The PC is Over
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
My <$130 7" Chinese Android tablet can drive a full HD 3D TV at full resolution, and can handle both bluetooth or USB keyboards. And many of these tablets can boot full Linux.
The next step up is MHL, allowing the screen to power your phone or tablet while it is using the screen for output.
Increasingly people will have the option of combining the convenience of the phone or tablet with being able to effortlessly connect it to a large screen and keyboard when needed.
Yes you can attach a keyboard. But carrying a keyboard along with your tablet is more expensive than carrying around a light notebook, like a Macbook Air, which is just as portable, more efficient at certain tasks, less efficient at others.
Also, comparing a PC with a tablet by comparing the hardware and the input interface is totally missing the point. When the PC evolved from DOS to Windows, from single tasking to multi-tasking, from big desktops to laptops and then to thinner notebooks with touch-pads, nobody talked about "post PC", as the evolution was not including regressions of functionality which made it totally obvious that the new devices were just like traditional PCs, only better.
That this happens now only means that these new devices are more limited than PCs, so a hard distinction needs to be made. And going forward, while lines continue to be blurred, the distinction will be extremely simple and effective, by answering just one question ... is software installation from third-party sources easy?
The ramifications by answering Yes to this will be: (1) piracy is easy + (2) mallware is possible + (3) Firefox is available for that device + (4) yes, that's a PC.
My tablet was <$130. My keyboard with carrying case was <$10.
But your comparison with a Macbook Air also misses a substantial other distinction: I can, and often do, leave the keyboard at home. The keyboard lives in my bag. The tablet is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, and so I often take it with me in cases where I don't want to drag more stuff with me, but still want something bigger than my phone. It is significantly more mobile.
> is software installation from third-party sources easy? > The ramifications by answering Yes to this will be: (1) piracy is easy + (2) mallware is possible + (3) Firefox is available for that device + (4) yes, that's a PC.
By your argument, any Android device is a PC. Fair enough. But it's quite clear that is not the context of the article being discussed.
And by my argument Androids are indeed PCs, at least for now, because excluding the availability of third-party sources, all other distinctions will get blurred within the next 2-3 years.
It is lighter and takes up less space in my bag, and the tablet attaches to the carrying case, so no, it is not "more expensive" on that measure either.
> And yes you can leave the keyboard at home, but if you know you'll need a keyboard, carrying your notebook instead is more efficient.
Even if I agreed with this - and I don't - having to keep data in sync across multiple devices is a major pain, and reason enough for me to avoid this.
I do have a laptop, but it is just that: A computer I use on my lap in my living room. It is too big for me to want to drag around, because it is a replacement for a desktop - which I haven't owned for 10 years or so - rather than something I see as a mobile computer.
But I increasingly treat my laptop as a dumb terminal. More of my personal data has my phone as its primary source than my laptop, and I do the vast majority of my work on servers, and so most of the local storage I use on my laptop is stuff that is synced to it from my phone and tablets for convenient local access when I do use it. I'd rather see a situation where my phone or tablet is my primary computing device and the rest just provide convenient screens and input devices as needed.
> And by my argument Androids are indeed PCs, at least for now, because excluding the availability of third-party sources, all other distinctions will get blurred within the next 2-3 years.
When you start picking your own definitions instead of relying on those the article are based on, the discussion becomes meaningless.
Personally, this is just evolution of form factors. Nothing terribly interesting. As a techie living in Asia, I would either just buy a Chinese gadget (clone) which fits my needs or just build my own. In this sense, the PC lives on. ;)
I don't know why you consider this "DIY" or "alternative tablets". Most tablets on the market has these capabilities.
> Personally, this is just evolution of form factors. Nothing terribly interesting.
I find it exciting we're close to the point where we can get convergence and not need multiple different computers for must uses, but you're right: It is largely about evolution of form factors, which is why I find it so amusing that so many people are so insistent the desktop PC will remain important.
The traditional big box desktop has been in freefall for years. It's losing market share at a rapid pace, and what remains of it is shrinking too - it's harder and harder to find full size ATX or Flex ATX, and almost impossible to find towers in shops geared at "ordinary consumers" for example.
Sure, it will still exist. But as a smaller and smaller niche.
Sure, but I think this space will be constrained by market forces for the next couple of years until we see movements towards these devices actually trying to be desktop replacements. Right now the focus is for these things to be phones and media consumption devices with a long battery life (which is what the masses want.) I'm waiting for the market to settle down enough so that Dell can jump in and make these things boring. Give me a tablet which is power hungry, gives me only 4 - 6 hours of battery but delivers everything I want to make these things true desktop replacements.I don't want sexy, I just want to throw the thing on my desk, plug all my crap into it and get to work. Maybe sometimes I might even take it with me. I do all my work from home though, and when I leave my home I don't want to take my work with me, so my mobiles don't get much mobile action.
Agreed. Ballmer was ironically right when he said "they're all just PCs".
What's perhaps more interesting than the form factor is the app-storification of software delivery. I have real concerns about a future where there's no market for hackable platforms.
Bluetooth. MHL with the device providing power. One cable to give you power and display, and no cables for the other devices.
And the laptop still needs cables if you want a decent sized display, and don't want to run it off battery.
Are there any machines in this form factor aimed at a general audience? A modern multi-touch tablet screen with a pivoting keyboard and mouse base?
[1]http://shop.lenovo.com/gbweb/gb/en/learn/products/laptops/th...
Tablets are definitely moving towards being general purpose computers, but they're not there yet, and if you're willing to buy into a locked down iPad as your main computer, then I feel slightly sorry for you.
On the other side of things, I really don't see the point in $1500 laptops right now. Yes, the laptop should be extremely thin and light, but the cheapest intel processor married to an 120GB SSD and 4GB of RAM will work great for huge numbers of users, for both consumption and creation.
Frustratingly, it seems only the Chromebooks seem to be taking this approach to laptops, and I really don't want to replace an open device with one which Google works hard to lock down.
However, I figured that a tablet + a keyboard is effectively a laptop with a good-looking UI and less features. The only real advantage I can think of now is better battery life and the fact that a tablet is usually cheaper to buy.
The advantages, for me, are:
* battery life
* in-built 3G
* the fact that iOS is almost single-tasking means I get distracted significantly less often
* when I do stop typing, I pick the tablet up and move around; on a "computer" I tend to stay in the same position, even when not working
The major disadvantages:
* not much good when doing web-UI work (task switching, no web-inspector)
* iOS really needs the "open in" button available everywhere, or something like Android intents/OSX Services/Windows 8 contracts.
[edited for formatting]
Not unless the keyboard is detachable, like e.g. the ASUS Transformer series. I carry a 7" tablet with me. I use it as a tablet to read stuff. The form factor means it's easy to hold with one hand. I also carry a keyboard with me, mostly because that makes it convenient to use for emergencies when a server goes down etc. and I want to be able to type faster and not have to prop the screen up. But 90% of the time for me the keyboard is dead weight. That's fine in my bag. It's not fine if I'm holding the device up to read on a crowded train, for example.
Increasingly I'm also finding that my typing speed on my phone and tablet is getting better rapidly. Especially with special-purpose keyboards like SwiftKey that has very good prediction, and so I resort to a hardware keyboard less and less.
Assuming Windows 8 does ok, I think we'll see a lot more devices in this form factor.
Quite a few gcc/vim/shell-centric developers use iPads as terminals and they work very well for this (with or without a keyboard).
That said, I'm typing this response on a Macbook Pro.
You can obviously gain root, and you can easily tick the box to allow unknown sources, but it seems likely that 99% of Android consumers are not going to do this without a decent reason.
You can get all that apart from the screen pretty much any Android tablet or phone these days, and the screen too on a large number of devices with either HDMI or MHL.
> I also don't like how all the pads and mobile devices are locked-down and more focused on tracking user activity than being a computing device.
Not nearly all are. My tablet came pre-rooted, and is known to be fairly easy to get plain Linux booting on.
Hmm, how about a CPU powerful enough to not fall over when repeatedly compiling that enormous codebase and running your massively parallel number-crunching app?
Tablets seem to be a pretty anemic when it comes to crunching (for good reason ... battery life, size, and cooling issues affect tablets/phones far more than they do a desktop)...
Tablets are fun way to browse the web while sitting on the couch, but the small size that optimizes them for that usage comes with costs; surely there are many applications where it simply doesn't work out?
I would guess that many Android tablets would have this capability.
(I checked the iPad SSH clients this spring, they seemed to be able to handle vim but not Emacs. Time to check again, I guess. WTF -- terminal emulators that don't let much of key codes for control etc through!?)
(Especially since the private APIs are already there, they just need to allow them)
I guess it serves me right for using/loving a closed platform... :-( :-)
My desktop isn't going anywhere just yet!
For that reason, this is not the same as the mainframe-minicomputer-microcomputer transition. What is going on now is new types of computers (tablets & pocket tablets) that are defined by their form, not their power.
There is a second reason other than new form factors for the success of these new devices that has nothing to do with power or form factor: new OS/app metaphors & paradigms. The basic metaphors & ideas (desktop, file system, install scripts, desktop shortcuts, trash) behind the PC are 20-30 years old. They were created before grandmothers, electricians and 2 year olds used computers. They were never optimal and they have grown hairs over the years. iOS & Android are a clean slate. This has fixed all sorts of things. Most important (IMO) is tuning applications application into "apps". Apps have a clearer definition than applications. They are self contained, easy to install and easy to remove. Applications are things that your older brother or IT department has to install.
This second factor (the clean slate factor) is tricky one because it's very important in the short run. In the long term it's irrelevant to the number of desktops, laptops or tablets sold. PCs will eventually incorporate the features (or the whole OS) that are better in touch OS's. This factor will not affect the ratio of laptops/tablets sold in 2018.
Declaring the PC dead is silly. This is just like web based software vs installed software. Power was a bottleneck. Now that it's clearing we can see that for all sorts of things web based software is better but not always. Keyboard & mouse vs touch is similar to this "transition." Things that work better on touch will move to touch, but not everything.
This will be a dispersion, not a migration.
You can now get a decent tablet for $200. You could also get netbooks for that price, but they aren't exactly decent when it comes to overall performance, and that has more to do with how the software is written (for powerful x86 chips - not for Atom chips), while mobile apps are written for much lower performance chips.
Micro/mini computers were computers at a different price/size points. I agree. But, the reason for buying a minicomputer was not that you didn't have room for a mainframe. It was because of price & power. They were the same category of thing just at different prices & power. Once power on all of them became enough to power everything most users needed, the lower priced form factor (microcomputers) became the only form factor that mattered.
By making that analogy Jeff is implying that smartphones, tablets & PCs are the same category of thing and that the thing at the lower end of the price/power chart will eventually become the thing of the future.
What I am arguing is that he's got it wrong: the form factor is there for the its own reasons. It's not there to facilitate power and its not there to facilitate price. Laptops have keyboards and mouses. Smartphones fit in your pocket. There is overlap in what they do, but phones won't get awesome enough to replace laptops.
This is unless they become laptops. Maybe eventually everyone will have a keyboard that snaps onto their tablet when they need it and a screen at home/office that plugs into it too. That's cheating. It doesn't count.
If no-one's buying PCs any more, the price will go up. As the price goes up, all the tasks that you'd do on a PC become more inaccessible.
I'm not looking forward to a world where if you want to edit professional video, do 3D animation or do games development, you need to shell out $10k or more for a machine first.
So while you might not be able to get a silent, high end desktop computer, I think you'll still be able to buy or rent the computer power you need at a reasonable price.
Given gaming, I can't see 3D chips getting more expensive either. Boards may, a bit, but provided a general-purpose PC doesn't become an extreme luxury item, I think we'll be OK.
It's not hard to imagine a world where the workstation that costs you $2000 today will cost closer to $4000 simply because the demand is 20% of what it is today, and the economies of scale disappear for even the large manufacturers like Apple, Lenovo, Dell, etc.
My hope is that the next great frontier for tablet commuting will be content creation (code, video, etc) and we'll start to see that make some serious in-roads before the prices go up substantially.
My understanding is that there are some routes that are less expensive to get to consoles these days, but yes - the console dev situation of 5 years or so ago is pretty close to what I'm worried about.
Edit: please explain the downvotes, I don't see how this isn't adding to the conversation.
It would seem obvious for Microsoft to aim for a similar thing with Windows RT/Phone, but they've made a terrible hash of mobile for the last decade, and I don't think that their optimise-for-touch-everywhere approach to Win8 would work well with a non-touch monitor plugged into a phone. On the other hand, if Win8 gets as much of a kicking as I suspect it will, they'll be in full desperation mode with Win9 and something like this could be a major selling point.
Nobody, as far as I can tell, is claiming it will kill of universal computing devices for personal use.
Android and Ubuntu both share the underlying kernel, so nothing really is preventing most of the rest of the stack from running at the same time.
Ubuntu for Android is just that: Ubuntu "userland" running on top of an Android-compatible Linux kernel, with various "glue" to integrate the Ubuntu side with various Android features, including ability to answer calls, unify contacts and calendars etc.
I think he misses the point, when my computer will boot instantly and allow me to work or when I won't have to wait for a file to copy that's when I'll have enough computer power. We're far from it and I think this applies to anybody, geeks or not. Who wants to wait for his computer to do his thing ?
There is nothing more productive than a good desktop workstation with big multiple screens. I recently purchased a new one for a good price, and I am happy with it.
I started programming on a computer that can be comfortably be emulated cycle exact on the cheapest tablets you can get today, so that's quite obvious hyperbole.
At my first company, we did most of our development work on a server that was shared between four of us, yet had 1/4 of the memory of my tablet, and which was about 1/10th the performance of current generation ARM's. Somehow had no problem doing programming work on it. As well as running paint programs (granted, none of us did much graphical design, but what little we did ran on that shared server using our local, much slower, machines as X terminals).
My "IDE" today is, as it was 17 years ago, Emacs. It hasn't gotten that much more resource intensive. My browser has gotten more resource intensive, but still runs ok on a device like that.
> How does the convenient form factor help you beat the competition? Working off hours? No thanks.
It helps me not having to drag a laptop around and/or rush to find a full size computer when server I have responsibility for go down. It gives peace of mind. And yes, I am very well compensated for being the one who gets the calls if something breaks, as well as the freedom to put in the resources to minimize how often it does.
It's also extremely convenient when travelling, such as when I'm heading out to one of our data centres.
It's the text that's an issue, which I solve by using a keyboard when I'm working (and that I leave behind when I'm not).
All the sales numbers shows you're wrong: The desktop market is at best stagnant, while people move in droves to other form factors. In many areas it is collapsing.
There's only tiny niches of "real work" that needs desktops rather than laptops.
And this is despite the form factor of the typical PC dropping rapidly, to the point where my local shops don't even carry full size ATX cases any more, and most "desktops" are "all in one" iMac style machines.
Big screens and full size keyboards are going nowhere, but the form factors are converging on mobile devices with suitable connectivity.
Desktops will likely remain available for a very long time, but they're well on their way to becoming an ever diminishing niche simply for the reason that the computational needs of most workers and for most home use is being met sufficiently well that more speed or disk space is now a secondary factor for a larger and larger segment of users.
I'm not sure about using tablets with keyboard/mouse/big-screen. I haven't seen too much of it happening, and I'm not sure its really an attractive thing to do anyway for a lot of reasons from the office-practical (lots of plugging things in, harder to coordinate everyone, possibility of losing things, etc.) to the purely pragmatic performance-based (can a tablet do all the graphics processing for a big screen? What if you are using a big file - can your tablet handle it?)
Disk space is a huge draw to PCs too. Very few people I know are happy to entrust their life's photo collection to an online storage-as-a-service provider. And I'm yet to see a good 'media center' (though I think they'll come along at some point).
One cable with MHL (power, display) and bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Some devices, such as the Galaxy S III, uses MHL adapters that also provides a USB port so you can hook up your USB keyboard and mouse to the MHL adapter and have just one cable to attach even if you want a wired keyboard and mouse.
> harder to coordinate everyone, possibility of losing things
How is that any different from today with offices full of laptops?
> can a tablet do all the graphics processing for a big screen?
Yes. My <$130 Allwinner A10 based laptop gives decent performance at full HD (1080p) resolutions today, and it is by no means a high end tablet. Sure, you are not going to get the same performance today on a tablet that cheap as on current high end laptops or desktops, but it is "good enough" for many uses, and this tablet lagged substantially behind the top of the crop tablets already on release.
> What if you are using a big file - can your tablet handle it?
Big by what standard? What it can't handle today, the next generation will handle soon enough. It is not that these tablets and phones will magically be capable enough now, but they are catching up to the type of laptop and desktop performance the vast majority of users are willing to pay for at a rapid rate.
> Disk space is a huge draw to PCs too. Very few people I know are happy to entrust their life's photo collection to an online storage-as-a-service provider.
My <$130 tablet today has 48GB of storage (16GB built in, 32GB sdcard), and can attach whatever size USB storage I want (including easily 128GB USB sticks), or connect to a NAS. Give it a generation or three and you'll be able to put hundreds of GB in these devices.
So again: Maybe some users won't be able to put everything they have on it today, but give it some time - storage on these devices will keep increasingly fairly rapidly as and when usage patterns expand.
>And I'm yet to see a good 'media center' (though I think they'll come along at some point).
XMBC runs on Android: http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/07/13/xbmc-for-android/
There's plenty of room in the computing ecosystem for both web sites and apps, for both closed and open platforms, for both PCs and devices, and whatever other divisions you can think of. Even if one thing "wins", it doesn't mean the other is automatically erased from existence.
No-one's suggesting that the desktop will completely disappear. The thinking is that it will become a niche for hobbyists and professional data crunchers.
I don't think such an improvement will be possible in the next 2 years, and the only incremental improvements in the iPhone 5 seem to support that. You can't really upgrade a tablet (yet - there is at least USB host support in most Android tablets), but consumers won't be as hard-pressed to buy an iPad 4 and 5 as they were with earlier versions. There is already the highest-sense-making display resolution, apps open almost instantly, and superlong battery life. What more can you ask for given its restricted use case of media consumption? It will again all be about software (Siri for iPad, tighter TV integration, perhaps OSX on iPad?) soon.
Actually, radio is as big an industry as it ever was. Mobile phone and app sales may eclipse PC hardware and software sales, but the products are just too different to expect one to replace the other. Perhaps there is more money to be made in Mobile/TV, but that's just because it's a plain old risk/pay-off trade-off.
I've just brought a laptop as my next main programming computer, rather than a desktop.
Laptops are the new portable desktops.
You can't type on a tablet.
Recall the 'iPad + Linode' experiment [1]. In every photo Mark O'Conor posted of his iPad in action, he had an Apple wireless keyboard next to it. A screen and a keyboard. That's a novel idea.
Combined, they take up just about as much space as a laptop (11-13") but the combination is far less usable. Smaller screen, less processing power, less flexibility using iOS, less customisability, so on and so forth.
O'Connor was attempting to nullify one of those drawbacks (lack of processing power), but he can't escape all the others.
[1] http://yieldthought.com/post/31857050698/ipad-linode-1-year-...
The problem for power users is having a remote service connected to the screen that's as open and hackable as a desktop system, and having a way to input data to the screen as easily as with a keyboard and mouse.
http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale/wholesale-android.html?g...
Deleted comment
> Desktops, on the other hand, are perfectly justifiable. That is, if you want three monitors, eight blazingly fast CPU cores, 64 GB of memory, and fire-breathing multi-GPU configurations. If you need absurd, obscene amounts of power, a desktop computer is the way to go.
> But even as an inveterate PC hot-rodder, I've noticed that in the last few years I've started to lose interest in the upgrade treadmill of ever faster CPUs with more cores, more sophisticated GPUs, more bandwidth, more gigabytes of RAM.
> I think we're way past the point of satisfying the computing performance needs of the typical user. I'd say we hit that around the time dual CPU cores became mainstream, perhaps 2008 or so. What do you do when you have all the computing performance anyone could ever possibly need, except for the freakish one-percenters, the video editors and programmers? Once you have "enough" computing power, for whatever value of "enough" we can agree to disagree on, the future of computing is, and always has been, to make the computers smaller and cheaper.
If I were you I would read it again before dismissing it as stupid and sensationalistic as I believe he raises a number of valid points.
As an example it's still slightly tricky to do low-latency (<10ms) AUDIO reliably on a huge desktop system and we're only talking about kbits/s here. Try it on an Android (iPads are a lot better here) and you'll find that the platform is fundamentally broken for this particular niche - no Guitar Rig for Android owners :(
When I'm at home, I pretty much forget about my tablet/smartphone, because a desktop PC is much more comfortable to use than a mobile device.
I don't consider myself bleeding edge anymore. I still don't have a tablet, although there is the occasional day I want one. Diablo 3 will be played on my next laptop, my 2010 era Macbook Air doesn't have quite enough horsepower to power point and click monster bashing for my taste. And while I've been pushed into going touchscreen on my phone, I still yearn for a physical keyboard on a mobile device.
However for any real content creation a laptop is my primary choice. I would love an ultrabook like the Asus Zenbook or Samsung Series 9. An ultrabook will most certainly be my next computer when I buy one some time next year. I am waiting for them to hit the 10 hour mark which I am hoping they will do next year (already very close with the Samsung clocking in around 9 hours). I am happy to sacrifice some CPU and graphics power for an extra hour or two.
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
If this was in stores today and handset manufacturers had good compatibility, I would make my next PC whatever the newest, top of the line Android phone and be relatively happy.
That said, this headline is sensationalistic nonsense. That setup would still be a PC, in fact it would look remarkably more like a PC than our current laptops we are lugging around (external monitor, keyboard, mouse, connected to a tiny "tower").
I love a desktop because it is a stationary place I can always count on, but as soon as that becomes more easily replaced and can still run games and media editing at the same scale, I will keep my desktop
What I find interesting is the fact that powerful computing systems can fit into your pocket. I may be crazy, but couldn't we fit 2 projectors to this, get rid of the display completely and require two surfaces to project a display infront of you, and a keyboard/mousepad at your hands.
Maybe have both - a small display for simple tasks and projection for tasks that require a bigger display. Could we see a shift towards holographic display investment in the future? It's already available for keyboards...
Consumers are using smartphones and tablets while professional are using macbooks. Samsung is new Nokia, Apple is new Microsoft (even worse). Linux is server and Rails is PHP. What news what news..
btw, the burst of Wintel (and Java) bubbles is really a good thing - it is for a new wave of Arm/Android/Linux.
Of course, there still will be x86_64/Linux server market for long (because its so cheap in terms of Price/Performance) and tons of MS/Java based enterprise crapware still need to be maintained, but that wave is gone long ago.
Surfing is a very nice model of IT business, btw.)
Most people only need a couple of hours of battery to or from the office.
Most people only need something powerful enough to do word processing and spreadsheeting, with a bit of accounts-package-nightmare and specialist-industry-nightmare software on top.
It'd be interesting to see Google drive this, or maybe even Canonical. Have a 5 year plan, with plenty of iteration and wiggle room.
So you can have that now.
Since you mentioned Canonical, they most definitively do have a plan: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
"Now multi-core Android phones can be PCs too. Ubuntu for Android enables high-end Android handsets to run Ubuntu, the world's favourite free PC desktop operating system. So users get the Android they know on the move, but when they connect their phone to a monitor, mouse and keyboard, it becomes a PC."
They're pushing this to manufacturers as a way to drive adoption of higher end Android devices with more cores, as well as to sell accessories like screens, keyboards etc., and as a "drop in" next to Android on the same device, with various integration.
They've demonstrated prototypes, and I imagine they're talking to handset manufacturers.
Laptops will stay for a while as they sit brilliantly in between.I do see no evolution in laptops but I do see tablets catching up.
The machine that I use most and is the most fun is the latest MacBook Air. I would expect that 'Ultrabooks' are similar useful.
(Sorry - I like codinghorror actually...)
Interestingly, to me, that's the problem that Window 8 seems to be trying to solve - I didn't know many people had it! And, of course, a few Android tablets that become laptops, etc.
I imagine battery tech is going to be holding back tablets and smart phones from being true desktop replacements for a while. The markets want long battery life, not a desktop replacement.
Lots of link bait over an article for a trend which is as old as computing.
I got rid of my last desktop years ago and have not missed them.
The day the local pc repair shops shut, the day the local electronics store shuts and the day that people pry my universal computing device out of my hands and the 3-4 billion other people let it go, I'll believe it.
Until then, this is a fad.
The local electronics store doesn't sell PC's at all, though it sells some components. And it does sell tablets.
But of course, these tablets are still "universal computing devices" too. Just in more convenient form factors.
A tablet is not a universal computing device: it's a portal for consuming stuff from a content producer. If it stood alone, then it would be, but they don't - none of them!