My birthday was this past week. When I came to Silicon Valley in 1977 I was 24 years old. Thirty-nine years later I am 63 and a lot changed around me in those four decades. I went from young to old. The personal computer industry, of which I consider myself to be a part, went from being two years old to 41 — an even greater change than I have experienced. And the point of this column is to write a bit about how personal computers have matured and where they are going, because I am pretty sure the PC is going away. And I have figured out why.
It’s hard for those who weren’t there to imagine how different Silicon Valley was in 1977. There were orchards still in the valley — lots of them. There were millionaires, too, but you wouldn’t know them. I met Intel founder Bob Noyce for the first time waiting in line at the bank when I asked him to put out his cigarette (he did). I knew Dave Packard because his daughter Nancy had been my wife’s roommate at Stanford. Linus Pauling lived at one end of my street and Edward Teller lived at the other end: the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the father of the H-bomb lived only a few blocks apart. Across the street lived Tennessee Ernie Ford. One night while playing Trivial Pursuits we called Pauling on the phone to ask him a chemistry question and he happily gave us the answer.
The big companies back then in the valley were Del Monte (canned fruit), HP, Intel, Atari, IBM, Lockheed, and Food Machinery Company (FMC) — a maker of military tanks. Apple was just starting. Microsoft was two years old. Zuckerberg was not even born. There was no Internet. There was the Arpanet but it was strictly non-commercial with 50 kilobit-per-second backbone pipes. Tim Berners-Lee was a British schoolboy.
Who knew it would get so big? Not me and certainly not my parents, who I urged to invest in Bay Area real estate but they thought it was a bad idea. They were scandalized when I bought a house in Palo Alto that year for $57,000 and shocked again in 1999 when I sold the same house for $990,000 (it would be worth $3 million today). You can’t go home again.
Time passes and you go from being one of the youngest people to be doing what you do to one of the oldest, yet somehow that passage of time goes unnoticed. I don’t feel any different except some times in the morning when it hurts a bit to get out of bed. But time passes nevertheless and the effects, if slow, are insidious.
I wrote 25 years ago:
It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the fifteenth century. Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s. Television, invented in the mid-1920s, took until the 1950s to bind us to our sofas.
We can date the birth of the personal computer somewhere between the invention of the microprocessor in 1971 and the introduction of the Altair hobbyist computer in 1975. Either date puts us today about halfway down the road to personal computers’ being a part of most people’s everyday lives, which should be consoling to those who can’t understand what all the hullabaloo is about PCs. Don’t worry; you’ll understand it in a few years, by which time they’ll no longer be called PCs. By the time that understanding is reached, and personal computers have wormed into all our lives to an extent far greater than they are today, the whole concept of personal computing will probably have changed. That’s the way it is with information technologies. It takes us quite a while to decide what to do with them.
I wrote that in 1991 and looking at the PC business circa 2016 I think I was correct. We still have PCs but fewer of them are being sold every year. Something happened, but what?
Personal computers went from being computational devices (spreadsheet machines) to communication devices (Internet gizmos and intelligent cameras). And because of Moore’s Law and our desire to put ever more personality into our computers we morphed our favorite 1991 toy from a desktop into a smart phone.
Put the power of a desktop into your hand and who needs a desktop?
And that’s why the PC, like me, is almost ready to retire.
“Put the power of a desktop into your hand and who needs a desktop?”
If you are doing serious work on a computer – not just social, email, games, and browsing – then you need a large screen, a full-size keyboard, and a mouse.
At the moment my monitor, keyboard and mouse are attached to a laptop sitting next to my desk. In future they may be attached to something smaller, but the requirement for a full-sized interface for serious work of any kind is not going to change.
I think Bob’s comment was that the Personal Computer (ie the home computer) could be replaced by a phone/tablet. I don’t think he would assume that workstations would go away.
Although, if you plug your phone into an HDMI port (or stream to a box like Apple TV) and add a Bluetooth keyboard to it (use your finger for the mouse still or add a mouse too) then you basically have a workstation you can take with you. You can already run things like PhotoShop (albeit a cut down version) on an iPhone/iPad so the power is getting close as it is.
You still need a personal computer for serious homework unless you remove the serious homework part.
All you really need is a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and a VPN connection.
Can you define “serious” in such a way that the educational system’s product is fit for citizenship, not just labor?
My point is that we are in a significant platform transition. I really believe that some of these comments don’t grasp that, so let me restate my thoughts with a bit more detail.
There are still companies that produce typewriters, but how many of them are sold each year in the USA? I’d guess the number is under 100K for a nation of 350 million. This is what will EVENTUALLY happen with the PC. That it is already happening is proved by the consistent sales downturn. PC sales are no longer enough to fully replace all the units in use yesterday, today, or tomorrow. There is no doubt about these numbers and little doubt that the trend will continue. The unanswered question is how far will PC sales drop and in what time frame?
Commenters are suggesting that for their purposes sales won’t drop much because they’ll continue to need their PC. But what do you even mean by PC? Since 2010 I’ve worked entirely on a notebook. Is that a PC? It’s certainly not a desktop. There was a time when I would have sworn that I’d never give up my desktop, yet here I am typing away on a 13-inch screen. For me the major issue was storage: I couldn’t imagine having enough storage in my pre-2010 notebook. Now I have a terabyte and that’s only 60 percent full.
Those who say THEY can’t imagine doing without their desktop, how old are you? How many more years do you expect to be recalculating those spreadsheets? In large part hardware shifts are aligned with generational transitions. IBM looked at the concept of executive computer terminals in the early 1960s and learned they were unpopular because EXECUTIVES DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO TYPE. A decade later — a decade, not a generation — high school and college typing classes had changed that, setting up industry for the rise of PCs and the extinction of secretaries. While PCs ENABLED this transition, what made it actually happen were co-ed typing classes!
What we know is that technology is in constant transition, that younger people are more comfortable with new interfaces, and those younger people (with their new interfaces) will eventually have our jobs.
Bob, you can do writing on a 13″ screen, but that’s one of the very few ‘real work’ things you can do on a 13″ screen.
You can’t do programming, science, engineering, database work, financial analysis and trading, graphic design, video and photo editing, publishing, etc., etc. on a tiny screen with a toy keyboard.
There’s a reason why everyone from bank tellers to support and telesales people have a full-size screen and keyboard, and a mouse. They actually need them. They’re not going to be replaced by a smart phone or a tablet.
If you define a PC as a box of any size, even a two inch cube, with full-size peripherals connected to it, then PC sales may decline but they will soon hit a floor. The people who really need them will continue to need them.
Cringe’s comment that PC sales are declining is both trivial and extremely late to the party. The decline was widely predicted with the release of the first iPhone, and perhaps earlier than that. However, that’s not even what’s happening here.
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Ever since PCs gained peak popularity IN BUSINESS (probably the mid 90s), every company began trying to limit which employees would have one on their desk. The hardware and software upgrades were expensive. The goal was a PC for ONLY those that truly needed it. In the consumer space ALMOST NOBODY needed a PC. Simple tasks like email or web browsing are a horrible waste. Apple finally came up with the solution. Devices that trade that excess power for portability. Brilliant!
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So, what I’m saying is the PC isn’t dying. It was always a blunt object that never fit most user’s needs. Now the market is segmented the way it should have been all along. It took Steve Jobs 25 years to come up with that.
Mark S. have you worked at a high tech company or taken a graduate level computer science class
lately. I rarely see anyone with a full sized keyboard and mouse unless they are using a docking station. Cringely seems to be on the money on this.
In reply to Tom, I graduated in physics and computer science in 1981, and I’ve been working in the computer industry ever since, for a wide variety of companies, and I still am. I’ve also taught in a university computer science department in the last ten years.
Tom, maybe the kind of industries you are are exposed to are limited?
Actually, I’ve done all my programming in the last 12 years on a 15″ Macbook Pro. Once this thing’s done, I’m thinking of going with a 13″ machine just for the weight, although I’m hoping there’ll be a 15″ Macbook Air at that time, since I do like the slightly larger screen.
You can always connect a laptop to a big monitor. I use a 17 inch laptop just to avoid eye strain.
Bob’s correct about the co-ed typing thing and the execs can’t type thing.
Was a generational thing. Old attitude was real men don’t type.
Having girls in class a big plus.
Grew up in Endicott NY, IBM’s HQ until 1970.
1/2 yr business typing course as HS soph in ’77.
After several weeks up to very usable 45 words per minute with subsequent incremental improvement to 60 wpm.
Can’t overstate how important functional typing skills have been throughout my career (college, graduate-medical school, residency and beyond). Try transitioning a 65-80 year old male physicians to an electronic medical record system requiring keyboard data input. (I can assure you it’s not a pretty sight)
Absolutely the most valuable coarse (in terms of functional usefulness) I took during 25 years of formal education.
Although computational and communicative tools have evolved the ability to enter and edit data still relies on typing. Not likely to change until telepathic computers arrive on the scene.
(An awful lot of brain neurons are involved in hand sensory &motor function- this uniquely human).
Using my 27″ iMac with much less frequency and mirroring my phone/Pad into even larger standalone monitor.
Still have an old Remington Rand type writer sitting in my office as a conversation piece.
I think Bob is talking about the masses, as in billions of people. Just say ten years ago, if someone wanted to send an email they needed a PC. Today, sending an email can be done on a phone. You can also watch movies on a phone, and even stream the movie to a big screen TV. You can do your banking with a phone, make reservations for just about anything, and do things that a PC cannot do like snapchat. The phone now covers most of the use cases for the masses. Sure, there will always be the subset of individuals that will use a specialized computing device for work, like a bank teller or CGI animator, etc. But the bulk of computing devices will be handheld.
Ted did say “serious homework”.
People like us still need a workstation. That’s because we grew up with them and don’t like touch screens. I believe that when my daughter, who is 16 now, is 48 years old there probably won’t be a keyboard in sight. She doesn’t want a workstation. My Mac Mini and 24″ Samsung look high tech to me but the next generation will find new ways of doing things that we haven’t imagined yet.
There are still areas where even the best tablets aren’t yet on the same playing field as lower end workstations, like 3D animation, game development, and high end film post production. While you can edit a high end film using relatively lightweight proxies, the color grading and VFX pipelines still require massive amounts of memory, computing power, and storage bandwidth and volume.
However, as GPU computing advances along with cloud based platforms like nVidia’s GRID, we might just come full circle by pushing all of that load onto to a centralized server, in which case a tablet with a portable keyboard and a mouse and a big screen might then be able to replace a workstation.
Agree to Mark’s comment ! Interface size won’t change that fast.
I agree on the need for a real interface for art, graphics and things that I don’t understand.
I won’t give up a desktop for a long time (I am older than Bob).
However, I think that the future is something like the iWatch (or an Android watch if they could ever vertically integrate and not suck on compatibility, updates, support, etc.) that connects to the “desktop” in your pocket (Bluetooth is currently short range). The desktop might be iPhone like but it needs a DISPLAY. I would guess that something like a Giggle glass and an air mouse would work out some day for real work (might be too shy to wear it on the street).
I am too old and have too many scars to put my “desktop cpu” in the cloud, plus you can never trust someone like Giggle. There mode of operation is to steal info; of course others are worse saying that anything you upload THEY own. Re the cloud: I want “it” to work NOW, not to be slightly overcast.
Re SiValley: in 76 we used to flush rabbits and pheasants on our lunch time walks from Amdahl. No more 🙂 and important companies? Not as big as HP et al, but Amdahl changed the computing world before it succumbed to Fujitsu, and lack of resources and foresight (I might have been part of the lack of foresight :(, but we trashed IBM’s ass around 1984-1990.
I’m with Bob. Those who doubt him, why do you think there is something inherently magnificent about QWERTY keyboards for anything other than text? It’s only so common because at one stage it was all we had. For many tasks graphical touch screen or speech are so much easier.
Likewise the notion of storage. Chromebooks show that you don’t need a PC. There are things they can’t do today, but that will change.
If you look around, the transition away from PCs is already clearly underway.
Most of what you claim to need to do “real work” are simply the affordances of a keyboard and a large display. And how often will you need to upgrade the machine you use to crunch spreadsheets and turn out documents? Sales of PCs will continue to decline until, like typewriters, they’ll be a niche product (most typewriters in the US today are used by prison inmates). That’s not a sustainable business model for a whole industry.
“Put the power of a desktop into your hand and who needs a desktop?”
I do – but I do things on my desktop that I used to do on a bank on PDP-11-34’s, and then MicroVAX computers which were “desktop” if you had a pretty strong desk and weren’t planning to use it for much else. When I got started in this game (3D motion capture and photogrammetry) I proposed that we port the programs to the IBM-PC but, at that time, it was not powerful enough – these days I can run the applications on my phone.
In a sense, that’s a problem solved, but the problem these days is finding people who can think deeply enough and creatively to use the tools that sit in their pockets.
I’d piggy-back onto this and say that most computers at big corporations nowadays are used for two big things: e-mail and PowerPoint. The first can be moved to a (reasonably secure) tablet, but the latter is a bit of a thornier problem.
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PowerPoint and other types presentation software are the primary method of communication between customers, co-workers, project leads, number crunchers, penny pinchers, and c-suite types these days. It simply can’t be avoided, so whatever machine you use, you have to be able to create with PowerPoint on it. Now, that’s not to say that a tablet with a lot of horsepower can’t use PowerPoint, but you still need to be able to multitask so you can generate your content to use in the PP stack. While tablets can do this work, it is often cheaper to simply buy a laptop instead. $500 will buy you a very good Android or iOS tablet, and it will also buy you a low end laptop who can still handle all that a tablet can do but with a bigger screen and a full size keyboard built in. And while that laptop has limited upgrade capability, that’s still more than the tablet does.
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Another thorny problem that the tablets and smartphones have is the matter of security. In a large corporation, bring your own device is potentially a security nightmare, because the corporation is dependent upon the individual to protect their device adequately from external attack. With a laptop, the corporation can control the software/OS upgrades and security software suite, which helps to limit their exposure to black hats.
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I do think tablets are a feasible future, but we’re not there yet. But once tablets and smartphones become just another commodity –like televisions– then we’ll begin to see more of a transition away from PCs.
PowerPoint? Really? I run my Windows instance and entire Office suite on a zero client device that connects to a chassis of blade servers in my data center. I have booted a “PC” once so far this year.
Re: “my data center” It sounds like you have a PC with long keyboard, mouse, and monitor wires, which actually supports the theory that the PC (or a local computer data center) will be around for a long time to come, to get real work done.
Essentially, you’re correct. But my “terminal” can be any device. I could run my entire Windows instance on an iPad, if I had one. But this isn’t a PC in any sense other than that there’s an x86 CPU in the data center and Windows and Office licenses.
I say “my” data center because I helped build it. I sit about a mile and a half away from the CPU running my Windows instance.
well said; nice article or as Ernest T Bass used to say ‘that’s a fine piece of talk’
[…] Personal Computers Approach Retirement Age […]
What a great piece, Robert! Please don’t retire…
And you were absolutely right, and the insight of the 30 years delay for mankind accepting inventions was enlightning to me then, and remembers me of your gifted vision (not the predictions, which I discard).
And I’ll be 59 next April.
Happy 63’s
Man, you had a sexy beard back in the day, bro. ?
Love your writing.
Ken Olson was right in 1977: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Yeah, too much competition for their own brain. 🙂
well, if you’re talking an 11/785 with three-phase and a 10-ton air conditioner and Thicknet all over the place… yeah, don’t want that. especially those 400-meg washing-machine drives.
Ken Olsen was right about PDP’s etc, but he sucked on management. It is truly disgusting how he made DEC commit suicide (yes, I was there in 1990 and saw it).
It wasn’t a technical thing; he just couldn’t ,and didn’t find people who could, manage. When the PDP was the ONLY option, no problem, money rolled in. I used to joke that the big problem was finding trucks big enough to carry it all to the bank.
However, when competition arose and someone needed to be customer oriented and NOT a technoARROGANT idiot, DEC died.
When I went there, every desk had a terminal—what a wonder;
UNTIL you tried to use it as a newcomer. I finally called DEC customer service and ask for a manual: “oh you don’t need that; a colleague will hold your hand”. I imagine telling that to a customer. ARGH.
and then the mainframe (Aquarius?) STUPIDITY: no rational or even conscious management. Made me want to puke. And don’t get into the competition between the middle range sys group and the large range group for the right to dev the next gen (big mid range or small large range). Having beer with reps of both groups in a hotel room in Tokyo the BOTH admitted that they had LIED on the schedule projections for sys bring-up. Why? If they didn’t the “big boys” would select the other group to do the sys. Great people though; some of the best tech people that I have ever worked with, and kind and thoughtful; just no leadership in a biz sense.
And the tech was fantastically futuristic; just not sellable. Remember the ALPHA chip? Incredible tech in it if cost and marketing rationality didn’t matter. The process was fantastic, if you include the previous caveat. But EXPENSIVE.
WoW! I have suppressed thinking about this for decades. So sad. Too many scars.
Bob; I have made this into a diatribe. Please delete.
I think computers will eventually become invisible to us. They will just be wherever you are. Tools to serve our wants and needs – to perform calculations that we don’t even think of as calculations, but rather simply fulfilling of our requests. Or even anticipation of our requests. Maybe this is what they called The Grid in the Terminator movies?
McLuhan had this sussed decades ago: https://www.scribd.com/doc/61062984/The-Invisible-Environment-The-Future-of-an-Erosion#scribd
Rob, Happy Birthday
You convinced me years ago the PC era was drawing nigh. The advent of iPad, bluetooth peripherals, smartphones and ubiquitous wifi combined to change the game.
Three years ago I purchased my first Mac, when they released the 27″ with a fusion drive. Specs still comparable today. Now I just need the tools to easily mod a website from my phone.
If I buy another PC, it will not look like this one. Rather it will reside in my pocket, cast onto a screen with bluetooth input devices.
A few years ago I sat next to a Ford marketing person on an international flight. He told me that the average age of a Lincoln Continental owner had been rising by about a year, each year, for a while. That’s not a good demographic to be selling to for the long term. Maybe the same thing is happening to the desktop PC. I love/need my 27″ iMac but I’m getting older (62) and my eyesight is slowly but surely going to crap. In a few years only old people will have desktop PC’s and then…. Well, we all know what happens then….
yeah, next breakthrough product is Apple WhiteCane
I’m a little younger but my way of dealing with poor eyesight is to take off my glasses and hold a tablet about 4 inches from my nose. It works for me.
It also seems to me that what most people do in non-IT real jobs can be done on a smartphone or tablet and will be. Most management jobs are just phone and email.
With the huge number of smartphone and tablet apps, I think there’s a move away from the general purpose word processor and spreadsheet to specialized applications. Good application design should mean the information needed can be presented and entered on a small screen. Of course many types of developers and designers will need more.
As an amateur photographer, all the PC users I know need > 1Tb storage and most have a RAID backup. Although I share my pics using cloud products (Drop Box, Adobe, iCloud), my type A personality needs that physical backup and I’m having a hard time seeing that in iOS.
Now my kids, also amateur photographers, happily snap their shots and create videos, immediately post online, and call it good. It takes great effort to convince them to send me their work to store in what I consider a “safe” place.
I guess another example of 30 years of transition. I’m becoming a dinosaur.
I think they’ll be happy doing that until there comes a time when they need to move their data somewhere else. Not having local control over their data will become a big issue then.
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I’ve actually been contemplating this exact thing should I swap my ISP. I’ve got years of e-mails stored in their site prior to a gradual transition to a GMail account, and pulling that data locally –as well as changing webiste subscriptions and whatnot– is a daunting task. And that’s without worrying about things such as photos or videos or music files.
The other thing that has happened, thanks to the Internet, is that the decades-long dream of the phone companies to put a dumb terminal in your house and huge mainframes somewhere far away has come to pass. Most of us who grew up around the computer industry couldn’t wait to have our own supercomputer in our house, just because we wanted one. Now we’re all just happy with Amazon EC2 (it’s FREE STUFF!). We’re increasingly reliant on having a network connection. Today, when the network drops there’s no way for many businesses to function. It won’t be long until our entire lives will require an Internet connection for even the simplest of tasks, much like the electricity grid. When the power goes out most of us can’t even cook a simple meal or stay warm (my gas furnace has electric water pumps). Imagine when the controls for your microwave depend on an HTML 5 web server and SQL database located on the other side of the world, just because it was an extra $10 to put in enough computing power for stand-alone operation. Oh, and also because companies don’t want to have to maintain software across thousands of devices, just make the thing phone home every time its used.
Personal Computers are no longer in people’s houses, they are in something called the “Cloud”. Many of our personal computing needs are carried out by computers that are managed by someone else. What we carry around is a terminal, a very capable one, but the “real” work is done elsewhere. How many tasks on modern non-PC devices require an Internet connection to carry out?
Having a personal computer in the home is becoming analogous to having solar panels on one’s roof, where the Internet is analogous to the electric grid.
Having a private personal computer may be decreasing, but personal computing hardware built and managed by others is still increasing rapidly.
As I said in a very secret IBM meeting in Yorktown, NY in 1979…”Inside every big and powerful water-cooled IBM mainframe we have running today is the soul of an old mechanical IBM 402 tabulating machine running emulation and screaming to get out!”…..the corollary should be “In every smartwatch and notebook is a PC running DOS or a Mac just screaming to get out!”
This PC death is just nostalgia for a form factor dying as its usefulness goes away. The big jump happened from mechanical computing to electronic. Now comes the jump from electrical to optical quantum?
The real question to ponder is the aging of UNIX, the father of DOS, iOS and almost all of today’s key operating systems. When does a human oriented operating system with all its quirks and security faults finally give way to a new vision of computing?
I only started following you in the mid-90s with “Triumph of the Nerds” so I missed your first 20 years. But you’ve dropped enough names and anecdotes that I’m looking forward to your memoirs. Seriously.
No need to fret, it’s just a change in form factor.
This change will continue until the Last Question is answered:
http://multivax.com/last_question.html
Wonderful reflective piece, Bob. The knot in my stomach and mild burning behind my eyes salutes your gift for poetic nostalgia. Thank you for your years of sharing the heart and soul of an industry packed with historic invention and discovery, rags-to-riches successes, thrilling political intrigue, and fascinating cults of personality. It’s been immensely gratifying to watch the epic story of the personal computer unfold over the years through your unique perspective. I’m as jealous of your front-row seat as I am appreciative your ability to capture the essence of what drives the passion and ingenuity of people turning a hobby of tinkering with electronic components and manipulating bits into world-wide empires of business.
Desktop displays and keyboards will continue to exist as long as desks exist. I’m looking forward to the day when all the papers and yellow stickies that I keep losing under my three screens will merge with the 4-foot by eight-foot surface of the desk that those screens rest on. But most of the compute power that drives those screens will no longer be hosted in a hot, noisy box underneath that desk, even for hardcore gamers — the hard computational work will go into the cloud the way it already is for Siri and Cortana and the processing in the displays will become dedicated to managing front-end components of interaction with the user.
It needs to become as easy to move data and functions from my wrist, or phone, or tablet onto that for-real-this-time “active desktop” or the giant screens on the walls without losing content or context as it is to pull a scrap of paper out of my pocket and drop it onto my desk’s wooden surface. Microsoft and Apple are taking the first steps towards this with Continuum and Continuity, respectively, but there is a lot more work to be done to make this seamless to setup and operate seamlessly and securely. Google is so far behind in this area that they aren’t even in the race.
The important thing about the computer industry is not the PC but the marriage of telecommunications and the computer. This is equivalent in history to the invention of the printing press. The Internet provides all the gifts of human history to everyone in the world! When I started in telecom, almost everything was analog (the modem was king and everything was nailed up) but when I quit (some would call it retired) everything was digital and the ability to be interconnected was universal.
Television, Telephones, and Motion Pictures still exist today, are called by the same names, perform the same functions, with only a slight change in form factor. So why use them is this article, intended to explain the reduction in PC sales?
I would argue that the technologies you cite have changed unrecognizably from their origins.
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Television was an over-the-air broadcast of the same thing at the same time to a stationary device and has now morphed into the YouTube model of video on demand wherever and whenever you want.
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Telephones were real-time, coincidental sound relay systems that in large part have morphed to portable, texting systems. Most people I know text instead of calling, actual speech telephony is in serious decline.
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Motion Pictures have stayed the most the same of the bunch, but a Motion Picture is now also a DVD and video stream waiting to happen and pull royalty revenue out of. Motion Pictures branched out into the new technology and did not try to destroy it (can you hear me recording industry?).
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I agree with Bob that PCs are dead and no longer evolving.
“Thou doth protest too much, methinks”
Being retired and more or less house bound, I will purchase at least one more desktop computer. I don’t care how many other people do the same.
Agree 100%. I will always have a desktop. As soon as USB 3.1 is feasible.
This (and your recent predictions posts) brings up something that you forgot about from 2014. You made 11 predictions that year, but only accounted for 10 in 2015. The 11th was in a separate post (back when most of your predictions were crammed into 1) and had to do with the fact that 2014 was *definitely* the year Apple was going to introduce a magical wireless dock thingy that would allow you to bring your iPhone/maxiPad into the office to be displayed on a big screen with keyboard and mouse attached. 2 years later and it still ain’t happnin’.
In fact, go into any coffeeshop (at least here in Boulder, CO) and you’ll see that almost everyone there as a laptop open in front of them. Why? Because they want to get real work done.
I too remember that prediction about docking the phone as part of a workstation. But we are already mostly there with wifi / bluetooth keyboard, mouse, external drive, printer. Wireless HD display isn’t quite there yet but it will be.
Thanks for pointing this out. I assure you I just overlooked that prediction: if I was unwilling to be wrong I wouldn’t be in the prediction business at all. You afe correct that device didn’t happen (or hasn’t happened yet). I think it will still happen, frankly. I KNOW Apple has it in the lab but then they may have time travel in there, too. Apple under Tim Cook is a lot more timid than they used to be about creating new product categories and destroying old ones in the process. The capability certainly exists if not the literal product. Certainly an iPhone 6 (or 7?) with its 64-bit processor can do any of the notebook productivity and entertainment apps we use every day. This is precisely analogous to the Mainframe2 (now Fra.me) cloud technology I’ve written about before except in this instance your phone IS the cloud. Now imagine a notebook form factor but without the 64-bit processor but with WiFi and Bluetooth. It would be super-slim and the battery would last a long, long time and the whole thing — it is after all a peripheral — could cost less than either a notebook or a phone. So my mistake is that Apple didn’t do it. That IS my mistake. But I think it was a mistake on Apple’s part, too. A mistake that I hope they rectify soon.
Re: “It would be super-slim and the battery would last a long, long time”. You’re basically referring to iOS or Windows RT (rebranded to Windows Mobile). Neither of these platforms have been accepted to do real work yet. They may be someday, but not before Apple and Microsoft continue to weaken and discourage the use of x86 based OSs like OS X and Windows. Eventually we’ll reach the point where every powerful app is only offered as a service, with an infinity price tag, since the app payments and bandwidth costs never stop. This is not a technology breakthrough so much as a marketing breakthrough.
Remember the “Exclusion Principle” in Physics?
“..states that two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously…”
Well, think of this. This is not an either/or thing. Someone mentioned there are still motion pictures, radio, and TV(no more over the air analog though). For that matter, there are still pinball machines, and a few cars here and there with 8-tracks that still function. Question, at what point is an old technological product defunct, for all intents?
I mention the “Exclusion Principle”, as, when someone is surfing the web or “doing work”, whatever the hell “work” is,on a smartphone or tab, they cannot be on a desktop doing the same “at the same time”. Considering the fact that a huge number of people, each day, are doing “work”, or just surfing the web for whatever reason, and entering and storing date(pictures are data as well), they are not doing that on desktops at the same time. In that sense, PC’s, including desktop/laptops, are already going the way of floppies in the mid 90’s(borrowed time). No one, also, has mentioned “phablets”, which are quite large, and, except for specialists in certain fields(design, programming of sorts, etc), can enable most “work” to be done. lastly, with “work” being mentioned so much above with the posts here, keep in mind the concept of “work” itself will be drastically diff in 5-10 years, itself rendering the old school PC’s superfluous except for a small number of professionals and a few nostalgia buffs(remember the pinball machine)..
While I agree that a lot of IT work can be done on a tablet, there are many tasks that can’t. Even things like cutting-n-pasting are easy on a desktop / laptop but extremely clumsy on a tablet !
The companies that make monitors seem to agree as those seem to be getting bigger and bigger – I’m writing this on a curved 34″ monitor !
Most people don’t now, and didn’t then, use their PCs for “serious work”. Certainly some did – myself included – but the vast majority of people who use computers now and a large number of people who used computers “then” (I go back to pre-internet days, sorry), use home computers for more “social” purposes. They’re not the developers, bloggers, podcasters, technical writers, graphic designers, videographers, gamers, or whatever doing “serious work”, they’re the end users that we are doing the serious work “for”. They use their computers for social interactions, communication, and entertainment. Not to develop the applications and infrastructure that allows them to do it.
The PC market is slowing down because mobile devices allow the vast majority of users to interact with a computer, the internet, and ultimately, each other, in the way they want to, using applications that a lot of them may have learned on a PC, but now can carry around in their pocket. The PC doesn’t offer them anything unique that a tablet or phone or game console, coupled with a TV, and maybe a bluetooth keyboard and mouse doesn’t offer at a lower price. A professional-quality PC is massive overkill if all you’re going to do is use email, a browser, and watch Netflix.
In effect, the PC market is undergoing a contraction similar to that that happened to the mainframe and midrange computer market had forced on it by minicomputers and workstations, and the workstation market had done to it by the PC. The mainframes and midrange computers haven’t disappeared and the market for them is much smaller than it used to be; the only people who buy them these days are the ones that really need a computer like that for whatever reason. Minicomputers morphed into servers based for the most part on PC architectures for economies of scale, and workstations have mostly disappeared, except as very high-end PCs. PCs won’t disappear completely, but the only real market for PCs these days consists of people who really need PCs for the things they want to do, and once they have one, it’s not something that gets replaced as often as they used to be.
Most of the time people are spending online these days is spend doing things you don’t need the power of today’s PCs to do, so why spend the money on a PC to do it?
So true, and brilliantly stated. But I will be using a desktop computer until the bad guys break in and drag me away to never-never land.
Yes! They will have to pull my full size, ergonomic keyboard “from my cold, dead hands!”
Bob,
It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. …
How many blogs do we read? How many do we remember? I read this when you first wrote it. It’s one of the few I remember. I was still working in technology back then. I’m retired these days. My job has become my hobby.
Technology has so many truisms. Think of Moore’s Law. The law of 30 Years is the one that was the biggest revelation to me, and it’s the one that continues to have the biggest impact on how I think of emerging technology. Did it take digital TV 30 years to take hold? That one might have been faster. But it sure took a lot longer than I thought it would. How about things that are emerging now? How long will it be before we get practical wearable technology that can help me remember names (ala Google Glass)? How about self-driving cars to let me get around easier as I age? In-home robots? I won’t even start the clock for in-home robots until somebody builds a prototype that can fetch a beer from the fridge.
As I look forward to my advancing age and how technology might be able to help me, the rule of 30 Years is something I keep in mind.
Thanks for so many years of great insights.
For those of us in our 50’s who have a long history within the computer industry (disk storage from the days of the ST125 5.25 full height 10MB HDD) I will continue to buy Mac laptops and store my data on it (and back-up to a separate local HDD/Flash drive) and have control over my file-based data.
Those who have belief in cloud-based storage will soon find out who’s data it is really is. Not theirs.
I have been on a virtual desktop for about 6 years now… I can view it on a phone, tablet, monitor, or TV.. This is the future for people who today use a PC for “serious computer work”.
I also do serious web development remotely. Using Citrix remote software, I develop medical clinical software mostly from home remoting into my desktop at work. Even though I have a nice PC setup at home, it is an overkill when I just need a couple of screens, keyboard, and a mouse and modest hardware. My PC at work can easily be replaced by a virtual PC, but this has to be within the hospital system for patient privacy reasons rather than the cloud. I have been doing software development for almost 50 years and agree with other comments that I am just that Lincoln buyer living in the past.
I hate you, Bob. For reminding me how old I am. I moved to San Diego in 1974, assembled an Imsai 8080 a little later, attended the first two Computer Faires in San Francisco, etc. The excitement was palpable in those days. Now it’s over different things. Time moves on, and I move with it…
Bob,
As you move towards retirement, please keep writing this column. Let all the other stuff go, do this on an irregular or occasional basis, but keep tossing stuff out there. We’re listening.
Very intriguing post – love the note about living in Palo Alto back in the 1970’s. Please don’t retire completely. Would love to hear more stories about your brushes with Silicon Valley greats. It adds color to the characters that made that area the innovation engine that it is today.
Both Bob and Mark S. are correct….the difference is the number of users using different devices.
Mark S is correct that serious creation needs keyboards, mice and big screens (graphics, programming, whatever), but the proportion of users in the population doing this type of INPUT is small.
Bob is correct that tablets and smartphones are ideal for CONSUMPTION of content, and the proportion of users in the population doing CONSUMPTION (and only a small amount of INPUT) is very high.
So….tablets and smartphones will dominate the market – but as Mark S points out, a small number of high powered PC-like devices will likely be needed for ever…..hence a long term decline in the market for PC type devices.
If this analysis is wrong…..can someone give me the number of programmers out there who write and test say 10,000 lines of code on a smartphone? Or the number of graphic artists who have abandoned their Apple Macs and are using a smartphone to create and distribute high end graphics for web or print?
My parents bought a house on Sharon Park Drive in 1975 for $100K. They sold it about three years later for $300K. My brother has threatened ever since to sue for failing in his fiduciary responsibility to us by not keeping it.
$300k in 1978 is equivalent to $1.1 million today.
I’d say your parents did just fine.
Also, keep in mind the “paradigm/template” of the PC workspace was created, more or less, or at least demonstrated , in 1968, by Douglas Engelbart(Mother of All Demos)….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
To paraprhase the Wiki entry…
“..The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work)..”
What we are really doing is making a fetish of the particular set-up Englebart created at that time, which was almost 50 years ago(half a century)…
When we use desktops and laptops, we are working almost always with a fixed keyboard, and a “mouse” of some sort or another, not to mention the more-or-less grounded screen(wedded to the fixed, tactile real keyboard…..That particular set-up is so ingrained in the public consciousness per doing “work” on computers that only perhaps 5% or less of those using computers with entry/storage(including smart phones and the whole panapoly of others), use them for what amounts to a fixed environment and that for work as well now….
The paradigm has now shifted away from that fixed “Englebart Paradigm”. It is so ingrained in the public consciousness that we forget it is almost completely irrelevant now…..It is more a conceptual issue we are wrestling with here, not a tech issue. Our usage skews OTGEAAO(On The Go Everywhere And Always On), while our conceptual meme skews EP(and only sometimes on as well).
Once we catch up conceptually with that, it will be a moot point what medium we access, process, and store data….
John Derbyshire wrote last year,
imagine someone time traveling from 1895 to their house in 1955. Telephone, car was just a rumor but now there is one in the house, air travel, TV, etc.
The same person time travels again from 1955 to 2015 to see just how much more things have improved, and will be underwhelmed.
Here is a video of Englebart’s 1968 demo mentioned above, for anyone interested…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VScVgXM7lQQ&list=PLCGFadV4FqU2yAqCzKaxnKKXgnJBUrKTE
Aha. So you’re saying that the desktop PC form-factor, with unit box, monitor standing on top, separate keyboard, and separate mouse, will be going away. It will be replaced by… something else. Perhaps a laptop-computer, with integral keyboard and screen and mouse.
Well, fair enough.
It seems to me that “completed office work” requires some keyboard input device, and some paper (or other way to deliver a product) output device. We’ve gone from typewriters, to desktop computers, to laptop computers. Our ‘delivery product’ has gone from paper to word documents to web-pages. But even now, it’s nice to have a separate mouse for ‘real work’ (that mouse-pad thing is just annoying). It’s even nice to have a separate USB keyboard (that integrated keyboard can be annoying). It’s even nice to have a separate, larger, monitor when doing lots of work.
I don’t see any of that “going away”, though the central device to which they’re connected, can get smaller and more powerful.
So, yes, in a way “PC’s are going away”. But in another way, we’re continuing to use them, just in a different form-factor. Just as automobiles continue to get more and more sophisticated, while NOT going away, I’d predict our computing platforms will continue to get smaller in shape and larger in capacity, while still NOT going away.
Your column reminds me of Amara’s law. Wikipedia even has your name under that entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
The law states that:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
100% Agree.
The PC is going to get replaced by smaller form factors. That doesn’t mean we won’t connect those smaller form factors to larger displays, mice, and keyboard to do what some consider “real work” (spreadsheets, arts, videography, programming, etc) – we will.
We will still have keyboards and mice, because they’re good input form factors for certain activities – writing, programming, etc – but they won’t be the only thing in use; and they’re good for their purposes because we need some tactile feedback, but then who knows – may be someone will come up with a programmable surface that can mimic the tactile feedback of a keyboard….
Even for desktops…they’ll get replaced by devices like the RasberryPi – most don’t need a huge behemoth of a system, especially one as costly (power wise – and that means $$) as a traditional desktop. Instead, we’ll have more dedicated devices – DVRs, storage modules, etc – that all interconnect; devices that can be turned on/off, replaced, or shared for their function easily, and quickly – devices that will be silent and need little attention.
Laptops will linger a little longer than desktops, but they’ll soon meet the same fate – something I’ve been saying since 2007 when Motorola initially put an HDMI+USB port on the Atrix and several other phones and tried to sell their (expensive) laptop docks…it just needs to be wireless and a bit more friendly. (And, yes, there is a BlueTooth spec that could be utilized…)
I disagree. While I believe tablets and smart phones or even devices like the raspberry pi will become more popular, even as advanced as microprocessors have become as well as video card with transisters becoming so rediculously tiny, most advancements have been in reduction of power consumption and improving efficiency but to maintain the same clock speeds, cooling is still becoming an issue.
I like to think of computers as the experiment of what we will see in new tech. We are seeing faster speeds with solid state drives with the m.2 capability, we are seeing apus that are getting up there but still behind on true dedicated video cards, and of course virtual reality with occulus rift. Even to power 4K resolution for true interaction is still requiring SLIed cards that require adequate power, cooling, and hardware.
Portability may seem like it will cause the PC to become obsolete, it may become more niche but no more than those who special order custom stereo components and those who buy a cheap panasonic set from walmart. It is all about the market.
The PC is not really dying. What is happening is that upgrade cycles are lengthening quite a bit. Between SSDs breathing new life into older PCs and modern CPUs being far more powerful than most tasks need, the old “upgrade every 2-3 years” model is more like every 5-7 years. Heck, the PC gaming industry is still pulling down $32B, bigger than it’s ever been, and is larger than both mobile and consoles. That’s not the sign of a dying platform.
When I think about people who I know have ditched PCs, either desktop or laptop, for phones and tablets, I come up with a single person. Just one. I’m going to guess that if all of the commenters here thought about it, they’d come up with similar sparse results. No, it’s not just old people. My nephews and nieces all either have or want PCs of some description and augment their use with mobile devices.
I put myself at seven years younger than Bob, but have walked a similar, if less successful path in the world of tech, however this is not about me.
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I agree the end of the PC is at hand. It’s not just tablets and smartphones, smaller better tech is now in our appliances and TVs and will emerge as the Internet of Things. I’m sure that concept will change too, but distributed intelligence means it won’t be as important to have that “intelligent box” beside your desk.
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As for the future I think the Amazon Echo is pointing the way, a real, natural language interface to all human knowledge. Kind of marries the vision of an intelligent box with less typing.
“Intel’s blazingly fast Optane SSDs are heading for gaming PCs soon”
https://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/intel-s-blazingly-fast-optane-ssds-are-heading-for-gaming-pcs-soon-1309371
“According to Intel, it represents the biggest memory breakthrough since NAND flash was introduced, and it’s a big, big deal with the company claiming it’s no less than 1000 times faster than NAND (with 1000 times greater endurance, too).”
https://www.legitreviews.com/intel-shows-off-512gb-optane-drive-with-3d-xpoint-memory-that-fits-in-ddr4-slot_176826
10 TB SSD drives are coming. Also, the Optane technology may keep Intel alive as their expensive x86 CPUs slowly get replaced with cheap ARM technology.
Bob – Another brain expander; thanks. Since humans are only evolving slowly, I think you are right about the idea of a separate thing that sits on your desk (or beside it) is moving quickly into obsolescence. If the human IO device (spacious monitor, full size keyboard and mouse) just paired and attached to your phone (think bluetooth in the car), as you sit at your desk–How many of us would care? Sixty-four bit ARM processors with a full size keyboard and monitor would do 99.9% of what I need to do as a manager: PowerPoint and email. Email is almost already better on my phone (certainly better spell check); one more 18 month cycle and some steroidal-bluetooth connection handling multiple HD displays and the business folks – who just want it to *work* – will be more than happy if the doc they were working on in their uber car driving in just pops open like when you dock your ‘laptop’ today.
Re: “just pops open” What pops open?
If the document you were working on during the drive to work automatically reopened when you sat down at your desk.
Except for the “automatic” part, that’s possible now if the document is saved to Google Drive or One Drive. We may not even want “automatic”, like if we were looking at porn during the drive, since our priorities change when we arrive at work.
I understand what Bob is saying, the euphoric era of the PC is over and actually has been for a while. However this does not mean the PC is an extinct product. A desktop computer remains the best tool for interactive computer work and anything else requires compromises in efficiency.
Technology that replaces the need for desktop interaction with a computer will kill the product we know as a PC. Make it possible to write code, design and create stuff or edit video on a virtual dual 30″ monitors with hand and/or eye gestures and the need for a desktop will vanish. Until then we will have our desks and our keyboards, mice and monitors connected to a “PC”.
Interesting article Bob.
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I have a different take on this subject. I consider myself one of the first PC users. I was using personal computing in the form time sharing and interactive terminals years before the first Apple or the IBM PC. I remember these devices being interesting at the time but lacked the power I needed for my work. In tine the processors caught up, but the operating systems lagged behind. I remember the day I compiled my first 32-bit Fortran program on a PS/2 Model 70, with a math coprocessor, under DOS, using a PharLap DOS extender. When I ran some tests of the application I had near the compute power in a $6000 PC as I did on all but the biggest IBM or DEC systems.
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For the first 10 years or so of personal computing some of the big uses were (1) a word processor, (2) a spreadsheet, (3) terminal for other systems, and other stuff. While everyone wanted their own PC, the ones with the strongest business case to get a $6000 device in their office were the ones who wrote code, did data analysis, etc. They were the ones who were using the compute power to produce business results for the firm.
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In time operating systems improved and the hardware got cheaper, and everyone got a PC. The big apps for the masses were at first email, later web surfing, later music and video. It is important to note what the majority of people did on their systems is a lot different than the early pioneers. I see tablets and smart phones as simply an extension of the PC evolution — better hardware, better software, cheaper, and everyone is still doing mostly email, web surfing, etc.
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The PC, or the workstation is a highly optimized tool designed to do certain things very well. I don’t see that need vanishing anytime soon. People who need keyboards and dedicated computing systems probably account for 1-3% of the total population. The other 97+% are served well with mobile devices. In the end it will come down to the right tool for the job — and there remains a clear need for both tools. We’ll probably stop seeing PC’s for sale in stores soon. The PC will go back to its roots and be a specialized device for special applications.
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Having watched this evolution myself (I once visited Bob in his Palo Alto home.) I can say there is more to come. While the innovation and integration of mobile devices, networks, cloud, the Internet, etc is all very impressive and very exciting — it needs more work. Personally I am not comfortable with how my personal data is stored. The integration between apps, their data, the platforms, and forms of storage needs work. I do not want, for example my tax data in the cloud. I’d like to keep it in my home. I’d like to keep all my personal data together and be able to manage it. I’d like to have a highly encrypted backup of my data in the cloud. I’d like to have it in a portable form that could be moved to another cloud backup provider.
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There will be more evolution in mobile devices and their applications. The “model” of what all needs to be done exists in today’s network connected PC’s. In time mobile devices will become more like fully functional PC’s. They have to. Our PC’s of the future could be running on ARM chips and Android OS. But to serious PC users, that doesn’t matter.
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Some devices will be mobile tablets and phones like today. Others will have big screens, multiple screens, full keyboards, very powerful processors, local storage, etc. They will exist in 10 years and we will still call them PC’s or workstations. The difference is for every PC or workstation, there will be 10,000 or more mobile devices in use. And that’s is okay.
Just read you post, Happy Birthday!
[…] If there is one device that will be associated with the Baby Boom Generation it will be the Personal Computer. A few boomers (most notably Jobs and Gates) drove most of this innovation. Very few of us (or even them) would have predicted at the outset that it would assume its current form and function. Former PC World columnist and PBS Technology consultant X. Cringely brings four decades of watching this world to a brief and personal retrospective of one of history’s more important technology, business and techn…. […]
Hello Bob!
I read your articles with a great interes always. As like you I also like to think about what was what is and what will be with computer industry and it’s my favorite hobby. Maybe I’m not as lucky like you and all others who has seen this processes live and were an actors of it beeing employed as a youngsters (many of them) by the companies like IBM and HP. I was an instructor at Cisco Regional Academy in BaKu”Azerbaijan. So all of these years i have read what I could and tried many experiments with hardware and software. I even went to the philosophy of PC and it’ historical developement.
Speaking of PCs what is personal computer that means that is what we interact especially and other electrobic devices also computers likes cameras, video cameras, TVs, phones even those we use at home, elevators and so on and all of them have chips some many of it, memory, input output and software. PCS are associated in our mind with it’ desktop form lactor later also laptop form factor has came into the use.when laptops came into the use with their farous forms including it’s keyboard that didn’t standart of PCs change. We still use nirmal keyboards and mouses and some even use them with their laptops and even taplets and phones.that means that standalone keyboards will live fin future too as books and pens.PC is a main hub between all of the computer standarts created from the beginning. It’ universal design allows to use it as an interchangeable decice and develope other form factor standarts on it’ base.When PC was created it’s main goals and purposes were to do a needed job and do it as well as possible just to get all and best what is posssible vrom these calculations. And later it was optimased as a workstations and this time also for the best results. Then there were needed to use this magical devices at the places where hard to go hard to enter hard to care and hard to put. And laptops came into the use with their mobility comforts and conveniences. That means when younuse something optimazed for something with an additional functions and eliminate it’s form factor size you make it less powerful but suitable. Everybody here know that the modules which are used to assembly PC more powerful than others used in mobile devices. Yes we know that scientists and engineers and designers tried to get a different way reducing the sistem requirements of software(saying what people want see on their screens having not any knowledge with it’s technical background, so they need to send email, talk with friends and share pics and music) and develop the hardware not thirsty for battery power, staying not overhit after many hours of use. But all of these for consumer use only. As a profescionals you never get something better than mouse for photoshop or corel draw and illustrator. For the phisical mesurements and standarts an interface is an important factor. And it’s the hardest question to solve trying to offer something new for customers. I do experiments every day trying to read in a sunny whether from my iPad smartphones of differentscreen technologies and find that reading from tablet is more convenient than doing it with smartphones.Also it’ true with entering the text and symbols. And it’ because the tablet has a measurements of a standart books what is very suitable for the size of human head and eye placement.And despite of all of my love to these devices they are hard to use in a aunny days for an outdor use. And also a meain psychological factors now I wanna to share. How many of us do a serious work during their trips among and between many stations when we move somewhere and in a company of our friends or the people speaking and loughing and joking near us? Every of us has he’s or her favorite place to work. And for it the convenience of PCs and that’ why many people who use them for five or ten years are not in a harry to change their behavour to use them or see in a different for. They just have not problem with it. and if one day they need to have a replacement they can start from the modulesb replacements and in future they can buy a new one but they will buy what they need what will do their job as well as they wanna it and they can realise their requirenets chosing a PC more than they could (if could) doing it with mobile devices.The rules of physics say that small things will do small things and big things will do big things.It’s imppossible to change.I have on my desktop any form of these devices and I realised that if all of them are my desktop I find PC as a more convenient and joyful device to use.
And I finally want to say that you will find best displays with PC only considering the size and resolution!
Thanks for reading and your attention!
https://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_how_markets_fail
The PC computer sales are tanking for these reasons
INTEL overpriced their best CPUs, too many computer makers are still selling computers with old CPUs that are useless for AV editing and gaming. Look at the INTEL’s top of the line desktop CPUs and top of the line laptop CPUs. Those should be the only CPUs that should be sold, not mediocre Core, Pentium, i3, i5, and other obsolete useless junk CPUs.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 is not very good.
Apple’s computers are overpriced and hard to upgrade and modify.
Only the gamers with deep pockets are pushing the desktop PC. Pick up a copy of Computer Power User magazine or Maximum PC magazine and you will see that desktop PCs can be great if you have the money.
The future ain’t what it used to be.
Hinagain dear friends!
Even that time I go to bed i gonwith thebthoughts in my head who poduces the best systems, whose chips are most advanced what xompany did more in IT industry who were the pioneers and so on and I start to do searches searches and again searches reaching all of the articles and blogs I’ve read many times. After many years of practise ana analizes finally for now I aproached the point which shows me what is what. Yes i agree that many companies for many years are producing PCs. And only one of them is making it’ own system and that’s Apple. So it means that Apple is a true Computer company on the base of electronics. The next one is SONY who produces Playstation and it’s Linux based OS. As we know that Sony had a brand VAIO notebooks and their line was one of best in industry. Despite of the fact Sony has produced one of the best notebooks that disnt help them to get a bigger piece of the market because they had’t use on them their own OS so all of the favours went to Microsoft. Sony was just one good producer of MS based yatema. And it sisn’t make them inique. Finally they have found that fact and decided to leave the market concentrating all of their attention on PS. But all of the other producers of PCs are an electronics companies who are using a standart platforms started by IBM and later being continued by Intel. All of these PC producers are just using at many occasions the services of ODM producers later putting there their names and writing deivers for modules. So id we take into the discussion of the motherboards we will find that just 10 per cent of the cost of it belong to system producer and other 90 per cent goes to Intel as their chipsets are being used and that’s the most valued piece of system board. But it was before and now along with memory controller the graphics controller also moved to CPU cores leaving the system board as an adaptor for ports.Why I type all of these is because I think the PC and notebook producers are getting les and less after all of Intel achievements.These days I help to my friends and neighbours with their problems troubleshooting. I tried many notebooks and I want to say that my 2008 Core 2 Duo MacBook is working better and it’s OS logic and interface is more convenient than all of them shipped with Win 8 and 10 systems.
Sony’s laptops were the worst in the industry. They were recalled after numerous fires. Their hard drives were prone to failure. Their screens would fail at rates much higher than other brands. They were OEM’ed junk, the only thing Sony about them was the logo. I vaguely remember people being told to not bother installing Windows 10 on Sony laptops.
If you want a quality laptop, look for Alienware, Cyberpower, iBuyPower, Aorus, and Origin. The MSI GT80 Titan outclasses desktops in performance. Origin laptops use desktop CPUs.
So Sony doesn’t produce harddisks and if they fail what can Sony do for that? If you mean the system controllers or drivers manage the drive operations in a wrong way? As I know it matters no and it may happen on any system. All my life I heard tht Sony laptops are one of the best in industry.Sony keyboards with that’s isle like form are today the standart for many producers of laptops. Yes all of those brands are great but all of them were assambled by Clevo and then rebranded. i’d like to add here also Sager which is also Voodoo book for HP, from that caregory.
Don’t you have spell check? If you do, a red line indicates there’s something wrong. 🙂
I thimk if Microsoft do their own hardware systems in time the IT industry could be in a different place. The Windows 7’8.1 and 10 OSs are marvelous systems but they have a fate to be installed on many different in design, style, approch, and culture. So why we have all of the problems now. All who are not bored try to produce PCs and notebooks using for it the standart operating system. Some of them are even not exist now and some of them are newcomers.I think that the greatest place for MS operating systems could be an Apple’s ecosystem.But Apple has it’ s own perfect MacOS.Anyway if we want see a perfect Windows then we must use itbwith the best platform in the world.
A number of the comments tell us that the PC peripherals are here to stay because they are just necessary. But consider a virtual monitor. Wear a VR HMD with sufficiently high resolution, and you will have not one “monitor” but a number of them, all virtual, all lingering within your VR context ready to take front and center. All without even taking your smartphone out of your pocket. And all very cheap, after your initial outlay. And the HMD should be around the price of one of today’s monitors. I’m probably talking a few more years down the road, but,say, five? And I didn’t even have to make this up. At the moment, I have nothing to offer for eliminating the keyboard. Your turn.
Ever since Radio Shack loaned me a TRS-80 model 100, in 1983, to play with ( I never ever did get on the internet then); I have been exploring online learning. Just a couple of days ago, a hundred or more Indigenous folk (aka Aboriginal, aka North American Indians) and I have been “talking” (on Facebook) about me “teaching” (facilitating – no one teaches anyone anything people learn) a complete hands-on series of workshops on how to design, engineer and building your own healthy, energy efficient affordable home (save 60%) . I did the latter, for 24 years in a face to face, 9 days long workshop – and put through 5000 house building contractors. What I am doing now: the “students” are located in Tofino on the Pacific Ocean, in Nova Scotia on the Atlantic Ocean, Toronto on Lake Ontario as last but not least on Baffin Island near the North Pole! I’m in Toronto. We are using tablets, laptops (smartphones??) and SKYPE. The students are in teams of 5 in each location and will be learning together. For example, they will watch my step by step demonstration (running a 14/2 cable into a rectangular box); then they will each do the exact same thing with the materials and tools they have assembled. when they have each completed the task – they first will check each others work – and then I will check all their work! And have them make corrections if needed. We will go through everything needed to build a house. I wonder why the latter isn’t done on a wide scale from colleges and universities everywhere? I wonder why specialized low cost “tools” have been developed to make it easier!
I wonder why specialized low cost “tools” haven’t been developed to make it easier!
Bob, did you happen to live on Portola? My wife, visiting her cousins on Portola, had the taxi drop her off at what she thought was their house. Turns out it was actually Tennessee Ernie Ford’s house the day of his funeral and she was invited in for food and beverage. She remembers them being exceedingly nice people, especially for inviting a complete stranger into their home!
Something I have found extraordinary over the past few years has been Microsoft’s myopia. (they seem to now have corrective lenses)
In the 80s there was complacency from the big mainframe people and the mini people that microcomputers were for hobbyists. Microsoft (and also Apple) changed that and ate their lunch.
Move to 2007 and you saw Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone, failing to see the upcoming threat, yet it was almost the identical scenario to mainframe/micro in the 80s.
Jerry
Bob: Regarding your photo with facial hair my father used to say
“Why cultivate on your face what grows wild on your ass?”
[…] long ago, such Internet scrolling transitioned from mouse wheel to persistent thumb. Robert Cringley recently posted an article detailing this evolution and why a computer in our pocket trumps one at a […]
Bob must be thinking of the way most people use computers (smartphones) as consumer devices to Tweet, Facebook, Instagram, listen to music, and read Web pages. If you are producing content, then a nice desktop computer (perhaps a well equipped laptop) is necessary to write and edit documents, process large images, build complex spreadsheets, etc.
Even reading web pages requires a powerful PC, since they seem to be designed to use up as much processor power as possible, without losing viewers, who will abandon the page, thinking it’s not working. Cringely’s site is one of the few exceptions to that rule.
I do not see PC dissappearing but simply evolving, there will always be a enthusiast and hobbyist scene, gamers, programmers, designers, work at home employees and more.
There has been a significant increase of sales of OEM parts and companies like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD/ATI have way too much invested. While desktop PCs for average use are slowing down, we are merely seeing a change in the x86 architecture to ARM which I believe is no different than the Power PC days when multiple architecture existed in the 90s. Look at popularity of raspberry pi and more modular designs with ARM.
Even if our future ends up looking like terminals merely connected to fiber with virtual desktops, datacenters and their oem providers will still be making equipment. I dont see that changing anytime.
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I’m a long-time software developer, and I recently purchased a Surface Pro 4 with 2 docks to replace:
– 2 workstations in 2 offices (that each drive 2 or 3 monitors, attached to ergo keyboard and mouse)
– laptop
– tablet
This was made possible by the relatively high-end parts that can be crammed into a $4,000 Surface.
In 3 or 4 years, this should be available in a sub-$1,000 phone.
But whether this is a Surface tablet or a phone, it’s either
a) still a PC because it’s my own (personal) computer, no matter the form factor, peripherals and servers involved.
b) not a PC because of a change in form factor, or because most of the computing is offloaded remotely.
c) not a PC for most people, because most people don’t need a keyboard and mouse/trackpad.
Most of the disagreement here seems to about defining the PC.
What is true is that keyboard and mouse/trackpad are needed for a shrinking share of computing tasks, and that more computing will be done remotely (a.k.a. the Cloud).
Re: “In 3 or 4 years, this should be available in a sub-$1,000 phone” I’m currently writing this on a shirt-pocket sized device running Windows 10 Pro. OQO first came out with this type of device in 2004 running XP, upgraded to the Model 02 in 2007 running Vista Ultimate, finally upgrading to the Model 2+ in 2009, when they went out of business, after which I snagged one of the few prototypes dumped on eBay. The main problem with trying to put a powerful PC into a small form factor is battery life. The OQO 2+ uses an Intel Atom processor circa 2009, renders most modern web pages slowly, and lasts no more than 4 hours with the huge 9 Amp-hour battery. When playing videos, the tiny fan makes a lot of noise. All this explains why we’ve gone to larger form factors for CISC processors and to RISC processors for phone-sized devices.
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CCTV is a situational measure that permits remote
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If greater compared to a person camera is made utilization of, then the
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Many people discover the CCTV market confusing
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[…] It’s estimated that we spend 177 minutes (nearly one-fifth of our waking day) on our phones daily — habitually checking them for updates around 150 times.[i] Furthermore, it’s predicted that mobile commerce will account for almost half of all e-commerce by 2018.[ii] Seasoned Silicon Valley gurus have even asserted a probable P.C. extinction as a result of the increasing functionality of mobile devices. […]