The last PC replacement cycle is about to start turning A friend recently emailed me at the end of a journey to New York City. “I was lamenting the weight of my company-issued Lenovo,” he wrote, “when I saw the machine carried by the passenger in front of me.” He enclosed a photo showing that poor unfortunate, who’d somehow managed to string a shoulder strap around an old Dell …
If the most interesting thing you do is powerpoint presentations, I suppose you could get away with either an ARM device or a weak laptop like a MBA. For anything more interesting, you're probably going to be out of luck.
It's nice to have meager expectations. Not everyone does though.
Plus all the tech everywhere has to support you. Not everyone is going to accommodate your Apple device (even in 2014). I suggest always having a contingency plan ready.
Whilst I get using tablets phones etc. for consuming content, I personally would still want a real computer (Mac, Windows or Linux) to compose actual content on. But maybe that marks me out as an out of day generation-Xer.
(slurpes a cup of Earl Grey whilst sat in the station buffet)
“When I’m in the office I’ll AirPlay it over to an Apple TV connected to a monitor. What’s the difference between that and a desktop?”
The difference is productivity. On a desktop with a mouse and a full numeric keypad I can fill out a spreadsheet with data from three different sources, draw a chart, copy it into a document, format it nicely, and email it to twenty recipients. All within five minutes.
On your iPhone, multi-tasking is barely feasible - every time you jump from your spreadsheet to your presentation app you'd find the latter'a process was killed because it ran out of memory. The Bluetooth ultra-light keyboard will be slower to type on than a more solid keyboard. There's no mouse so simple tasks like Copy+Paste take forever.
For content consumption (displaying your presentation) the iPhone is fine: but creating anything more than linear text, no edits, is a tedious chore.
"The difference is productivity. On a desktop with a mouse and a full numeric keypad I can fill out a spreadsheet with data from three different sources, draw a chart, copy it into a document, format it nicely, and email it to twenty recipients. All within five minutes."
What about network computing which would let you do the same things by connecting to some headerless server somewhere and do the same things with a keyboard+mouse attached by On-The-Go? Why does it always have to be a genuine honking workstation actually sitting on your desk?
"Why does it always have to be a genuine honking workstation actually sitting on your desk?"
It's your desk. you're paid to be there and generally available in that vicinity, and , if slightly possible, do something that can be classed as "productive" . Signed, your boss.
While a mobile workspace, like "open office plan" sounds nice in theory, and in several high-level use-cases is actually practical, for the most of us drones things come down to the above. And then I haven't even touched the bits where company policy or law *requires* the use of physical connections on isolated or firewalled networks while handling $data.
Why does it always have to be a genuine honking workstation actually sitting on your desk?
It doesn't always. I was recently in a furniture chain where the salespeople all had Ipads and took your order sitting on one of the sofas. They could also show you what any sofa looked like in any fabric. Quite impressive.
But personally, I prefer to type on a proper full size keyboard and look at a full-sized screen (24 inch 1920x1080, lamenting the disappearance of 1920x1200). That way I don't get RSI in my fingers and I don't get eyestrain and headaches and back-ache.
I have a smartphone and a tablet and find uses for both. But if I had to choose I'd give those up rather than my desktop (assuming I could go back to my old dumb phone for calls and texts -- with a battery that lasted two weeks, some things don't improve).
At work, any employee whose job it is to sit in front of a computer for most of the working day deserves a proper desktop system. And the employer is in danger of facing a claim for causing industrial injuries, if they think otherwise.
PS the laptop probably *is* dead. It always was a poor compromise, with a shrunken keyboard with limited key-travel and a too-small screen too close to the keyboard or too far from your eyes. As for those expletive-deleted mouse-pads, the less said the better.
> but why don't more laptops include trackpoints (or pointing sticks,
> or whatever they want to call them)?
Well, a female friend of mine used to have her own slang term for the "trackpoint", which led me to suggest that was why she liked playing with it.... (just as a hint; a female anatomical term)
Some headerless server which is probably actually just PC hardware in a different box and location. I'm not seeing the point where I can't buy such hardware and assemble it in a case under my desk arriving any time soon.
Besides isn't the x86 PC supposed to already be dead? Killed off by Itanium? Or was it by PowerPC? No wait, it was Alpha. Etc. There have been so many predicted deaths for the PC that it's difficult to take another one seriously.
I'm talking the office environment. If you need it for a private or personal business, well that's your prerogative. But you'd also be the exception. Enterprises, as content creators, will always need the horsepower. Thing is, thanks to improved portable computing and networking capability, man and machine really don't necessarily have to be in the same room anymore. Indeed, barring outlying circumstances like social interaction, why bother with an actual office? Meanwhile, computing has morphed into something that doesn't necessarily need a single muscleman processor to accomplish. By necessity, we've become much more adept at finding ways to slice the jobs into smaller bits that can be parallelized. Even some of the toughest ones like video encoding can be split effectively if you do a little analysis first (for example, detecting scenes and splitting by them would not incur losses because each segment would be split at key frames).
> Why does it always have to be a genuine honking workstation actually sitting on your desk?
Ergonomics and efficiency.
The "workstation" isn't so much important as is everything else connected to it. It's the peripherals. Although a lame locked down OS running on some slow CPU like something out of the 90s isn't going to be helpful.
The difference is productivity. On a desktop with a mouse and a full numeric keypad I can fill out a spreadsheet with data from three different sources, draw a chart, copy it into a document, format it nicely, and email it to twenty recipients. All within five minutes.
Maybe ... but how many of those twenty actually read the thing?
If the report is actually useful and necessary it would be more efficient for to automate its production rather than messing around with spreadsheets; if it isn't then it would be more efficient not to produce it at all.
I don't see any clear argument for a desktop PC here (though you will have to prise mine away from my cold dead fingers).
'The difference is productivity'. Correct sir.
When at work I use a VDI session, run from a little cisco thin client box, but, and here's the crux, it's attached to a mouse, keyboard and 2 big monitors. It's this what allows me to be productive (well, perhaps not on a Friday afternoon, but you get my drift).
When at home, I use the same VDI session. But I access it through my traditional desktop. Again, the critical part is mouse, keyboad and 2 big monitors.
I can also use the same VDI session from my Tablet. And my phone. Other than clumsily checking email or lync messages, I could have zero productivity from that way of working. As for 'casting' to a big screen, without my mouse, keyboard, comfy chair and desk, I'm not going to be able to work as good.
I think it's the 'Desk' in 'Desktop' thats the critical thing, and the peripherals that sit on it.
WTF?
Listen, I have a BB10 Z30 hooked up to my TV via HDMI, with wireless USB keyboard+trackpad and mouse (used if needed). They work as intended. I can do my work on that thing quite reasonably, although I never really did it for very long. USB host mode is great with a powered hub.
The sources lie on a 3Tb drive, also hooked up via USB - this thing has 2Gb of memory. Now, I do not waste time in MS Office, I do my stuff in vi from the command line - and it works pretty well. Does the iPhone have USB host? I am not sure and am too lazy to look it up - actually, I do not really care to know.
The only thing I miss is the preview.
Yes, I can create presentations from within vi, they can also end up as MS Office presentations, after a little work. I personally use PDF, but I can output almost anything - docbook, for example.
This is why we need both. I really want a iPad Pro that runs OSX (no not a touch version) when placed in a keyboard docking station. I could run dual monitors from the dock. Then when I pull the iPad from the dock it changes to iOS for on the go. I could keep ALL my files on the iPad and have an identical docking station at home and work. Yes something similar is out there, but I want Apple to make mine.
There will always be a place for a full blown laptop in specialty applications. Anything that is very processor intensive and shuffles huge amounts of data, needs detailed display on a large screen needs to be run on a device that was designed for that kind of work from the ground up.
One of the biggest reasons for this is power. Batteries just can't provide enough juice at a reasonable size to perform such tasks. As long as there are people who want to do video editing in better quality than what is intended to be consumed on a 5" screen, those who want to process astrophotos where 1 GB of data to be crunched through is normal for 1 photo or other processor intensive tasks that take a long time to achieve just can't be conveniently performed on a mobile device as small as a phone in a very practical matter.
The flaw with mobile devices is their size. Notice how they try to compensate by growing bigger. Mobile devices are very suitable for consuming media, but a totally unsuited for heavy creation of content. Ever tried writing a 20 page document on a mobile device? I find typing a one paragraph post on a discussion forum an exercise in frustration, let alone writing a 20 page incident investigation report. Once you add a blue tooth keyboard and an external display are you really much better off than having a laptop? Why is there a reasonable sized market for keyboard covers that attach to your tablet of choice?
I believe that the laptop will continue to have it's place, but most of the market will be for specialty models with higher processing power and massive storage instead of low end models not much good for creating content. There will be, in my opinion less variety of models and many of the low cost laptop makers like Acer will disappear. The prevalence mobile devices shows how little we actually create in our jobs... I guess all it shows is that the computer sales will have shifted to India and China where all the work actually gets done and all us consumer suckers will be using mobile devices because we don't actually create anything anymore.
"The prevalence mobile devices is that it shows how little we actually create in our jobs"
I think it would be an eye-opener to see how many folk spend their days generating emails... and somehow probably quite depressing.
Moving to asia I ended up having to design a case to fit a supermicro ATX xeon and full size graphics card into a standard laptop bag to take as carry on luggage, power supply went in the hold, but so much more power than I could have got from a laptop even for twice the money. The fella with the dell, just needed a bit more ingenuity
As long as I can be more productive on the laptop, and it costs less while performing better than a phone or tablet, with a better UI and a larger screen, the laptop can be the desktop. Surface is a neat idea but entirely overpriced. Just getting a stupid keyboard for your choice of app-laden tablet costs $70-130.
The $300-500 laptop range is great. Broadwell will arrive in force soon along with Kaveri's successor. 1366x768 panels will hopefully die out.
1366x768 panels will hopefully die out.
A man can dream ...
I suspect the 1366x768 panel will be with us until Microsoft or someone equally influential in the marketplace publishes a PC specification that calls for 1920x1080 panels as a minimum, or that prominently attaches the label "Low Definition" to 1366x768 panels.
Intel tried. Their roadmap keeps 1366x768 in the entry category of 2014 laptops. Intel completely missed the phablet and ultra-high PPI phone displays (as high as 2560x1440), but correctly predicted a trend towards greater than 4K premium displays (Dell, iMac).
This is why laptops (and yes, even desktops) will remain relevant far longer than another "replacement cycle" - content creation apps on smartphones and tablets are complete and utter garbage.
Ever try scanning 10,000 pages into a tablet, OCR'ing them, keyword searching, cropping relevant portions, and inserting those portions into a slide show or video presentation? I just listed 6 things you aren't going to do effectively on a smartphone or tablet anytime in the next couple of replacement cycles, because the apps simply don't exist at all or don't have anywhere near the necessary functionality. And yet, those functions are necessary for most law offices - so you've just taken the entire legal profession off the map.
What about design engineering? Architecture? Accounting? Etc, etc, etc. The apps don't exist, or the ones that do are such complete and utter crap as to make working on one for professional content creation completely impossible.
Yes, a sysadmin could do a little coding, and remote into some systems on a smartphone, and throw an image onto a larger screen, and connect a keyboard - we've all experienced it. Yay! That functionality has existed in some fashion since the Palm Pilot was hip though, keep in mind. I did nearly all those things with my first Blackberry just for kicks. Telling me that a sysadmin can keep some servers running from a handheld is absolutely nothing new, and has absolutely nothing to do with "the death of the PC".
Yes but in your example, you need one person with a PC used for such things, you don't need everyone to have a PC just in case they need to do some scanning.
Of course some people need a full PC interface either for performance or input/usability reasons - just as some people actually need 4-wheel drive or a pickup truck to drive around in day-to-day.
> Yes but in your example, you need one person with a PC used for such things,
No. In that example, ANY person in the office needs to be able to do those things. Not only that, they may have to do even more interesting things that the OP didn't even get into. He only went into ONE small subset of the given use case. He only touched on the tip of the iceberg.
Flexible powerful systems allow users to do interesting and surprising things.
THAT is the whole point of the PC. You are not stuck dealing with centralized IT management to give you permission to do something. You just fend for yourself individually or collectively.
Mobile devices have to lose the whole mobile device cripple management mindset before they displace genuinely general purpose devices.
I've worked in offices where anyone might need to do scanning. We didn't have a scanner on every PC. We had one PC with a scanner, which you'd jump on if you needed to scan something. If we'd been a business who did a lot of scanning it would've been different but then that's a special case in which case your whole argument is meaningless because we're talking about general IT, not any number of niches (programmers, architects, artists, scientists, etc)
Telling me that a sysadmin can keep some servers running from a handheld is absolutely nothing new, and has absolutely nothing to do with "the death of the PC".
Exactly; being able to do a job where your main tool is to immediately telnet into something else - which by definition makes whatever hardware is right in front of you irrelevant beyond a keyboard and some screen that can display text in a readable fashion - hardly says anything whatsoever about the general relevance of whatever you're using as nothing more than a teletype console...
The last phrase was probably the most important as it actually describes the whole article. ( see title).
Effectively, there is a movement towards small devices, but I hasten to add that the movement is within a particular demography. I can't say who that demography are but I might be able to who they are not. I would suggest that the following is a non-exhaustive list of those they will not move towards the smaller devices regardless of how much power they have.
Hardcore gamers. (There strife for power is never ending)
CadCam (was mentioned the article)
Video Editing ( was mentioned the article)
Photoshoppers ( again need lots of power).
Photographers ( need huge storage and large screens with reasonable CPUs).
Admins ( Any admin that is working solely on one small tiny screen must have a vey quiet life)... Multi-remote sessions require screen estate and a good keyboard, not a dinky thing where finding the Pipe Symbol is a major challenge)
Game Developers.
Big Data crowd...
etc etc etc
One of the major differences between the two platforms lies in their "Duree de Vie"... A smartphone has about a 2 year lifespan; a PC is usually closer to 4. This means a much quicker and expensive refresh.
The smartphone would have to be permanently connected to a power source, thereby removing it's advantage of being portable ( I agree that it will retain a least a few hours of autonomy though).
Smartphones are fragile, they definitely cannot take the beating that a PC/Laptop can take. Walk into any office and have a look at the scuffmarks on the PCs that are floor bound... Also have a look at a 2 year old road warrior smartphone, they get pretty beat up...
Personally I don't see a massive migration the smartphone as the sole device, it definitely has its place but not as the sole device... It is more of a compliment to the existing arsenal.
Currently there is a huge choice of platform PCs, Smartphone, Tablet, Tablet that resemble smartphones or PCs ( IBM Yoga style). Most of these devices can have a keyboard added, removed etc so they are quite adaptive. But each will eventually find its own crowd and probably retain them.
If I had to choose between the Smartphone, Tablet and my PC, I would definitely keep my PC and buy a very cheap "talk only" phone.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
>Hardcore gamers. (There strife for power is never ending)
>CadCam (was mentioned the article)
>Video Editing ( was mentioned the article)
I'd be interested to see some rough breakdown of how desktops are used... my guess is that most of them are fairly low end for general office tasks, followed by enthusiast gaming machines, followed by intensive productivity workstations (CAD, video-editing).
One trend worth noting is that for the last few years, new Intel CPUs have been geared towards energy efficiency instead of raw grunt - they are already fast enough for most tasks.
Gamers do push the limits of GPUs, but some may trade that against size and noise to run a 1080 TV in their front room (SteamBox). The other drivers here are ultra HD displays, multiple monitors and maybe the Occulus Rift... Most modern games don't benefit from any CPU faster than an i5.
CAD can be run on a laptop, and the big number-crunching - rendering and simulation - can be farmed out to an array of GPUs or even the cloud. Hell, some CAD can be used over the cloud - there are some advantages (pay per use, easier security administration, cheaper local machine, team collaboration tools).
Video editing.
A decent MPEG encoder used to take a day to encode two hours for a DVD on highest quality settings. A new PC greatly sped this up and I think a large part was going from IDE to SATA.
Now I handle HD, even the quad core plays up sometimes, but I do get the odd issue with strange frame behaviour (Editing MPEG2 if I insert an image it reencodes all teh MPEG2 and then messes up lip sync).
Gaming does appear to be a constant power battle, Good rooom heating though!
Video editing.
Main constraints: Processing power, Input/output, driving high res displays.
Some of the workload can be offloaded to GPUs, or to specialist parts of the newer Intel CPUs. Software has been re-written to take advantage of OpenCL - see DaVinci for OSX. More specialist encoding hardware is available PCIe / Thunderbolt, such as the Red Rocket.
The other concern is IO throughput. Storage will never just be on the local machine for reasons of redundancy. Within the machine, yeah, SATA will be better than IDE, SSD better than HDD, PCIe SSD even better.
I cant wait until the day Steam games are all kn the cloud. I wouldnt have to worry about constantly upgrading the gaming rig, wouldnt have noise and heat problems in the gaming room, the gaming room could be repurposed.. And, best of all, I wouldnt need to get out of bed to play a game if it ran on, or was streamed to a phpbe, phablet or tablet device..
the smartphone [...] definitely has its place but not as the sole device... It is more of a compliment to the existing arsenal
I completely agree, assuming you meant complement (not just saying nice things about the existing arsenal). Even in the things you list, mobile tech (and cloud) could complement desktop, though not replace it for the most part.
Long live the workstation and portable workstation.
...
I like the term 'workstation' as it defines where these devices still provide for a strong need - work (ie, content creation). I agree that laptops/desktops for consumption-only is generally overkill these days (outside of hardcore gaming, as the only exception I can come up with off-hand).
I can see good, solid, not-overly-cheap (but-worth-the-price) workstation-class machines going on for a long while yet. The cheap-end will likely be eaten up by mobile though.
Who in their right mind pays for online gaming when you can get better hardware for the same money and free online gaming on the PC - all using the same game?
Exactly, over my dead body.
BTW, I was helping a mate move-in the other weekend and found an xbox 360 lying in the garden ... was the former occupant's toy, apparently ... no charger ... I took it home, used an old 350W PSU and fired it up ... works like a charm ... now, I might get a charger second hand somewhere ... but I will never pay for online gaming for the thing, ich bin doch nicht blöd.
Python and a whole bunch of other hi-level SW is needed to manipulate sattellite data sets into useable GIS images to interface w/City, County, State and Federal GIS Maps (essentually making new maps)...use gaming technology that is normally only found in I7 workstations w/ LINUX OS's...also needs several 32 in or larger monitors...
IMHO= this is only 1 of many things that will never be done on simple pc's either Laptop or Desktop, do not even think about a cell phone... gaming boxes / technology, along w/HD TV monitors and multi-TB USB storage devices make quasi-workstations, just dump MS-OS and rebop w/a useable LINUX setup...RS.
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