Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?
The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)
I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.
There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.
I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc.
I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too.
I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous.
I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals.
I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.
Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing.
Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.
The main reason other browsers stopped supporting Flash was websites stopped being built with Flash because iOS didn't support it, and a lot of people thought that mattered even though iOS had (and still has) a small market share world-wide.
Sure, he's laying out a case for the app store they'd later introduce, but it wasn't simply CPU and battery. There's a reason I cited crash logs as the primary thing I remembered about how it affected me. It gave me an immediate reason to share with people about why I couldn't fix Safari crashes when Flash was involved, which made that aspect of my job easier to explain.
You can get PCs in formats Apple has never ventured to make and never will.
And let's not forget that Apple copies everyone else.
Folding phone? How long did it take until Apple "invented" the folding phone market? Oh, that's right, they don't have one (yet, but they are followers after all).
VR Goggles? Also late to that race, and they did a stupid thing with it.
Even the iPhone was really, really late to the game (and no, I don't care about their ~30% worldwide mobile market share).
Apple fanboys love to think that Apple invented all the things and everyone else copied them, but those are fanboy thoughts.
Sorry, Apple simply is not the technology leader you think they are.
I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.
They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
But I can imagine that it would become less prevalent on personal machines, maybe even rare eventually.
We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.