaming, APIs, and developer mindshare.
Microsoft doesn't even try to play fair in new markets and eventually it had to bite them, and it did.
For the leading edge of the desktop PC market, definitely (advanced graphics cards, fastest possible processor, fastest possible RAM).
On the other hand, the broad center of the bell curve of the desktop PC market has been driven by office applications. These have never needed the high performance that the gamers demanded - users simply wanted something "good enough for Word, Excel PowerPoint, and email".
On the mobile side however, the recent performance increases have been very dramatic, just like in the early days with the 386 and Pentium and stuff.
So with desktop demand tapering off, the performance jumps taper off. And with laptop demand still strong, performance jumps there remain strong. And with mobile demand sky-high: the performance jumps there are as high as computing has ever enjoyed.
If anything, consoles have been languishing for the same reasons desktops have been: there's simply not a lot of demand for a bigger/faster console.
Sure, eventually there will be new ones; just as Intel inevitably releases new motherboards and chips, despite soft competition from AMD and flagging demand. But the growth and clamor isn't there and the performance increases likely won't be either.
Meanwhile, laptops are maintaining their 20 - 40 watt profiles but are gaining performance. They are converging to that low power threshold. The tablet space is even lower, down to 5 watts in some cases, averaging from 3 to 10, but still, that is a convergence point.
It also doesn't hurt that AMD tripped over their own feet for a while and Intel is resting on its laurels pumping out higher performant CPUs without AMD to compete with at the high end.
Meanwhile, the graphics card business is heating up, the 7000 and 600 cards are upwards of 30 - 40% faster than the previous generation at much lower TDP, the Kepler architecture is extremely vector processing optimized to a fault in that it is worse as a gpgpu device than the 500 series, while the AMD Southern Islands chips are very generic cores optimized for GPGPU when their last few generations were graphics optmized, but in both regards they are markedly higher performant and consume much less power than many older gpus.
The advances are still there, they are just going in divergent directions. Nothing is stopping Intel from making a 32 core i7 with hyperthreading on a 500mm die besides the heat associated costs and tremendous production costs, but nothing on the market would utilize that. So they invest elsewhere.
The next generation of consoles isn't looking so bright either - they all seem to be targeting AMD gpus, and the WiiU will probably be using a modified 68X0 and the Sony / Microsoft camps will use the 78XX cards. They even are considering using FPUs. The gaming performance on the new hardware won't be that radical as the last time because the lower margins means they can't make extremely customized gaming hardware like back in the RSX days.
Now, whether the next console tier will actually allow that or not? I don't know. Investors seem to be catching wind to just how low-margin the games business is, and as a result seem to think social gaming is the way to go(if Zynga's large and horrible decline hasn't convinced you that they are wrong yet, give it time. It will.)- which means less marketing dollars justifying that new console, and thusly, less reason to push the desktop.
But we haven't stopped because there's no more need. Just, the market is in a bit of a wonky place right now. Console manufacturers would love to have a new one to sell, but developers are pushing back because to actually develop at the kind of fidelity required to go past where we are now, your average game's budget will quickly double or more, with few returns in terms of profits- those margins just keep getting thinner.
For a long time, processor architects were able to increase the frequency, increase the cache size, and increase the pipeline depth (to allow for more instructions in flight at the same time) to yield more powerful processors. As Moore predicted, processor architects kept getting more transistors to play with, and they were able to make processors more powerful by making designs that were "like the old one, just more so." But they've hit fundamental limits in the design: increasing the clock speed and the pipeline depth at the same time means that you have to communicate the same amount of data over a longer distance in a shorter amount of time in the silicon. We've hit the point where it's not feasible to do that anymore.
Hence, multicore. Processor architects are still getting more and more transistors to play with, so instead of using them to make a single core more powerful (as they did for a long time), they're using them to make multiple cores. But you no longer get the "for free" performance boosts that you did when you increased single-core performance. Now we need to change how we make software to take advantage of this new hardware. And some software can't take advantage of this new hardware.
I would argue that the rising production costs to produce games that actually make use of ultra-advanced hardware are more to blame for the slowing of the graphics race.
You can always do things faster by doing things in parallel. It just gets much harder to program them.
But that's beside the point: the games industry drives the graphics card business, but that is only a one part of the consumer computer business. General purpose processors are a larger part, and processor performance improvement is not the exponential curve it was a decade ago.
Why? Don't they pretty much lose money by subsidizing them for a few years and only start breaking even after a long haul? I thought they made their money on game licensing.
The licensing deal is also often why sometimes the PC version is five to ten dollars cheaper than the console version. You need no one's permission to publish to the PC market.
Then there's Arma 3 just around the corner.
From my point of view, as a PC gamer, the reason there's not so much investment in using the PC graphics capability we have cheaply available right now is because of the influence of the console market. Most big budget games right now are made for the current crop of consoles which PCs outpaced years ago. Too many times the PC version is just the 360 version with UI changes to support the mouse and keyboard. You can look at the graphics mods that are being made for games such as Skyrim and GTA4 to see the wasted potential.
Also, it's really, really expensive (as you point out) to make a game that truly pushes the capabilities we have right now and very few developers are willing to do that, it's a huge risk. Part of UnrealEngine4's development are attempts to address this by providing tools to help reduce the time necessary with the creation process.
But not all games need high graphic fidelity, that's not the whole story. The true waste is the pure amount of cheap computational power we have available with both the GPU and CPU that's being wasted. Screw photo-realism, I want more physics and AI.
The tools are there now. You can make an outstandingly impressive looking game with UnrealEngine3 right now if you ignore restraints of mainstream PC and console hardware. Look at the Nvidia and AMD tech demos for their cards to see what they can do.
But that game would be expensive, time consuming, and not worth the investment if you were planning on making money.
I would say it's better to describe it that they are waiting on tools that allow them to do more with the same time and money budgets on current or next-gen hardware. That's where things like UnrealEngine4 make it interesting because it seems that Epic is saying that PCs are under-utilized graphical work horses now and don't want to wait for the consoles to catch up. It's potentially a huge risk for them to take and it'll be fun to see how it plays out.
To me the tools thing isn't just about graphics, it's about development. Proper tools make high quality games cheaper to make in general. As an example, let's say you want to make a big open world game that has hundreds of indoor locations. You have a team of ten to create those indoor locations. If you can use tools that would allow a team of five people to do the same amount of work in the same amount of time as ten on the previous project then you have two choices. You can reduce your team to five to make the same amount of content for lower costs (and probably being better) or you can keep your ten to create more content for the same costs as before.
If you look at the UnrealEngine4 demos they are just as much about content creation tools as it is about graphics in general.
While I agree games propel hardware forward, I believe it's the combination of a graphics plateau, diversification in gaming, and the end of the free ride on Moore's Law, which the article pointed out. This generation of AAA games run arguably the prettiest graphics ever seen. But this comes at a cost of complexity and sheer hard work to build the environment and models, without the wow factor of a major leap in graphics quality. Crysis is still the Gold Standard in what gaming graphics can do, and that was released five years ago.
We are also seeing a large and unique divergence in gaming in the form of indie titles. Indie games, by their nature, could never compete pound-for-pound on the graphics of AAA games. They made up for this in experimental gameplay and embracing a unique graphics style. Before now it was very difficult to get an indie game exposure and the art of building said game was difficult. Now the game development toolchain has improved by orders of magnitude, and the advent of app stores on tablets and smart phones makes distribution and monetization much easier. Tablets and smartphones likewise bifurcated gaming. Tablets couldn't render the graphics or use the raw computational power found in the latest PC and console titles. This made them a natural home to indie titles.
There is also something to be said about Zynga, Facebook, and the whole crop of casual games that sprung up in the last five years. Suddenly the gaming market had many more diverse demographics they could effectively target. It's no longer the 18-25 year old male that was the prime gaming market. These titles don't need the raw computational power of next-gen consoles or the latest PC hardware. They run fine even on netbooks and tablets.
In all, I do believe that gaming was a primary driving factor in hardware development. In recent years video games have become a much more diverse ecosystem, many of which don't require the raw hardware power.
Additionally, I very much take issue with your statement that Crysis, a game released in 2007 is still the "standard" for graphics intensive games.
The games that are pushing the bounds of PC hardware are games like [1]The Witcher 2, games which are huge improvements on [2]Crysis.
[1]http://cdn.ripten.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/witcher2-20...
[2]http://oyster.ignimgs.com/ve3d/ve3d/image/article/745/745255...
I don't know how you can say that this generation of AAA games is the prettiest ever seen, and also say that Crysis is the gold standard - this is kind of my point really, things have stagnated. Games run faster and faster on "current midrange hardware" (however you care to define that) but aren't really looking much better.
Your points on the video game market massively diversifying are extremely valid though, it's true that the disposable income upgrade-chasing 20-something is no longer the most luctrative or important demographic.
The pressure on consoles will come from tablets (the next generation of Imagination Tech's GPU IP is comparable to xbox360's 7 year old GPU).
Software seems to be going the same way. SaaS is a fairly transparent rip-off in many cases. Certain big-ticket professional software vendors restrict sales to a network of resellers they can control, who dutifully pull last year's version as soon as this year's is available, so if you want to buy an extra copy to go with the 10 you already have, you can't (unless you upgrade your entire organisation to maintain compatibility).
Bridging the gap nicely are drivers. Here we see a range of dubious techniques. One popular one seems to be releasing equipment with drivers for certian specific operating systems that are available at the time, but then conveniently not releasing any drivers to support new operating systems released within what would otherwise be the normal lifetime of the device, thus artificially shortening its life often by many years. Another good trick (I'm looking at you nVidia) is to take essentially the same hardware, but sell one version with nerfed drivers and another premium (sorry, "workstation") version with "certified" drivers that actually use the hardware to its full capabilities.
I'm a little surprised that we haven't yet seen more people pushing back against these obviously customer-hostile trends, because a lot of people are spending a lot more money and suffering a lot more hassle than they should have to. Certainly some rip-off merchants do come unstuck; I've heard about what would have been extremely lucrative sales of very expensive specialist equipment that got flushed when the prospective customer discovered some form of artificial nerfing in software and took their cash to someone else who didn't do that. But it seems that everyday hardware and software are in one big race to the bottom.
Even premium products, like those high-end graphics cards and professional software installations with their multi-thousand price tags per unit, seem to be tolerated because almost everyone is doing it now. Perhaps this is partly because the more honest competition mostly comes from smaller organisations in the hardware field or in software's case via independent software houses and open source communities, and these kinds of suppliers are (rightly or wrongly, probably a bit of both) regarded as not being up to the job of supplying Serious Business Customers(TM).
What I haven't yet figured out is why this is still happening. Do you know anyone who, in either a personal or a professional capacity, actually thinks any of this stuff is done to help them, or that spending money on these things is a good deal? In a logical market, we would expect competition to spring up and exploit that vulnerability, promoting brands based on honest dealings and good quality, almost certainly charging a higher price for it, but with a greater perceived value that justifies that price. And yet, this doesn't seem to be happening, which suggests that many of the markets in technology industries are not effectively competitive, or some of the big name players are in practice dominant or outright monopolies even if they're not formally recognised as such.
Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.
Then how do you explain the kinds of deliberate and obviously anti-customer behaviour I described before?
In some cases, a single dominant player is abusing their customers because they have a captive market. This is often the case with high-end equipment or software, because once someone has committed to using a certain product range the cost of switching is prohibitive.
In other cases, while there may not be active conspiracy, I can see no credible explanation for the way multiple suppliers all impose the same unnecessarily consumer-hostile policies unless there is a lack of effective competition such that those who offer consumers a better deal gain a commercial benefit from doing so.
Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air.
Completely modular in the sense of a tower PC case, of course not. But that doesn't mean they have to glue stuff together so even their own people can't easily repair a failed component.
As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.
Perhaps. But they mostly used to suck because there were no standards, so every device/software combination needed its own version of what we now call a device driver. There's no such excuse today.
Now the drivers suck because someone at the source made an active decision to screw their customers. How else do you explain a newer, much more powerful model of graphics card that somehow has severely degraded performance in some functions compared to a card of the previous generation, while much more expensive workstation cards using the same new generation of hardware under the hood do seem to exhibit the performance improvements one would expect?
And what other description is consistent with releasing a hardware device that should be useful for many years, yet not releasing drivers for it when Windows 7 comes out just a year or two later? It's not as if the arrival of Windows 7 was a surprise or the manufacturers don't know how to write Windows 7 drivers for their equipment. Chances are the next product range runs just fine on Windows 7 and its drivers are probably using a lot of the same driver code as before.
Obviously there is profit in these behaviours, because it forces customers to buy much more expensive high-end brands or to buy replacement equipment much sooner than they otherwise would have to.
I agree, but for the record, there have been a variety of customer-screwing conspiracies within the computer market. If memory serves correctly, price-fixing arrangements have occurred in at least RAM and LCDs. Not to mention various anti-trust issues.
Plus a few lawsuits were avoided or defeated because of the generosity of the US federal government making laws that makes it more difficult to be a consumer; the DMCA comes to mind. Laws pushed by the very companies that are not in a conspiracy but willing to work together for their own benefit when needed. You want a third-party ink cartridge? Screw you because the law says you can't and it's even illegal for you to try.
Nope, nothing to see here.
Likewise, it's easy to buy non-stupid printers right now, today. But few people want to pay what they cost. Even techies would rather spend $50 on a printer and then complain about how it screws them over with ink than spend $200 on a good printer.
If you want people to fight the trend, start with yourself. No, you can't fight it everywhere (not enough people want a modular cell phone for anyone to actually manufacture one), but you can fight it in a lot of places. Start by not buying crappy and restrictive printers just because they're cheap.
Right. It's absolutely necessary for Apple to make the new iPad so that you can't even take it to an Apple Store and get the storage upgraded, and to literally glue the Retina version of the MacBook Pro together so it's almost completely impossible to repair anything if it breaks.
Some integration has a genuine benefit, such as minimising size or weight. But plenty more integration is just artificial, and this trend is increasing. Some of the clients I work with design high-end IT hardware for a living, so I can say with some confidence that if you think the equivalent people at places like Apple couldn't design modern devices in more modular ways than they are, you're just kidding yourself.
Likewise, it's easy to buy non-stupid printers right now, today. But few people want to pay what they cost.
Why can't the colour laser printer I already paid for just work? Printing a black-and-white document with nothing but black toner is not rocket science. Stop apologising for people who deliberately screw their customers.
If you want people to fight the trend, start with yourself. [...] Start by not buying crappy and restrictive printers just because they're cheap.
That printer probably cost the equivalent of $1,500 when I bought it, and was marketed for use in a small office. I'm not talking about cheap consumer junk, not that it would make the slightest difference to my argument if I were.
I'm not saying you can't complain about junk. I'm saying that it's really odd to complain about how it's some conspiracy of manufacturers when it's actually just people preferring the non-modular systems for many reasons, and then giving an example where you yourself went for junk instead of something that's supposedly like what you want.
Agreed. This is not some evil conspiracy of hardware integrators (led by AAPL) to make non-modular devices. This is a design tradeoff in a leading edge machine [1] in which upgradeability was deemed to be less of a concern than making maximum use of space and weight.
[1] You can't get a Retina MBP for less than $2200, making it a premium product for the laptop category.
Nonsense. Go look at the iFixit write-ups of taking apart recent Apple devices, which helpfully show exactly how similar/different the variations are in many respects, highlight all kinds of proprietary components literally down to the level of unusual screws that have no apparent benefit whatsoever over using a standard/compatible component, and incidentally debunk your claim about "substantial thickness and weight savings" in the process.
it's actually just people preferring the non-modular systems for many reasons
I'm still waiting for anyone to cite any of those reasons. Other things being equal, why would someone prefer to buy a system that was going to cost a vast amount more to repair in the event of screen damage, or where proprietary connectors meant they couldn't swap out the SSD for a higher capacity unit even though the device itself is actually removable? And as noted above, for the most part other things are in fact equal, or so close as makes no difference.
then giving an example where you yourself went for junk instead of something that's supposedly like what you want
I'm still waiting for anyone to tell me what I should have bought instead. As I said, the printer I was talking about there was very much not an entry-level device, it was pitched as part of a range for professional use in an office, and with a price tag to match. Asking for such a printer to print a black-and-white document with only black toner is not some sort of absurd concession or flippant request. There would be no excuse for nerfing a $150 printer in that way, never mind a $1,500 one.
Also, it's not as if I somehow found the only printer or the only printer manufacturer around who has this problem. Again, as I already said, almost everyone seems to work this way these days. If you insist on maintaining that after extensive research I still wound up buying "junk" unnecessarily, you can easily win this debate. All you have to do is cite an alternative device I could have bought, with a reasonably similar spec and for a similar budget, that does not have such artificial limitations. But you can't, and instead of accepting that, you persist in implying that it's somehow my fault that a world class brand deliberately nerfed a device that costs $1,000+ in order to increase their revenue on consumables.
"Apple did not design and build a 1.5 mm thin LCD panel. They did, however, do something exceptional with the design of this display: rather than sandwich an LCD panel between a back case and a front glass, they used the aluminum case itself as the frame for the LCD panel and used the LCD as the front glass."
Remember your whole theory about iFixit debunking substantial weight savings? Turns out iFixit agrees with the OP and not with you.
Also, here's another direct quote for you:
"Incorporating a removable LCD into the MacBook Pro with Retina display would increase the thickness by less than a millimeter, while still preserving the awesome Retina resolution."
Source: http://ifixit.org/2787/mid-2012-macbook-pro-teardown/
Unless you're going to argue that less than a millimetre is enough to swing a purchase regardless of display resolution, in which case a lot of MBP Retina owners are presumably on their way back to the Apple Store to swap for a MacBook Air, it looks like iFixit does support my claim after all.
No, you wouldn't.
But even leaving aside the obvious hyperbole of your comment, we're drifting away from the topic at hand. My argument is simply that proprietary-everything, all-in-one designs are a significant loss for the consumer and a huge win for the manufacturer, because they very effectively kill both the upgrade and repair industries, making the default response to buy more new equipment instead.
Given the disproportionately high rate of damage to mobile devices, and the relatively low starting specs, and the fact that most laptops (including Apple ones) have not had such severely restricted maintainability until very recently, this all seems like a huge step in the wrong direction, from the customer's point of view.
If it were only the screen on the Retina MBP, I could just about believe the theory that it was done to keep the size down, but it's obviously not only that screen. If you look at the direction of basically all Apple equipment in recent years, not just phones or even laptops, everything has been moving towards using unusual/proprietary connections and fixed-at-birth specifications for a while, and there are far too many cases where there was no apparent benefit of any kind for me to accept that it's all being done because it's what the customer wants. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me dozens of times over a period of years, find me a good shrink.
Who's giving them a choice, other than not buying anything at all?
I think people value the benefits of the non-modular design more than you think.
I think people value other things that may or may not have anything to do with the lack of modularity, and I think they buy devices that have those benefits. Often, they probably don't even realise the lack of modularity or its implications at the time of making a purchasing decision, but even if they did, they might still value the other benefits over any downside due to lack of modularity.
We can't really conclude much from the current trends unless manufacturers also offer devices that have the benefits of modularity as well, potentially at a greater cost literally or in terms of things like bigger size or heavier weight.
As for the rest, can you give me a specific example of a non-modular system that Apple has made that didn't result in savings in cost, space, or weight? Because every example I can think of saves at least one of those, so either you're thinking of something I'm not, or we disagree on what the savings are. Either way, I can't address it until I know exactly what you're referring to.
Personally, I don't buy the idea that a customer goes into a store and measures whether an iPad or a Galaxy Tab is a few tenths of a millimetre thicker before making their purchasing decision. On the other hand, I do buy the idea that a lot of people are shocked and then angry after their Apple gear gets damaged and they learn how much it's going to cost to repair and how long it's going to take, not least because I personally know several people who have been stung in that way. Of course, by the time they discovered that downside to the all-in-one designs, Apple already had their money.
In my experience, people are mostly surprised as Apple's good service when they need a repair. It's not like other manufacturers provide cheap repairs, either.
What is more interesting is smaller hardware. Mini-ITX systems, The RaspberryPi, and ATMEL/Arduino systems. Writing C code for a 16k ATMEL is a great way to appreciate the hardware in an 'older' PC.
Starting up Outlook takes 10 full seconds (just the splash screen consumes half of that time). When I open up a web browser or click a link in an email, it takes about 5 seconds to fully load. Even distilling a file to pdf or loading Facebook takes almost 5 seconds.
I don't think it's an issue of my computer being particularly slow. Everyone at work with their quad core processors and 6gb of ram seem to just sit and wait without noticing. Have you ever been in someone's office while they search for an email? It takes minutes! And don't even try doing any work while Adobe is trying to update or the Antivirus scanner is running...
I spend so much time waiting for a computer. Waiting for IDEs to redraw, waiting for my computer to let me disconnect my usb drive, waiting for splash screens. What is going on?
AES-NI is the big one. Improvements to VT-x and VT-d for virtualization performance and security are other big ones.
Pure CPU clock hasn't been increasing, and number of cores isn't useful for many tasks due to difficulty programming, but CPU features are still a big deal. FMA with Haswell is going to be a big deal too.
I need 16GB of RAM in order to work with development data sets, and the old Thinkpad chipset can't take more than 4GB. Heck my brand new one is limited to 32GB, so that is probably what will cause my next upgrade. (I'll omit my rant about laptop screens getting worse.)
It was easy to double the processing requirements of software when we were at a low exponent of moore's law, but now that is looked at as poor development. We're able to do more with less code.
Also, since facebook and other web services have diluted the demographic with people who mostly browse the web, the demand for power has waned.
However, I am annoyed with all the posts asserting that desktops are dead. This is far from true. Gamers will not give up their desktops. For power uses, a laptop just won't support 4 1080p monitors. I personally prefer having a desktop so I don't have to mess with docking/plugging in my laptop to a ton of cables when the desktop does a better job anyway. The desktop as serves as my media consumption station and is connected to the TV.
I think servers for real work are still important, and they're not done at getting better faster.
I'm looking forward to what kind of technology will be available in 2016.
More on topic, quick PC obsolescence was always something of a myth. Parts were only really obsolete if you absolutely had to run the latest shooter at the absolute highest settings known to man. So it wasn't that it was obsolete, it was that the user needed to justify their desire to buy the latest for bragging rights.
I straight away thought of Kubrik's 2001. The complete failure to imagine mobile phones. Floyd uses a fixed video phone to phone home from the space ship. Personal mobile technology is the thing.
Back nearer the topic: When I can hook my phone up to a monitor and keyboard I'm done.
* Game developers constantly up the ante. Try playing Battlefield 3 at 2560x1440 on Ultra on your 2008 PC and see how you go, if it even starts at all.
* Virtualisation has resulted in consolidation (for me at least). Whereas I might have had to keep around a Windows box to do testing, now I just fire up a VM on my laptop.
Then a funny thing happened. The video game market outgrew the movie market. It started making financial sense to invest tens of millions in the development of a single game. The cost of the content (i.e. character designs, level designs, script, voice acting, motion capture, etc.) far outstripped the cost of coding the engine. It became a complete no-brainer to port games to as many platforms as possible to maximize your audience. The corollary to this is that it became necessary to design games such that it was possible to port them to as many platforms as possible. That meant that most developers stopped exclusively developing for one platform and instead started designing for them all. While you can always tack on some superficial eye-candy on when the hardware supports it, games could not be designed to have basic gameplay requiring more resources than the slowest platform was capable of. Thus, consoles became an anchor that brought the relentless march of PC game requirements to a screeching halt.
The Xbox360 and PS3, not to mention the Wii, are handily out-performed by today's desktops by a large degree. Mobile phones are poised to pass them within a couple of years! However, the games you can play on a PC are largely identical to the console versions. Sure, there are some improved graphics, additional content, etc., but these differences are superficial. In fact, if your hardware isn't the latest and greatest, most games can simply scale back the eye-candy to maintain performance. Even PC-only developers, such as Blizzard, have recognized that they must build games with conservative minimum requirements in today's market.
The end result is that PC gamers can run new games with only superficial inferiority to what the latest generation of desktop hardware is capable of. They no longer need to upgrade their desktops. At least, they won't until the next generation of consoles arrive. When that happens there will be many new games designed with greatly increased resources in mind and a big wave of desktop upgrades will ensue.
In the end, PC obsolescence isn't really dead. It's just quantized differently.
OTOH everything else has been playing catch up. Disk, Network, Bus etc... Sure my CPU has hit the ceiling, but it spends 95% of its time idle anyway. Broadband five years ago was probably a 3-5Mbps link, and storage was a 7200rpm platter. Now broadband is 20mbps and storage is an SSD.
These were all under $50 a piece when you factor in that 3 were free. All of these guys sit on ubuntu server or archlinux and never have problems. Hell, you can go buy surplus/ old 620's from corporate shops for < $100 and build yourself a full Beowulf cluster for under $500.
I had a Pentium 166 with 80MB of EDO ram and a 1GB hard disk (bought new in 1996 as a P120 with 16MB of ram) until the end of 2005 as a home server, running Windows 2000.
The only time I saw my ~2005 era system have non-trivial CPU usage was when doing encryption, and even then it would peak at around 25% of CPU.
It seems like ARM servers are the best choice for home servers. They have adequate processing power and are cheap.
edit: the real issue is that I can't get a cable connection in my neighborhood with higher than .7mbit up, so it's not like I 'm serving loads of content. I use these for running different tasks usually. Two are dedicated DB servers and the other 3 run whatever projects I'm consulting on this/ that week.
18W peak from the wall, no fan (which is one less moving part to fail). Since it replaced an old P4 system (200W from the wall), I shaved $30/month off my electric bill
My parents are still using a desktop system from 2002 for all their stuff, and it still working quite well.
This is the problem most OEMs are facing nowadays, as there this no need to upgrade every few years like it used to be.
Furthermore, PC enthusiasts and gamers will never be satisfied. These folk live for the next hardware releases to get even the tiniest gain on their overclocks or go from 2x AA to 4x AA. The PC enthusiast community is a force to be reckoned with. Don't believe me? Just check out the plethora of forums out there and see how active they are. I don't see that going away anytime soon.
I expect my Sandy Bridge replacement system to go another 7-10 years before I replace it.
In fact, my home system is pretty much identical to their hypothetical 2008 i7-920 system.
I have made a couple of upgrades over the years (Replaced the original Radeon 4870x2 with a GeForce 560 about 9 months ago when the ATI card died, recently upgraded from the original 6GB of RAM to 24GB.
Looking at what's other there now there's nothing that makes sense to upgrade to.
Does anyone think a desktop PC with a 20 year life is possible now? What kind of design?
Probably not, I think hardware still moves too fast for it. A current PC might serve as a media center for that long, though.
The place to look for a 20-year computer is probably the same place they are now -- embedded systems with minimal power consumption and ample specs for the limited job they're designed for. E.g., cars.
Devil's advocate: My old workstation has a 440w power supply but uses much less than that most of the time. A small percentage of the total electrical power that my house uses. What pressure is there to switch the workstation for a more efficient PC?
Particularly the graphics processing on laptops. Inevitably, this ends up making the difference between a machine becoming "a little slow" versus it becoming "unusable", for general, day-to-day use.
In the next ten years, who knows? But I'm betting that going with the best graphics processing available (again, particularly in laptops, where this is often un-upgradable) is going to be a good investment in terms of extending a unit's effective lifespan.
It's about the shrinking of MOSFETS that happened over the 35 years since he wrote about it. My electronics textbooks mentioned the scaling, but did not make this named attribution (perhaps just a bibliographic reference).