Replacing the PC
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
Haha. D Curtis and his predictions, always very funny. Japan is where you should look at. Japan's penetration of the mobile phone is close to 100% since the late 90s, and Japanese could already do everything they wanted using ONLY their mobile phone even before the iPhone came out.
Yet the PC did not die. It's still very much alive even in Japan, because your mobile phone still won't replace every of its uses, and you'd be hard pressed to find any young person (maybe not teenager, but at least university students) who does NOT have a laptop.
PCs are not going to die anytime soon, as I said before so many times you are just going at a more fragmented market down the road, with people using different kind of devices for different purposes. And OMG, let's stop relying on what 15 years old kids do to predict the future. My former 15 yo self had none of the needs and uses as my present self, so of course you'll tend to go to different devices as you age. There's no silver bullet for every use out there.
Nope, Curtis is talking about behaviors of younger people, just as I am. My point is that Japan is the most mature market out there for mobile phone, since there's no other country that has such a long and significant mobile phone history out there. It's been prevalent even with teenagers since the mid 90s, and now most kids get a smartphone before they even reach 10. And they could do everything with it. Yet the kids from the mid 90s and mid 2000s still went and purchased PCs when they grew up.
People's behavior changes as they age. That's why you don't keep eating "happy meals" at McDonald's when you are 30.
My computer is in a huge tower case. In the mid 90's I could go into any computer store and pick one up. Today, finding even a full size ATX case on display is a rarity, and most of the PCs on sale local to me are in form factors closer to Mini-ITX, or are all-in-one PCs.
Most people simply don't need enough computing power to need the big units any more - their needs may increase, but they're increasing at a slow enough pace that the size of computer they need keeps dropping.
It may not "cut it" for anything beyond basic browsing and basic use today, but that's rapidly changing. My phone performance over the last 3 years have increased several times faster than my desktop and laptop performance (to a large extent because there's lots of "cheap" gains still for phones). The gap is narrowing.
> They won't go completely extinct, the way mainframes haven't. But they'll get relegated to smaller and smaller niches.
PC are STILL selling by hundreds of millions every single year. Saying it's dying is like saying winter is coming just because you have a cooler summer day.
The small screen size of a mobile phone will always limit it's suitability for particular tasks. I can't imagine any office, for example, replacing their desktop PCs with smartphones. That's hardly a niche market. Smartphones are good for consumption, but not so good for creation. For example, even the simple task of word-processing is painful on such a small screen using an on-screen keybboard.
The performance of the average persons PC is stagnating. Not because they can't get faster PC's, but because people increasingly have opted to slow their upgrades, and upgrade to cheaper units.
Meanwhile smartphone performance has skyrocketed.
Couple that with wireless streaming of display, and wireless keyboards, and we're very rapidly converging on a situation where a large portion of the population can get everything their want in terms of computing from their phone.
This is not something Japan has had since the late 90s.
Maybe people won't use their phone, but the current desktop form factors are as good as dead. They've been rapidly shrinking for years already. My local stores pretty much only have all-in-one PC/screen combo's and various tiny form-factors already. There's no reason to believe the shrinking won't continue, and when the phone form factors and PC form factors meet, there'll be little reason for most people not to carry their primary PC with them.
It's mainly because they started from zero in the first place. But I can tell you the performance of newer phones is nothing like 3 times of last year's ones. The increase of performance in single thread is also stagnating on phones, and you will soon hit a barrier in how much you can deliver per watt and per core in the same form factor.
PCs hardware is increasing at a slow pace because there's plenty of power available to run most applications very well already. On phones, demanding applications can make your phone crawl, so obviously there's a clear need for better performance, while my 4 years old laptop still runs most applications just fine.
That's also why PC sales seem to stagnate: you don't replace your PC as often as your phone or tablet.
Technologically, consumer electronics in Japan is not as far ahead of western countries as it once was in the 90s. Going into a Japanese electronics store, you will find it does not look that much different from a Best Buy in the US. What does look different? All those "different kind of devices for different purposes" have folded into smartphones.
Who cares about the traditional market ? The point of the article is that the PC will die. It's simply not going to be the case, even if the PC stops being mainstream - there will still be USES for the PC, even if it's for a minority of people. And it does not look like it, there are still hundreds of millions of PCs sold every year, and they are not replaced as fast as subsidized phones and tablets, therefore it "looks like" the PC is dying, except it isn't.
What most people misunderstand is that, given the choice, most people would choose a PC for a lot of their computing needs.
The issue is lugging that PC around everywhere they go. In other words, physics doesn't give people that choice, and so other form factors become extremely popular.
But at no point will PC's be replaced by them. It's been predicted before, and they were wrong then too.
My experience is the complete opposite. My wife's family has one computer in the entire extended family, everyone else uses their phone exclusively and I rarely see people using laptops in cafes, etc. My wife has multiple relatives that she can't even email without using a japanese prepaid phone because Docomo encourages invalid email username construction.
Go to Starbucks. I see people using laptops every time there. And not just old geezers.
Kids also don't need appointment books, the ability to read/edit documents from work, and so on.
They also have smaller hands - a cell phone is already big to them. Their eyesight is at the best that it will ever be. I would have been able to use a cell screen to browse the internet at 20; now, not so much.
> If you want to predict the future, just look at what middle-class American teens are doing.
I know people love to say/write this, but I'm trying to think of a period of time where this has held up within the last century. Technology, especially today, doesn't allow it. Also, teens hop on and off of fads quicker than any age group. Teens and early-20s adults have behaviors that will all change within just a few years, along with the things they deem necessary vs nice-to-have.
That the iPad, or tablet, has plateaued (or even shrinking) may be true, but I don't think the data or reasoning supports it.
The migration factor would seem to be an important part of Dustin's point—along with the idea that teens and 20-somethings are leading indicators, as they were for social networks, mp3s, etc.
(I'm typing this on a 27" iMac but would broadly define myself as part of the "specialist" group.)
Incidentally, cameras appear to be following a similar trajectory to PCs, with sales falling off in the last two or so years. See e.g. http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/when-will-the-panic-star... or http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/march-2014-nikon-news/ha....
Yeah, but just like the PC, phones are never going to replace reflex cameras, for a number of reasons I will not develop here. It's not because a market actor gains or loses that it wipes the entire market - and that was Dustin's entire point.
I think the future is coming to your office and getting a bigger screen via a wireless connection to your tablet automatically (like Surface Pro with Miracast). You even said "27 iMac" instead of "powerful iMac".
Today's "normal pc" compute power is inadequate for 4k video ... Unless you plug in a decent gpu and your machine includes a decent bandwidth to that gpu.
Given that parents have always wanted to film thir kids at the highest quality they can afford, where do you thnk this trend might take us industry wise?
Edit: if i cannot type out this post error free, mobiles phons suck as PC replacements ;)
I can't imagine trying to write complex code on a phone. Heck, I can't even imagine trying to write an article, or anything much longer than a tweet on those tiny phone screens.
I would like a PC without fan noise, though.
I bought a Galaxy tablet for reading books, because it is nearly paper-sized, had an HD display, and is completely silent. It's marvelous for that, and I'm very pleased with it. But it's still too small to program on, both the display size and the inadequate storage.
That makes sense and I'm in a similar situation right now. However, going forward, monitors and desktop computers will become increasingly redundant with the smart tvs and phones that most consumers will already own.
I did. I asked a 15 year old cousin.
"I use my mobile phone exclusively for email and internet."
why?
"I have privacy on my phone and it's the only thing I can use at school and at home."
Huh. Makes sense.
But when these students get older, and aren't as concerned about privacy from their parents, and aren't restricted from using other devices by school rules, I suspect they will adopt the device appropriate for the task at hand -- just like older folks do now.
Maybe tablets as a separate product are going to be more niche but I personally don't see it. But one thing I'm fairly sure of, as long as people have to type long things, a real keyboard is indispensable. I'm not sure what the 2030 Macbook Air will be, but i feel pretty confident that it (or similar) will be.
I know so many older people who now live entirely on their tablets - heck, in Canada, I've got family who do all their email and browsing on playbooks .
Personally, I could never, ever, live without a Laptop (Not a day goes by where I don't spent at least 15 minutes on Terminal.app) - but, I totally understand how 90% of the population has different "jobs that need to be done" than myself - so there will be some tablet/Smart Phone that will take over those jobs.
The 20-30% of us hackers, knowledge workers, and gamers will keep a vibrant PC / Laptop market going for at least another 5-10 years, until Tablets/Smart Phones get powerful enough to just drive a display technology and get hooked into a keyboard.
That's the day that I carry my entire processing/storage/memory unit in my pocket.
i disagree that middle-class teens are the harbinger of this future out of enlightenment - more like just managing household expenses and the reality of living at home. write your homework on the shared family PC, and everyone has their own phone.
Today's mobile phones are much more powerful than yesterday's PCs, but they didn't replace yesterday's PCs. We just have much more powerful PCs as well.
For most people, PCs and Laptops became powerful enough about 5 years ago. I am a serious power user, run VMware, Cisco Network Simulators, Multiple Drawing Applications, Aperture, the entire Office Suite, VPNs, plus the normal host of twitter, text editor, skype, google earth apps, iTunes - all simultaneously - and my 2010 MacBook Air is still sufficient . I'm still doing all my Desktop PC work (Mostly Outlook and Visio) on my 2004 Dell Precision 650 (All that I've upgraded is the SSD and Monitor).
The Laptop and PC market is wildly over served today for 90%+ of the population. A MacBook Air is way more powerful than people need in terms of Processor, Wireless, and CPU performance for those people.
Yes - of course you will be able to take advantage of more powerful systems, but if we've already reached the point where I can't, then it won't be too far off before Phones/Tablets will have more than enough processing power for most ordinary people.
"For some very, very, very small percentage of the population, that extra power can be useful - but I strongly suspect that, outside of gamers, that percentage is less than 10%. "
I.E. If we eliminate the PC gamers, probably less than 10% of people need the extra power we are getting from PCs. I realize that PC gamers can always, and will always need more power than they will ever, ever get.
Bargain basement PC's are fast enough for most users to the point where it is a massive problem for everyone but Apple (who commands a massively higher average price), and this has been the case for years at this point.
No, then it becomes a 'PC'.
This topic get's framed around hardware when it's far more nuanced than that.
Workflows & Usage based on age and context of use. There's a strong bell curve correlation between age and content creation.
There is an underlying value of the time spent computing, and that in turn affects the need to own different computing devices and so on. Today computing is ubiquitous for some people, but the value people place on the time they use a mobile phone to catch up on facebook or reddit may not be the same as the value they place on the time they use a tablet or a pc to do something more substantive.
Moreover, tablets are still less mature than other computers and don't have the same market penetration so naive comparisons don't necessarily spell universal truths.
I think ultimately the average person will end up using both smartphones, tablets, and keyboarded computers in the future. With varying degrees of use depending on their own habits, hobbies, and jobs. I especially don't think that the tablet is going to go away, it will have its niche and it will be a big one.
Edit: I think a fundamental problem with DCurtis' reasoning is the idea that we are at the end of a massive change in computing, rather than at the beginning of a new revolution in personal computing. I believe that the latter is true, that the changes which will occur over the next 20 years in computing will be more profound and more impactful on daily life around the world than what has occurred over the past 20 or even 30 years. Part of that will involve the penetration of tablet style (or hybrid tablet/laptop) computers into the workplace, something that has not yet happened to a significant degree. Part of that will involve the revolution in education via educational software that will almost certainly occur within the next 20 years, which will likely be most commonly used on tablet form-factor computers, not phones.
Mostly tablets need to be purchased outright, which requires a lot more disposable income.
But what I can see is the PC moving to the phone, such that a monitor and workstation accessories can be plugged into the mobile device.
And you can already do this. Pretty much all Android phones and tablets supports bluetooth or USB keyboards, and many supports wired or wireless HDMI out.
This will either mean we all start carrying around really large phones, or that technology gets to the point where you can fit an object the size of a phone in your pocket and have an experience like a tablet. (Using some unforseen tech)
IMHO augmented reality converged with VR is the long run future. I have to imagine we are all going to be wearing comfortable opaque goggles in a few years that will project whatever we want wherever we want.
(1) Their mobile communication capabilities are essential.
(2) Their nature is to be coupled tightly to an individual rather than be shareable.
(3) Their replacement cycles are so short.
Because iPads are used mostly by professionals eg doctors and people who want to read stuff or watch a movie on it.
At the moment, most of these appliances are missing a central controller, one big home computer to coordinate all your smart devices, smart walls, etc. Once we move into 8K wall displays in every room, a smartphone will not be able to drive most of what people do with computers. They will need a big home PC to handle their homes, but it will probably not have a desktop interface. Maybe it won't be called a PC, but rather a home server or something like that, but it will be a big bulky box installed in the home for personal computing.
The mobile phone is currently moving to replace the primary interface to the many computers we all use, but it also has wearable candidates to replace it in the near future. However, if you define the PC as a Windows desktop/laptop, I definitely agree with the premise, but let's not forget about all the upcoming power-hungry applications for home computing like AR and VR.
30+ is not "old". You don't start hitting your stride until your 28/29 plus. Lumping together everyone over the age of 30 is wrong.
Another point, people in 30+ have the income that younger people lack. Why are 15-20 year olds using mainly mobile? Because that's what they can afford or what their parents get them. Desktops, laptops, and tablets are expensive in comparison.
Why do more "old" people use tablets? Because a lot of us have found a tablet is useful in many circumstances where a phone or laptop is not. We also have more spare money, so I can splurge on an iPad every couple years. If I had kids, they wouldn't be getting the newest thing for sure. There's work we can do that doesn't require a full laptop.
Its a price thing right now, not an I want thing.
As a developer who can't do his day job without a PC, I couldn't picture using my phone or a tablet to code with or administer servers. Believe me, I've tried using my phone for many aspects of my job and besides being able to maybe restart a server, NOTHING beats a good old fashioned terminal and keyboard. The restrictive nature of applications available for devices like iPhones and iPad's also means there are certain things I cannot do (like transferring large database dumps that are tens of gigabytes to a remote server).
I work for a design-led agency and let me tell you something, you cannot design on a mobile phone or tablet (well tablet you sort of can, but the results aren't that pretty or easy to accomplish). I'm sure some will argue otherwise, but I challenge you to open up a 1gb PSD file on an iPad and see how well you can work with it (switching between layers/groups, text sizes, resizing things). Some devices aren't meant to do everything and people like Dustin have been generalising and proclaiming these new portable touch devices will replace everything, but the reality is they cannot replace everything.
People use different devices for different purposes. I've never seen anyone coding on a train using an iPad or their iPhone before. People seem to use their portable devices for email, gaming, phone calls and social media mostly. How often do you see someone on public transport on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? A hell of a lot more then you would using said devices for other purposes.
Then there is the issue of battery life. These new phones (especially phablet phones) are lucky to last a day on a full charge with the stock battery because of the constant drain of the screen, GPS and Wifi. You can't rely on a smartphone, not even in 2014 to be reliable. Battery life followed by form factor are the two biggest hurdles and the bigger you go, the less you can call the device a phone or tablet. I can get like 5 hours from my laptop, comparative use on my phone would maybe be half that...
For phones to completely win, we need terminals in offices and libraries that let you type on a full keyboard and use multiple monitors. Maybe you can just dock a phablet to power the dumb HCI? That would be my dream.
Multiple surveys have shown that tablets are used almost entirely at home. People still see them as largely entertainment devices.
Yes, absolutely.
I get that I'm an outlier, but I used to have a phone, and my experience has improved on net since I moved up a size category.
I might just be weird, but it's improved in ways that I would imagine would hold universal appeal: longer battery life, easier HCI (easier to type and swipe, easier to see nav, more readable text, better video).
The downsides are that it doesn't play nice with some phone plans, and it's kind of awkward in one hand. Not completely awkward, but probably unreasonable for a lot of smaller handed people (teens?), killing wider adoption. That's why I think six inch phablets might hit the sweet spot.
I don't. I spend a lot of my time browsing on a phone. I could probably be counted in that "cell mostly" demographic. You can't get work done on a phone though. When I actually need to get things done for school/work/etc. I'm using a real computer, not a mobile device.
For many Android phones, you can already use them as desktop replacements of sorts, with HDMI out (including some with "wireless HDMI") and bluetooth keyboards.
mac pro, imac, macbook pro, macbook air, iphone, ipad 1/2/3/air/mini, apple tv, mac mini, airport xt, airport xp, hell even an ipod or two. jeez, it's actually kind of embarrassing now that i see it all typed out.
mac pros and macbook pro/airs get by far the most usage (dev and sales staff, respectively), followed (by a safe margin in terms of clock time) by iphone (everyone, all day long, for short bursts). everything else is highly incidental and we could easily get by without. the ipad (of which we have 3 or 4, i believe) sit pretty much unused. our imacs are kind of dead-ends functionally and the rest... more of a novelty than anything.
i tried to use ipads during meetings and even phone calls but found myself fumbling. completely unnecessary when a macbook air is just as easy to carry around and offers a traditional interface.
Until multitasking on tablets is fixed it will never replace the PC for them. Young people switch tabs and applications like mad!
So, the statistics may suggest that mobile web usage drops off in the 20s range, but that may not mean that 20-somethings are any less savy or interested in it.
Millenials can't afford to move out from home because they get bamboozled by framily plans and handset discounts that drain their pocketbooks. At 10 a GB, you have to be a wall street or Washington fat cat to watch Netflix.
I can't wait until tablets get Blu ray players cause the rent on LTE is too damn high and all the kids think it is retro cool like 8 track tapes.
The phone network isn't supposed to sound like that. Compare AMR, EVRC-B, and mu-law side by side sometime.
That being said, the PC has a level of flexibility that mobile devices really can't touch. If the PC really is dying, then I think it's a failure or a lack of interest from consumers to take full advantage of their capabilities.
I would prefer if telecoms died a horrible death so that we could just use the infinitely better infrastructure for moving information, AKA the internet. They only stand to benefit by holding back the internet with bandwidth caps to promote their crappier SMS tech.
That way instead of this marketing abomination called "Smartphones" (Phone/PC hybrid failure mishmash) to using agnostic modular mobile PCs (not laptops) without the GPS tracker and the cellular chipset (both being optional, the magic of modularity). To have a hub that would connect to the mPC, interfacing with all USB/HDMI/Audio devices. Not everyone likes current wireless devices. Adding the ability to install whatever OS you want with an actual friendly & helpful bootloader.
A man can dream...