At the end of Part 2 (Part 1 is here) I asserted that a new force would enter the world of computing completely changing the landscape. I stated that Microsoft will lose this battle. I lied, there is more than one force, but one way or another there will be one result.
The PC will die
I expect one thing to happen that the industry will have no defence against: The PC is going to be, for the most part replaced. You may think this a somewhat bold assertion given it’s success, but in order to understand why you must first understand that the economics of the PC market are somewhat different compared to the rest of the world, this alone almost makes the PC’s replacement a forgone conclusion.
When PC and Mac fans duke it out on-line the Mac is commonly criticised as being propriety hardware whereas the PC is made up of cheap commodity hardware. This argument hides a truth rarely revealed: The PC itself is a highly expensive niche product. x86 processors power more than 90% of the desktop market and have a sizeable chunk of the server market. Yet these same processors make up just 3% of the total number of CPUs shipped per year.
The CPU industry as a whole ships more embedded CPUs per year than the number of people on the planet – and they have done this for the last 8 years running. Ubiquitous computing is not coming, it is here already, but no one seems to have noticed. Phones, Cameras, Hi-Fis, TVs, DVD players, MP3 players – they all have CPUs. These use 32 bit processors which are only a minority in the CPU market, the real action [1] is 8 bit CPUs which are the market leader [2], this is liable to inspire most computer enthusiasts with horror but just consider that the embedded industry spent the last decade upgrading from 4 bit CPUs!
Despite it’s relatively tiny size the PC industry gets the majority of the profits due to some very large margins. What’s more, Microsoft have margins which dwarf the computer or semiconductor manufacturers, including 228% in their “InfoWorker” (read Office) division and a whopping 415% profit on Windows, by contrast Dell made 6% (figures for 3rd Quater 2003) [3].
It is these huge margins combined with the under-utilised capabilities of modern microprocessors that mean the x86 and especially Microsoft are vulnerable. It would be very easy to get into a price war with the PC industry – and win.
A second difference from the rest of the world is that PCs need to constantly upgraded. The entire industry is based on obsolescence. With a constant flow of people and businesses replacing computers with new ones Computer, Semiconductor, Operating System and Application vendors have done very nicely thank you over the past 20 years. However computers and software have now become so powerful and feature rich that the endless upgrade cycle is beginning to come to an end. In other industries users only upgrade when the product becomes useless, TVs and other home appliances can be in use for many years before needing to be replaced. This is also starting to become true for the Computer, I have a 800MHz PC and it’s just fine, I could upgrade but the fact is I have no pressing need to.
The challenge that the PC is going to have to face is a computer not based on high performance, high margins or built in obsolescence, it will be a small, ultra-low cost computer.
Return of the Mac
The original idea for the Macintosh was for an ultra low cost computer, it would have been very different had that vision of been followed, It would of had an 8 bit CPU, no mouse and no GUI. The end product was changed drastically after Steve Jobs [4] took over as the project leader and he changed it into the vastly better product later launched.
Ultra low cost computers have been done before, the PC Jr [5] was one example. By today’s standards it’s $1000+ price tag is not exactly low cost but then it was something of a bargain. However users then needed all the power they could get and it subsequently never sold.
A low cost computer is unlikely to be of interest to most computer enthusiasts but that is irrelevant since they only buy a fraction of the computers sold. Most computers go into offices where they do exciting tasks like e-mail, web browsing, word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.
You do not need a 1GHz CPU to do these tasks, in fact most of these tasks have been done on much, much slower computers for many years, a 100MHz processor will do fine, but our low cost system wont be quite that slow.
Someday someone with enough resources is going to start building them, I expect them to arrive from Asian countries most likely running a form of Linux. Education will see the immediate benefit followed by governments, business users will follow when they see the millions saved in large rollouts. Slowly at first then faster they will start eating away at the PC market, they will eventually take over from below. Microsoft will no doubt fight back with bigger, better software with ever more features but is this really important in business? Microsoft will have to have products good enough to justify their colossal margins, with low cost competition they are going to have to fight hard to avoid having to slash prices. The strategy I suggested they are contemplating for PCs in Part 2 will not help them here, they will not be able to get special hardware added to these boxes.
Who will it be?
Who is going to make these ultra-cheap computers? Dell? HP? Apple? Microsoft?
All of these companies are capable of producing the hardware but would they understand what they need to do? The technology industry works on certain assumptions and in order for this to succeed those assumptions have to be set aside. Most people are naturally conservative, businesses, and especially large businesses – even in the technology sector – are especially conservative. Whoever does this is not going to be a conservative, and most likely wont even be from the technology industry.
The business model for this is completely different than anything in the computer market today, this business will operate in a manner similar to that of a cheap TV vendor, nothing like a computer vendor. Whoever sells these machines will have to understand that the users will buy them and use them for years, that they wont get sales from obsolete systems every other year and high margins are a big no-no. This product will make it’s money purely by volume, just like normal consumer products.
That’s not to say it’ll be easy just if you know that the rules are different.
The hardware can be standard embedded parts or perhaps a custom design (which will save costs when produced in large quantities). Before even starting production you need to find an OS which can run applications acceptably on a machine which is lower spec than any PC on the market today. Programmers today are used to multiple GHz, hundreds of Megabytes of RAM and masses of Hard Disc space so there’s not that many OSs about these days from which you can chose. Even then you’ll need high volumes from the very beginning and that costs money even for low cost hardware, got $25 million spare? Then you have to sell them, but that’s a whole different story.
Giants fall
In twenty years time there is a distinct that Microsoft may be just a bit player – if they still exist at all. If it sounds off the wall that a small computer could unseat the biggest giant, remember that in Part 1 I stated that we can look to the past to predict the future, this sort of change has happened before in other industries.
I am predicting a change which already has historical precedent – even in the computer industry. Go back 30 years and only one of the four companies I listed above actually existed.
The PC itself brought in a massive change in the computer industry, turning it on it’s head and removing it’s biggest player from the top spot, IBM used to be the biggest company in the industry and indeed it was they who produced the “IBM PC”, the ancestor to today’s PC, but it was that same PC which went on to topple them from the top and relegated them to producing expensive business systems and chips (that said they do very nicely doing those and are by no means small).
I believe this industry is about to undergo massive changes, the rules and assumptions which have kept this industry in it’s current shape for the past twenty years are changing, Microsoft will not have 415% profit margins for much longer. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, we won’t know until it’s over, by then it will be too late and the new powers will have taken the reigns.
Rumors of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
The PC will almost certainly not “die” as such, these small computers will take over much of the market but not all of it. There will still be a market for high end performance PCs but it will be vastly smaller then the current PC market. Without the price advantages PC vendors will have to resort to new tricks to sell their wares, this will be difficult on Dell and HP but wont be a big threat to Apple who already concentrate on users who generally need more power than the low end system will provide.
It’ll all happen when someone produces a computer and sells it for $100. Yes, it’ll be that cheap and it’ll include the OS and all the Applications necessary to be useful. I expect the price to fall significantly later but with sufficient volumes a $100 (retail price) computer can be produced today. There are choices for the OS but it could obviously not be Windows, it costs more (outside the US) than the entire system!
The Second front
The PC is under threat from other areas as well, it’s not obvious right now but advances in other existing areas will produce new competitors which may provide an even greater challenge to the PC.
The PC’s little brother, the PDA is also under threat, the stand alone PDA will not be around for much longer. The foe is sweeping aside the PDA with ease, but it is this same foe which will later go on to threaten the PC as well.
The PDA is under threat from Phones which are now becoming increasingly powerful, SmartPhones are now outselling PDAs 2 to 1, I expect this trend to continue. PDAs will continue to lose market share until it pretty much gets all taken away by the SmartPhones.
This will be especially prevalent In Europe where Phones are generally sold with contracts. You pay the contract monthly and a big chunk of the price is knocked off, in many cases you can expect to get the phone for no cost whatsoever. No PDA vendor can compete with free so expect even the lowest end PDAs to become under pressure, as a result they too will get telephony functionality built in.
Eventually I expect the stand alone PDA to die out as a consumer product altogether but it’ll probably continue as a industrial product in some form.
SmartPhone Operating Systems
A new OS battle is opening up on SmartPhones. Here we’ll see a fight between Symbian, Microsoft, PalmOS and Linux:
Microsoft will keep pounding away but without the market’s trust will have difficulty getting any of the large vendors. Expect to see more no-name and Telco branded devices from Microsoft. The only exception to this is Motorola but they are also working on Linux based phones.
I don’t think Linux will get very far though it could do well in low cost devices. As with other markets the Linux kernel may look like an attractive option because of it’s “no cost” but the surrounding software will remain firmly closed source and will have to be paid for. Consequently the price advantage is not all it’s cracked up to be and with vendors heavily customising devices a complete solution with a good track record such as Symbian will continue to look like a better option.
PalmOS is a bit of an unknown at this point for phones, especially their new OS 6, which while no doubt technically good (coming from the BeOS team) is still new. That said I expect the usual PalmOS vendors will use OS 6 in new PDAs and SmartPhones though even Palm themselves are said to be considering using other Operating Systems in future devices.
Symbian has the support of the all the major vendors but that could change. Symbian was technically very good before they even started working on Phones in 1998. At this point they are providing a complete solution to Phone vendors and have many new Phones in the works. Nokia is also producing a solution for Phone vendors based on Symbian.
With Nokia now in charge of Symbian [6] things could get complicated, the Phone vendors will not want Microsoft replaced with another Microsoft. This could bode well for the competitors and I expect if the vendors are unhappy with Nokia’s control they could go running to the other options. This could do PalmOS 6 a world of good. On the other hand Nokia was said to largely be running the show at Symbian for some time anyway so it may not make much difference.
OSs aside the software market for Phones is starting to take off and I expect this will continue, Java is especially popular as it works across different Phones and OSs.
One thing I do not expect but I’d like to see is a return of Psion to the PDA domain, they never made anything that could be considered even vaguely Phone-like and with all the PDAs turning into phones I expect many PDAs will vanish, I can see their product fit into a neat niche – but even it would have to include a Phone. I do not expect this one little bit but perhaps someone else will see this opportunity.
To 3G or not to 3G
The day of 3G Phones seems be taking awfully long time to get here. That said that day is coming and the devices are beginning to trickle out.
Some suggest that 3G will be a flop, that 802.11 (aka WiFi) will take over instead.
I don’t see that myself, there are a lot more Phone users than Laptop / high end PDA users. 802.11 has limitations in that it’s target market is itself limited. It’s also limited in it’s range, an area where any phone will have an advantage.
I don’t see one technology killing the other, I expect one to live alongside the other but I expect 3G phones will dwarf 802.11 usage once 3G begins to take off. That said Phones will include 802.11 at some point so everyone’s going to have it anyway, this could lead to a price war between Fixed line and mobile Telco’s driving the price of both fixed lines and 3G down – at least in areas where the two overlap.
3G is still stupidly expensive and will remain little used until it becomes economical for normal people to use it. Once it does it’ll allow high resolution images to be sent and we can expect picture messaging to take off even more. I’m not so sure about video but I do expect it to catch on to a degree although perhaps not as much as the Telco’s would like. It’s apparently quite akward but among others I can see a use for video when you are calling distant relatives.
The Phone’s next victim: The PC
Phones have had Internet capability for some years, it did not take off as much as expected but seems to be catching on now. Once 3G SmartPhones appear I expect Internet surfing over phones to really take off. This will not only take yet more market away from PDAs but also threaten the PC as the centre of their users world. Who’s going to go and switch on their PC if they can browse the web while vegging out on the couch?
This may not exactly sound like a big threat but being on-line is one of the largest uses of PCs. Phones will be getting Hard Discs in the not too distant future and then will become a more serious threat to the PC, for many a Phone will able to store their data and do much of what a PC is used for.
The only thing holding it back will be the screen, but even that may not be a problem for long, put a connection into the base station for a screen or TV along with keyboard and mouse and you’ll effectively have a PC. Eventually you’ll not even have to plug it in, looks like “Ultra Wide Band” will cover that. The same technology will put a swift end to the “media players”, but then I don’t expect them to catch on in any case – who wants to watch movies on a 3 inch screen?
Scanning, Printing and other peripherals will also be plugged into a base station with USB / Firewire or whatever else becomes popular, perhaps that’ll be 802.11’s job. For many there will be no point having a PC at all, you will be able to do everything on a Phone.
Volumes? No problem, Mobile Phones are produced in volumes some 4 times higher than the PC. The No 5 mobile manufacturer (LG) makes more phones than the No 1 PC maker (Dell) make PCs.
The No 1 (Nokia) alone make more phones per year than all the PCs (companies and users) combined[7].
For business a $100 PC will be the draw, for consumers a SuperPhone will do it. The PC is under threat from changing economics, lower cost embedded parts and more advanced, more convenient technologies, and I haven’t even mentioned home entertainment boxes…
On the home Front
I have already written my thoughts on TV-PC convergence [8] in which I argued that while the capabilities will be similar the TV and PC will remain separate due to the different ways in which they are used.
When it comes to a fight however I can’t see a PC being a popular replacement for a TV. If the capabilities of the converged TV are sufficient we could see home PCs not being replaced for the more casual PC users. There are no end of PCs out there who’s capabilities are not even touched upon, or in many cases not used at all. There are many computers out there which are hardly ever used, move what it is used for into a TV or elsewhere and the PC has no more reason to exist. For these users the mythical convergence may actually happen and the TV will completely replace the PC.
The death of the PC may be inconceivable for the average geek but then they don’t buy most PCs, PCs are a mass market consumer and business product. Make something better / cheaper / more convenient and the PC becomes surplus to requirements for big sections of that mass market. When that begins to happen the PC will begin it’s downward spiral. The PC will start moving back to it’s original user base – the geeks. The lower volume of production will start sending prices up and this will make the PCs competitors even more attractive.
This isn’t going to happen overnight, but slowly and surly I do expect the pressures to build and the PC will start falling. The PC vendors already know that the endless upgrade cycle is coming to an end and are making a pitch for the living room, looks like it’s gonna be tough[9] and that’s just one of the battles the PC is going to have to fight.
In Twenty years
Fast forward Twenty years and the Computing world will be a very different place, the major players will likely be different and one way or another Microsoft’s absolute dominance will be long gone.
New practices in development, new CPUs, new PCs and new competitors for them.
The computing industry is entering a phase in which it will be consolidating the progress made into a solid infrastructure industry. Simultaneously the technology that made this possible will be rapidly evolving as the computing landscape changes into something we’ve never seen before, the PC was part of that journey, it is not the destination.
There will be winners and losers, most of all there will be change. A golden age of innovation is coming as Phones, TVs and PCs clash for our attention and companies race to produce the biggest selling products. It’s best not to bet on the winners now, the cheapest, most feature rich product does not guarantee anything, the iPod has sold well despite being relatively expensive and it’s not stuffed with features. I expect one of the most important features will be the interface, techies love complex stuff but most users don’t. The company who gets that power to the majority through a good interface will have it made.
PCs will still be around in a somewhat limited form but they will be vastly more powerful. New display technologies will also be around so what remains of the PC will provide a very different computing experience. When we have a Teraflop on the desktop, How will we use these computers? What will we use them for?
In Part 4 I shall go beyond guessing the future of today’s technologies and shall dive into the blue sky of real future computing.
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References
[1] Zilog have just released a new OS for the 8 bit Z80 CPUhttp://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=ZILG&script=410&layout=0&item_id=489701 [2] Discussion on upgrading from to 32 bit from 8 bit embedded processors.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031211S0043 [3] Microsoft make a LOT of money.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12694 [4] The Mac changed considerably from the initial ideas.
The_Father_of_The_Macintosh [5] IBM’s low cost ($1000!) PC.
http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/gallante/ibmcpu/4860.html [6] Nokia get control of Symbian
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3472193.stm [7] The mobile phone market is rather large.
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/4568.html [8] TV & PC Convergence.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5359 [9] Who do you want your media server from?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/51/35432.html
Copyright (c) Nicholas Blachford February 2004
Disclaimer:
This series is about the future and as such is nothing more than informed speculation on my part. I suggest future possibilities and actions which companies may take but this does not mean that they will take them or are even considering them.
… I think you’re twisted. The future of computing is for the most part driven by economics, and economics is very hard to predict. Economics is not only made by big corporations, banks, and small businesses, but also by the regular people. If you think that you can even come close to predict the future, you’re wrong.
One small example that comes to mind is MS trying to force people into switching to WinXP, from older versions of Windows. Even today they didn’t succeed. To be successfull there is one golden rule, that you just can’t bend too much: You have to offer good quality and affordable products. If everyone can afford it, people will go for it. That is how economics is driven, in every branch.
A fresh one: Why doesn’t everyone own a MAC? Simple, because it’s expensive, and because cheaper you can buy a PC with good specs. If Apple would offer a product at a closer price to what’s affordable, they would have much more business, because, after all, they are in the business for the money.
So my friend, it is hard to predict the future, and judging from your predictions, I would say you’re twisted. By the way, when 3DFX died, I’ve predicted it about 10 months before it happened, and sold my 2 voodoo board, which where expensive back then. All my friends laughted when I’ve told them that NVidia will take over because they sell chips to everyone and everybody, in all price ranges, and 3DFX will die because they won’t come out with anything revolutionary. So, I may be wrong.
Just my $0.0000000000002
I strongly agree that most of the sold desktop boxes today are too overpowered for general desktop use. I laugh at all those middle-aged men who buy 2+GHz boxes to do their surfing and e-mailing on. It’s such a waste of money.
My desktop computer is still a 400Mhz and I have absolutely no speedproblems for regular use. When it comes to music production it can’t get me that far though, but that’s high-end computing that’s a different story, most people in the world don’t do that kind of stuff.
I would like a small cheap fanless x86 computer as my desktop computer when this one dies, but I’m starting to think that it never will cause it’s been running 24/7 for five years and never a problem
I see that for the majority of the “PC” world the PC, as a desktop design, will die, but it will remain in a much smaller niche for a much longer time than most people think. The new “PC” will be super game-consoles designed to do more than just play video games. They will do internet, office suites, etc etc. The PC as it is now will remain for those alternative OSes that will continue to use the platform like Linux and BSD.
> Phones will be getting Hard Discs in the not too distant future
Are you kidding?
Hard discs won’t ever find their way into mobiles. They just need too much power. If you put that together with a decent 32-bit CPU, then power consumption will rise explosively.
as you say, PDAs, TVs, phones and other consumer electronics will begin to subsume the tasks of the desktop PC until almost noone needs one at home.
but, i don’t think the PC is going anywhere in the office: far too many jobs depend on the status quo and backwards compatibility. laptops are becoming more prevalent, and that increase will probably continue.
the biggest problem for the PC is that current speeds are fast enough: the upgrade cycle is slowing and might even stop… well, unless Longhorn says otherwise.
I laugh at all those middle-aged men who buy 2+GHz boxes to do their surfing and e-mailing on. It’s such a waste of money.
I don’t see that as a waste of money at all, especially when that’s what is being sold on the market today. Look around and every name brand PC vendor (Dell, HP, Sony, Gateway) is selling P4 or Celeron or AMD systems. Everyone is boasting 2+ GHz systems for cheap.
I’m sure you’re aware of the price situation if someone wanted to buy EDO RAM today? 😉
P.S.
That 400 MHz system of yours… 440 BX? 🙂
I belive such mobile phones with HDD already exist.
It’s not as extreme as you imagine it to be. It’s all the more reason to emphasize research and improvement of existing batteries.
Your right! Phones will just have better type of flash memory. He is talking how th ePC is overpowered for todays users. The only reason that the Phones are overpowered and can get away with it is because it is dirt cheap. (I believe it is sony that started making some new models with MMC, which is a dead technology, just because its cheaper).
And with Linux getting pushed into the Phones, you can expect even better phones, since, like I said, they get more functionality without needing to spend on a per phone basis.
Yet, they will never get HDD!
but my geuss is that it will be replaced by one [i]big</> computer. I think people will probably eventually just buy one big computer for thier house and have many thin client style devices that connect to it. This machine will probably also control alot of other devices in the house too.
I don’t think it will end up that the “PC” will go and Microsoft/Apple might win, I think computers will just change. A long time ago a company used to buy one really expensive great big computer and all the other clients would connect to it. Now we’re moving back to that except one really big computer doesn’t COST nearly what the old really big computer did.
A family will probably share one computer they buy, it maybe provided by HP, Dell, Apple, or maybe the real nerds will continue to build them themselves.
Having a desktop system will a resonable sized monitor to look at and work with is not going away any time soon. People keep predicting that Cell phones are going to take over the world, but here’s the deal. I don’t want to watch a movie on a 1.5″ screen. I don’t even want to watch one on the 5″ screen that a PDA has. Having a “workstation” is probalby not going to go away for quite some time…
The PC is not going away, but some other devices might be used as well.
It is absolutely inevitable that mobiles will have HDD someday. Phones are growing so fast in features and advanced functionality. With more apps and programs coming onto phones, the need of a HDD will become imperative. The battery issue is true but I am sure that as time progresses, new technologies will strongly increase battery life. I agree that in the future the need for PCs will diminish (I’m talking many years here) because all the tasks will be able to be handled by handhelds or other unforeseeable devices.
yes it’s true that today’s most powerful pc’s are overpowered to run YESTERDAY’s software. but tomorrow’s software? no way.
technology always advances, and people will always have a need for newer and better technology.
yesterday’s PC’s will not be powerful enough to run any kind of intelligent AI, or virtual reality interfaces, which may be the technology of tomorrow. imagine a PC which you need no physical interaction with, everything is done by thought, speech, or movements.
no 400Mhz computer can do that. not even today’s pc’s
what about games, the new doom3 is too complex for even today’s most powerful video cards.
yes, office’s may see a slower pc upgrade cycle, becuase all they run are office apps. but when some technology comes out which makes office work more productive by x%, and requires a more powerful pc, you will see offices upgrade.
pc’s will become smaller, and more embedded and integrated, there is no use for expansion video, sound, network, etc… cards on motherboards for office pc’s.
the way i see it, is office’s may lead to a more “thin client” solution. IMHO that is the cheapest way to go.
only having to upgrade an application server every so years can save a ton of cash for business’. and pc’s are powerful enough to handle large loads of thin client applications.
“Are you kidding?
Hard discs won’t ever find their way into mobiles. They just need too much power. If you put that together with a decent 32-bit CPU, then power consumption will rise explosively.”
I think he meant something like a flash card , same stuff we see today in USB flash cards. Or something similar.This is my guess.But I could be wrong.
“The PC will die.” That as a statement alone is wrong. That’s like saying we’ll all be driving flying cars, and yeah.. that happened, huh. The problem with justifying this argument with the ‘2GHz is overkill’ concept is that even for such mundane tasks as webbrowsing, you just might need that cpu power. Take a Flash or Shockwave heavy page, and you can most certainly peg your CPU. But I guess the author is still probably using Lynx because it ‘still works.’
The author could be right, however integration would be the key. If the phone/tv/pda/…. was going to replace the desktop it would still need to integrate with interfaces that work the same.
The keyboard doesn’t look like going away in a hurry, neither does the mouse. This argument is like the one where a single computer will replace all the computers in a house. Current computers don’t have the performance to really do this.
The market forces for integration aren’t even there yet. Everyone is doing there own thing. There is nothing to integrate the mobile with a television, only basic sync services for computers. You’d need to replace all that with something like the Plan9 OS (not sure is this is the right OS, but basically distributed computing) before this could happen.
If you think that’s adequate for a desktop, then you’ve never used a powerful machine.
I have a 1.5ghz AthlonXP with 768megs 333mhz ram and this is barely acceptable for my XP + Mandrake 10 dual boot machine.
What that means is I should be the bottle neck for the computer, not the computer itself. When I open a folder, it should open instantly. When I launch a program, if it takes more than 20 seconds (besides games), it’s way way too slow. One folder I have has over 42,000 files in it, and it takes XP about 5-10 seconds to open it and Linux kernal 2.6 about 2-4 seconds. How fast do you think 400mhz with 100mhz fsb would open that? I don’t want to wait 30 seconds or longer.
I’m talking about responsiveness. I can watch a video, burn a disk, surf, have my dremples desktop running and still when I open a folder, it will pop open without any hesitation. It’s only if I have solidwerks running or something as equally taxing that makes my computer choke. To me, that tells me that my box still isn’t there.
When computers are instant on, instant off, instant anything you open whether is local or on a lan or on the net, computers ARE NOT FAST ENOUGh!!!
Death to the PCs! Bring on the yellowt… *cough* the INTERNET APPLIANCES!
The PC will die!! Free at last! We will free at last!!
I’m sorry, but I don’t see people preferring a little couple inch screen to a full screen at 1600×1200 resolution which allows for so much more productivity, and if my cell phone can fit as much on it as my monitor at 1600×1200 allowing me to still be just as productive while remaining as small as a cell phone, well, thats what it will take to switch me away from the computer where I need productive… Sure, the desktops may die as it may come to the point where there is no advantage to a desktop over a laptop, but at least laptops are going to be here in 20 years…
“I belive such mobile phones with HDD already exist.
It’s not as extreme as you imagine it to be. It’s all the more reason to emphasize research and improvement of existing batteries.”
Fuel cells are coming.
Hard drives with the power consumption suitable for mobile phones are here already.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0401/04010804toshibahdd.asp
I could imagine with a bit of smart programming these drive could be powered up and down when required, not running all the time as in a PC. As other posters have noted this type of technology will also drive battery research, note that early generation mobiles required a charge once each day, now I can almost run my phone on a once a week charge.
I like it when people go out on a limb (the future) and make arguments about what will come. Cudos to this author!!!!!
I don’t know what will become of the current PC but I will fight to keep my permanent records behind my firewall and my encryption! Let freedom ring!
The PC might die, but if, it will die because it will get replaced by another open, extensible system!
Perhaps forgotten, the successful PC market was pioneered by the Apple ][ whose hardware design was open from the beginning (I have the technical manual with the schematics still) the only problem the early cloners had, was to come up with a compatible firmware.
Because the Apple ][ had slots, one was able to add new capabilities to the system, although we saw that flexibility only in its beginnings, what we do today, ripping out graphics boards, adding faster CPUs was not common at time.
I knew it would be a success, once I saw small companies importing cloned boards from the east.
I guess the PC from IBM took over the Apple ][, because it came with faster processeer (4,77MHz instead of 1 MHz), 16bit instead of 8bit, MS Flight Simulator faster than on Apple ][, and improved graphics.
Not to mention Turbo Pascal and Apple’s move towards the MacIntosh.
I am not sure if business software was better on the early PC than on the Apple ][, Visical was a cool spreadsheet on the Apple, also wordstar.
If the PC architecture gets replaced I only think so by an even more powerful and perhaps more open system.
Perhaps cube with no noise, lots of GHz and module bays for nano technics? 🙂
Regards,
Marc
The CPU industry as a whole ships more embedded CPUs per year than the number of people on the planet – and they have done this for the last 8 years running. Ubiquitous computing is not coming, it is here already, but no one seems to have noticed. Phones, Cameras, Hi-Fis, TVs, DVD players, MP3 players – they all have CPUs. These use 32 bit processors which are only a minority in the CPU market, the real action [1] is 8 bit CPUs which are the market leader [2], this is liable to inspire most computer enthusiasts with horror but just consider that the embedded industry spent the last decade upgrading from 4 bit CPUs!
This is a silly comparison. It’s like saying “the hatchback will die because hatchbacks only make up 3% of the market for tyres”.
A PC is not an embedded chip. They’re so comprehensively different that I’m amazed you could even *think up* such an analogy, let alone try and use it.
A second difference from the rest of the world is that PCs need to constantly upgraded.
Rubbish. Certainly on the x86 side, PCs have been “fast enough” since the days of ~500Mhz P3s for the things most people do. Macs still have a ways to go before they hit that point (even a G5 feels chunky to use) but it shouldn’t be more than a year or two before they hit that point. You no more need to upgrade your PC than you need to buy a new car on the same schedule.
The entire industry is based on obsolescence.
How many industries can you think of that this *doesn’t* apply to just as equally ?
In other industries users only upgrade when the product becomes useless, TVs and other home appliances can be in use for many years before needing to be replaced.
This may come as a surprise to you, but most people replace their car, stereo, TV and other devices while they’re still working fine. Much like PCs, they do it because newer models offer better features or just have shinier shiny bits. 9/10 times there’s no _need_ to do it, as you are implying.
This is also starting to become true for the Computer, I have a 800MHz PC and it’s just fine, I could upgrade but the fact is I have no pressing need to.
You have just contradicted your main point.
The challenge that the PC is going to have to face is a computer not based on high performance, high margins or built in obsolescence, it will be a small, ultra-low cost computer.
Right now I can buy a complete system from Dell for AU$900 and they’re not the cheapest game in town. That’s about a week and half’s worth of my (admittedly somewhat above average) take-home salary. Based on history, I’d feel confident in saying that machine would have a useful life of at _least_ 3 and probably more like 5 – 6 years for general purpose use. This is for a multipurpose tool that can be used for communucation, entertainment, teaching and research.
Computers already _are_ cheap. They’re not going to get much cheaper (heck, they can’t – how are you going to make it cheaper ?), they’re just going to get better at the same price point. This mirrors most other commodity goods (like, say, cars) – eventually the price points stabilise (~$14,000 for a brand new bottom of the line vehicle here in Australia) and you simply start getting more stuff for the same price (these days you’ll get air conditioning, airbags and a CD player at the price – 5 years ago you would have been lucky to get a tape deck).
You also seem to think in the future people are going to be happy with less computer power, not more. Nothing could be further from the truth. As things like “rip, mix, burn” and home movie editing become easier and easier and games become more and more mainstream, more people are going to want to do it – and these are some of the (few) things average people might do that would actually utilise the (relatively) enormous processing power of modern computers.
I could _possibly_ see a future where households invested in a single powerful computer and accessed it resources via thin terminals, but that’s a long way from the scenario you are suggesting – that’s not the “death of the PC”, it’s just a different way of using a PC. Not to mention the simple fact that thin terminals rarely cost significantly less than entire machines – and who’s going to buy a useless-on-its-own thin terminal when they could buy a complete machine for only a bit more ?
Your entire thesis seems to rest on the assumption that someone, somewhere is going to be able to make computers for significantly less cost. THat’s a *massive* assumption to be making with nothing more than a handwave towards supporting it.
Before even starting production you need to find an OS which can run applications acceptably on a machine which is lower spec than any PC on the market today. Programmers today are used to multiple GHz, hundreds of Megabytes of RAM and masses of Hard Disc space so there’s not that many OSs about these days from which you can chose.
Fantastic. So you can see software development practices *regressing* and things like shrinking code size again becoming more important that portability, readability and maintenance ? Not bloody likely. No intelligent software developer is going to advocate going back to writing non-portable OSes in assembler just to save a bit of memory that costs a few dollars.
One point I see missing from this article is the fact that a lot of the integration between electronic appliances/computer might not be the fusing of two devices, but rather an increased interoperability. Not that I am dying to control my fridge from my nonexistent cellphone, but if a couple of good standards for information exchange (XML, IPv6 &c anyone?) would be upheld, then you could program your VCR remotely via your email client, and have it call your toaster to check if there is some flour in the pantry. That would be great: and think of all the unprecedented mishap that viruses could do…
Only an imbicile would think a PDA or Phone would replace a large screen object for movie viewing. TiVo has more chance there, I mean, I’m not give in my 96″ Widescreen HiDef set for a Cellphone, no matter how many harddisks it has. B) Some geeks just don’t get it, I’m running Windows Xp plus several extra startup apps (you used to call them memory resident not sure of newer term) on a 1.4GHzP4 PC with 384 megs RAM, Never slow down, not even skippy playing Morrowind (about most advanced 3D I have). Now he’s Predicting a 100 dollar PC. Well there’s a 200 dollar one already, ever heard of the Linare PC, based on Linux, with all the apps who’ll need for all the things he says you need, with a 1.4GHz Duron, and 128MB of RAM, not to mention of 30 Gig HDD, and a CDROM drive (no not CD-R). Digital Convergence is overated, hasn’t ever really worked, Philip and C= couldn’t do it (Phillips made the… CD-I? and Commodore the CDTV) in the late eighties, my Toshiba with Radio/TV from the mid nineties (yep with 32meg RAM) didn’t do it. TiVo ain’t doing it. XP Media Centers probly won’t do it either. These components are seperated because something specialized is always better than something general purpose, atleast, at doign the one task. Gaming consoles rely on new games to sell new hardware, which is already low margin. It’s the new products peopel want with gaming consoles, but unless PCs make some new killer app that you need a new PC for, that ain’t gonna happen in the desktop market. Marketing is underated by this guy. Ask someone to name a PC CPU, now ask them about the Zilog or some Modern 8bit cpu, they can’t do it. they don’t buy things Linare cause they ain’t heard of them. People buy 2GHz XP boxxen because they hear of them. MY PDA works well, as an MP3 player, got one movie on it, but not gonna waste space on playing movies on it, unless I wnated to show a movie to a friend at school. Cell phones have too small, too weird shaped screens, though my Motorola could be about widescreen proportions if flipped sideways. Technology will improve, resolutions in cellphones, as well as color count. Same in PDAs. but a phone’s good at being a phone, after that the controls get too complex. Touchscreens are great being adaptive, but only so much. Most things today are present because their form works well. PCs could become small slabs, crunching in a HDD, DVD, and the mobo, but the monitors, printers, and kb/mice will stay the same. Phones haven’t changed much since inception either, the buttons are usually on a phone reciever itself now, but that’s about it. the PC market will become more like the phone/vcr/dvd player/tv market. It won’t go extinct, and people will buy windows cause that’s what they know, and that’s what their son wants for game X. In developing natinos they’ll be more willing to ‘try Linux’, but so far, it’s being more like ‘more willing to pirate windows’. Last, most people don’t buy a new PC every 2.3 years anymore, hasn’t been that way since the late nineties atleast, if not mid nineties, PC makers aren’t crakcing yet, and Longhorn may very well force a new upgrade cycle if it’s truly not backwards compat, but the cycle will be slow, several years atleast unlike the cycles of the eighties and early nineties (though I have still have my Amiga 2000) Anyhow, long rant over, ta!
You do not need a 1GHz CPU to do these tasks, in fact most of these tasks have been done on much, much slower computers for many years, a 100MHz processor will do fine, but our low cost system wont be quite that slow.
Uhh, yeah, maybe if we all want to go back to the DOS days.
I mean, if a phone can do all that a PC can do (because powerful hardware becomes small), what’s to stop a small PC (using that same small powerful hardware) from acting as a phone? You just put the cell phone hardware on a card that slots right into a small PC.
Seems to me it will be easier for a company like Apple to shrink the size of its PCs as hardware advances allow that, than for Nokia/Symbian to write equivalents to iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, Garageband, Keynote, and god knows what else Apple is cooking up (iDocument, a quicken replacement, etc.). Even the PIM software included with Symbian phones seems rather piddly compared to iCal, Address Book, Mail.
> Hard drives with the power consumption suitable for mobile phones are here already.
> http://www.dpreview.com/news/0401/04010804toshibahdd.asp
Looks like the IBM microdrive, the site you link to doesn’t say anything about power consumption.
> I could imagine with a bit of smart programming these drive could be powered up and down when required, not running all the time as in a PC.
Try laptop-mode.
> As other posters have noted this type of technology will also drive battery research, note that early generation mobiles required a charge once each day, now I can almost run my phone on a once a week charge.
And we don’t want to go back to daily recharging, do we?
There is no need for mobiles with HDD. I just read on /. about 8GB compact flash cards: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/11/142246
I think that should be enough for most users, after all it’s still a mobile and not laptop.
They can do what the want but my memory will remain behind my firewall and my encryption!
It’ll all happen when someone produces a computer and sells it for $100. Yes, it’ll be that cheap and it’ll include the OS and all the Applications necessary to be useful.
Please explain how such a machine is *not* a PC.
I expect the price to fall significantly later but with sufficient volumes a $100 (retail price) computer can be produced today.
With a monitor, keyboard, mouse ? How about a warranty ? What’s the lifetime of this machine going to be like with such obviously dirt cheap parts and poor QA ?
On what basis do you expect the price to fall significantly ? A 500Mhz P3 CPU is no more cheaper to produce today than a P4 twice as fast. Similarly with a 10G vs 40G hard disk. Where are you expecting these cost savings to come from ?
There are choices for the OS but it could obviously not be Windows, it costs more (outside the US) than the entire system!
Repeat after me: “OEMs do not pay retails prices for software”.
The PC’s little brother, the PDA is also under threat, the stand alone PDA will not be around for much longer. The foe is sweeping aside the PDA with ease, but it is this same foe which will later go on to threaten the PC as well.
I’ll agree that mobile phones will eventually replace PDAs for most people, however, to say these new devices will then go on to challenge the PC is simply silly.
I don’t see one technology killing the other, I expect one to live alongside the other but I expect 3G phones will dwarf 802.11 usage once 3G begins to take off. That said Phones will include 802.11 at some point so everyone’s going to have it anyway, this could lead to a price war between Fixed line and mobile Telco’s driving the price of both fixed lines and 3G down – at least in areas where the two overlap.
Uh, this is a bit like saying Firewire will kill USB (or vice versa). They’re meant for different things – neither will ever “kill” the other.
Phones have had Internet capability for some years, it did not take off as much as expected but seems to be catching on now. Once 3G SmartPhones appear I expect Internet surfing over phones to really take off. This will not only take yet more market away from PDAs but also threaten the PC as the centre of their users world. Who’s going to go and switch on their PC if they can browse the web while vegging out on the couch?
Anyone who values their eyesight.
I can see some value in browsing the net from a phone to do things like check movie times, train schedules, send a quick email etc. To say that a mobile/PDA device (with its inherently tiny screen and input devices) is going to replace the PC (with its – by then – 20ish” LCD) for things that require more than a few minutes interaction is, again, just silly.
And, of course, it’s never going to happen while browsing the net via your phone is incurring extra charges – even more so with the outrageous fees currently levied.
This may not exactly sound like a big threat but being on-line is one of the largest uses of PCs. Phones will be getting Hard Discs in the not too distant future and then will become a more serious threat to the PC, for many a Phone will able to store their data and do much of what a PC is used for.
Rubbish. No phone-sized device is going to have the tens to hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, or the processing power consumers are going to be asking for once they really get into things like editing home movies and downloading all their music and other entertainment from the net.
The only thing holding it back will be the screen, but even that may not be a problem for long, put a connection into the base station for a screen or TV along with keyboard and mouse and you’ll effectively have a PC. Eventually you’ll not even have to plug it in, looks like “Ultra Wide Band” will cover that. The same technology will put a swift end to the “media players”, but then I don’t expect them to catch on in any case – who wants to watch movies on a 3 inch screen?
The phone-ish device isn’t going to be the whole shebang. Most likely there’s going to be a “main computer” – a PC – with loads of storage, processing power and the like. Syncing up relevant information will become vastly easier and more automated but, again, there’s no way a phone-sized device is going to completely replace a PC.
For business a $100 PC will be the draw, for consumers a SuperPhone will do it. The PC is under threat from changing economics, lower cost embedded parts and more advanced, more convenient technologies, and I haven’t even mentioned home entertainment boxes…
The PC isn’t under threat in the slightest. Indeed, all you’ve done through this entire article is *reinforce* how important it will be to have a PC at home for all these little toys to interface to and how big a role it will play. What’s going to happen is the interaction between your PC, your printer, your camera, your phone, your fridge, your TV, your watch – indeed, just about everything you own with a microchip in it – will become easier, more transparent and more pervasive.
There’s still going to be a PC at the heart of it running the whole show, though.
And, of course, it’s something pundits have been predicting for a couple of decades now…
the PC will not die. But, the Power Processor(not the G series, ppc), will give both AMD and Intel a run for their money. Which is good. Competition is good. Remember what I said about HT’s paralell virtualization.
That’s going to come into play here. And no the “peecee” isn’t dead by a long shot. x86, I think will survive in built in virtual compatibiilty, for legacy hooks and rerouting. (hardware manufacturers on both sides the fence will breathe easier with that one).
Hardware is a strange business. It’s stranger to be able to keep up.
Case in point two computers, same home 1Gig 512 megs running
windows, opens most programs instantly next computer 500mhz
256 megs linux only, opens programs about as fast no
perceptible difference. not even my 350mhz computer takes
20 secs to open in fact, not 10 secs for anything.
“I strongly agree that most of the sold desktop boxes today are too overpowered for general desktop use. I laugh at all those middle-aged men who buy 2+GHz boxes to do their surfing and e-mailing on. It’s such a waste of money. ”
Says who? Is upgrading your 35 inch TV to a 45 inch TV a “waste of money”. If you have the money, and it provides a better experience, why not get a newer system? Especially, now when you can get a fully loaded Dell with a LCD monitor for $700. I say if you hide your money underneath the mattress, you are wasting it.
they’ll all have their face re-arranged, when quantum-optical takes the scene.
WOW, this arcticle makes 2 big claims.
1. Microsoft is going to lose it’s “top player” status.
2. It’s going to be a “sub $100” PC that brings them down.
Where the author fails to put 2 and 2 together is that Microsoft is already the vendor of a $100 PC called the XBOX.
it would have been better if he said x86 not pc would die, which I doubt cause everyone needs a cheap white box. as for excessive power yes 500 mhz is enough, even for flash and shockwave. The difference however comes into the professional field in which case more power the better. Also id like to point out that cell phones wont kill the PC. Who the hell wants to surf the web on a 1″ X 1″ screen :-p. Windows will never die despite what many os zealots think (including me) mainly cause they’re saturated in the Personal Computer Industry, everyone “uses” windows, though for the non lemmings theres now a slew of different oses like SkyOS and Linux that have come into play. so as for these predictions im standing here asking myself what is this guy is thinking, some of his claims strike me as just odd
If you think that’s adequate for a desktop, then you’ve never used a powerful machine.
Sure I have. I actually have a 2GHz machine which I use for music production. But for regular desktop use there’s no need for anything faster than a 800MHz(and even my 400 does well). Especially since I use BeOS as my main OS. But even windows is pretty fast on this machine (haven’t tried XP on it though).
Linux with X11 on the other hand is really slow on this machine so you got me there.
If you play a lot of new games then that’s a different story, but then we aren’t talking about general desktop use. I prefer the “older” kind of games most of the time so I don’t have that need.
Phones will be faster and have more space than todays computers and will able to do anything a normal PC does. You will be able connect to inputdevices wirelessly and to your TV. Why would anyone then need an extra PC???
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA…
realy funny article…. eh it was supposed to be funny, right?
I wish the editors had proofread this. All those “its” misspelled with apostrophes make it look messy and unprofessional.
Paul
Phones will be faster and have more space than todays computers and will able to do anything a normal PC does.
So what technological breakthroughs are you envisaging to allow a device that has the performance a 2.4Ghz P4, 80Gb of storage, fits in the palm of your hand and has a battery that lasts for several days within, say, 5 years ?
Congratulations! You’ve joined the likes of Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy in predicting the death of the PC. Scott McNealy tried a bet-the-company move with Sunray and their “The Nework Is The Computer” strategy which had somewhat dismal sales.
The PC will remain a standby until computers are capable of directly interfacing with the human brain. Certainly we will see computer-like functionality in more and more devices, but these devices do not eliminate the need for the PC. The PC’s multipurpose, Swiss army knife-like nature is what keeps it from losing out to a pile of single-purpose devices.
TVs and other home appliances can be in use for many years before needing to be replaced.
And this will also change as various formats continue to evolve. We’ll soon see HD DVD players which output compressed audio/video over IEEE1394 rather than using onboard decoders and composite video/toslink. Meanwhile most consumer HDTVs do not have IEEE1394 support. Users will either be forced to upgrade their HDTVs or buy an MPEG-2/4 decoder box which takes IEEE1394 input and outputs composite/Toslink video/audio.
Says who? Is upgrading your 35 inch TV to a 45 inch TV a “waste of money”. If you have the money, and it provides a better experience, why not get a newer system? Especially, now when you can get a fully loaded Dell with a LCD monitor for $700. I say if you hide your money underneath the mattress, you are wasting it.
Is buying the fastest car in the world when the speedlimit is 110km/h a waste of money? I’d like to say it is. While it is something to brag about in front of your friends and impress stupid 20 years younger girls with, it is in the long run completely pointless.
What kind on experience would a 2+GHz box provide compared to a 800MHz box for a person who has one or two IE-windows, outlook express and perhaps word open at the same time?
The fact is that a slower computer can also be made to consume a lot less electicity, so it will also be cheaper to have it running.
You know, there IS other things than computers to spend your money on. Like travelling, go the see a play or a movie, go out for a nice dinner etc. Those things are experiences that will last. Opening Word 5 seconds faster won’t change your life or make it more enjoyable.
It takes balls to write article like this, I agree with many things he says, though obviously not all, I found it to be an informed and well researched article on the whole.
Two Thumbs Up!
Well, that was amusing speculation. Here’s the real score…
PDAs are weak in Europe, because they never gained market traction in the first place.
PDAs won’t be replaced by phones, due to size and the usability of a conventional phone pad. You can’t write e-mails and letters with it, honestly. Moreover, you can’t read the things on a 1 1/2″ screen.
It’s just a form factor thing, really. Bigger question is whether cell PDAs with bluetooth headsets will actually replace high-end phones.
Watch the fun when long distance wireless rolls out, and suddenly you can have VoIP and far better data than your mobile phone, for less money. Except you have universal access to the internet, to your data, to reference databases and web services. Telecom companies wanting to charge £1/MB are going to lose out badly.
PCs? Expect the midi/mini tower to become less constant. Power users will still have their towers, but they will be rare. PCs over the next year, will rapidly run into the SFF market, with lower electrical powered components, less heat and a lot quieter. The small size and unobtrusiveness of the machines is the key. Effectively, most people will buy these systems and take a slight step back from the bleeding edge, because they value this more. Where this will merge with the laptop market is anyone’s guess.
Via Epia systems will also become more mainstream in technical circles and available from regular suppliers, servicing the silent, appliance market, which will grow, finally. The key will be systems designed for STB markets, with PVR, DVD playback, VCD, MP3, DivX and basic browsing. With added wireless networking, they will interact on local home networks and act regularly as servers.
x86 won’t be dead for a long time… Neither will PCs in general. The diversification in form factors will drive computing in the next few years, however. This will possibly lead to Apple re-introducing the Cube (or something similar) and being caught quite in the cold with only their current tower systems.
Expect major gains from Linux as well, due to the issues of programming for a multitude of form factors, input devices and screen sizes. It will be attractive to be able to write code for the same Kernel, across all systems, from the Phone/PDA->Laptop->HTPC->Server->Mainframe.
Expect a modular Windows XP into the market in the next three years, with the same idea. Expect Psion to be left out without a desktop market share for people to develop on/for. If they do take up Linux (saw a headline today to that effect), that will change the balance of mobile OS power, considerably.
Anyway… To sum up:
-More form factors
-Smaller desktops
-PDAs will live with phones (perhaps merging with PDAs for power users)
-Wireless changes everything
-The next ten years will be all about networking application innovations. Your machine isn’t an island anymore.
-Big wins for OSs able to traverse all form factors and be similarly programmable for all (currently Linux)
-Quiet (Silent!), cool, low electrical power are the new priorities
While I agree the computer industry is in for major changes I see a slightly different direction.
The author viewed the PC as a single product produced as a commodity by multiple manufactures. In the case of desktop systems this is true. However, the laptop market is less of a commodity market. Look at the offering from vendors. Features such a size and weight or multimedia capable are balanced against one another. The user selects the best balance of features for his/her use. Lowest costs is often considered after the feature set is met. Further just as the smart phone is displacing the classic PDA, the laptop is slowly displacing the classic desktop computer. I see the laptop evolving into a mobile data system that works with other systems in the user’s environment. The desktop may in fact functionally disappear.
He correctly pointed out that the screen of a smart phone is too small for most jobs. Users will want a bases station with monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. But will users want to go looking for a base station to use every time they want to send an email? I doubt it. Rather they will want a mobile base station that can go with them. The laptop will fill that niche. Combined with Bluetooth enabled smart phones users will reach the next level of mobility, pervasive networking. A user will simply open their laptop; it will check for a high speed WiFi connection on its built in NIC. If it doesn’t find one it will automatically connect to the internet via a Bluetooth link to the user’s cell phone. At the same time the laptop and phone will synchronize key information the user wants on both machines. This could include standard PDA data, music files, electronic books, even data files the user might want to access from other devices like his in car GPS system.
In this regard the term hub may be incorrect. It might be that no one device dominates a user’s computing environment. Rather the user will have a network of personal and shared devices he/she works with. Some like the GPS system might be highly specialized. Others like the laptop would be more generalized in function. The key feature is that they would all share information according to the user’s requirements so the user doesn’t have to not have think about his/her computing environment he/she just interacts with it.
I don’t know about you, but I live on earth. As far as I know, I don’t believe PC will die, and everythings go somewhere else. Also, the first one who resonded to this article is right, you are twisted. I guess the term “die” is not correct, on the other hand, you should use “PC will change its form”. You cannot predict the market since it’s driven by the economy, but when you think about the business, many of their products are created by doing a lot of research, the R&D department then finalize the report showing the trend — consumer’s need. Basically, nowadays mid-tower with 17″ LCD, mouse/keyboard, and wireless home are typical PC, but you should see a trend of mini-pc later if it keeps improving.
People do not buy 19″ LCD/CRT because they are too big. I know many of them use it at home, I am one of them but what I mean is the overall market. Like my friend, he would rather buy a 17″ LCD than 19″ LCD, not because of the LCD quality, but it’s because the size. So form factor is very important at this point.
You can see some vendors are trying to mix PDA and cell phone together. But in fact, I don’t think this will be the trend. First, Dawnrider is right, you cannot use that 1.5″ cell phone screen to do all business with the num-pad. I know you may wanna say that many of the 3G or 2.5G phones are having panel like PDA so people can input. But at the very least, all my friends do NOT use PDA say that they don’t wanna buy such a brick for just making some calls. Even Nokia 6600 is too big for them, according to what they have mentioned to me.
One more thing, when you say PC will die, and then you say 3G or not 3G, I think you are saying them in different timeline right? Since as far as I have seen, laptop is getting more popular now, like me, I am using my baby laptop typing this. But more and more people are buying laptop because their prices are closed to a PC now. For 3G, there are many negative news about 3G currently, and it’s still in experiment. I guess we will know if it’s 3G or not 3G before 2008. But I don’t think PC will die before 2008. Instead, it may go to cheaper mini-pc with Linux on them, using Server to run the entire office like mainframe but not as much. My idea is that every single device in office is an individual node: PC, PDA, and printer…At that moment, we use bluetooth, wireless all over the place. While Linux/Unix servers are serving as server, they mainly serve as information exchange servers and user privileges. So even PDA can get information from servers, print documents, and emailing. But then your boss’s PDA of course will have more privilege than you do.
Think of the following, bluetooth is getting more popular now, wireless PC peripherals are not ready yet(I see Logitech has bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo, but who’s gonna buy that expensive mouse and keyboard now? it takes at least 2 years to see the reasonable price). Then wireless home is not ready yet since encrption is a concern, devices seem not too stable and reliable as yet. 64bit CPU just started, when 64bit CPUs come down to $150 CDN, it’s reasonable for people to buy it, but it will take more than one year for one model to get to this price range. Then video card, motherboard, RAM…etc. I guess you are not saying PC is not dying suddenly, it will die eventually; but as I said, PC is not dying, it changes its form to a small form factor because people still need it to study, work, and all other matters…unless…
you are from different world that PC is dying already, while our world just steps into the century of PC.
Please explain how such a machine is *not* a PC.
Yes, exactly. The PC is more an interface issue than anything. As long as we have the monitor/keyboard/mouse interface which you sit in a chair to use, we’ll have self-contained computer systems to plug these things into.
Any attempts to make special purpose devices that require a keyboard (and pointer) will only provide a more cumbersome, difficult to use, and less versatile device than a PC itself.
With cost margins driving the cost of PCs down, what room is there in the market for single function devices?
Sorry folks, but a PocketPC is in fact every bit as much a PC as your desktop PC. He may be correct, the desktop PC may die. But the PC has only expanded markets, and it’s still expanding.
Unline analysts like to think, we have not come all that far in the last decade. I predict a slow change in some direction for the PC. That’s all the more I would venture to guess.
Is defence the UK spelling for defense?
Where does that come from?
Howdy
Mobile phones will merge with PDAs, PCs as we know it will die as will client/server architecture and be replaced with peer-to-peer and computational nodes.
The future IS distributed computing with one computing node rallying other nodes when it needs help, this is not in 5 or 10 years but it is maybe 20 or 30 years away.
Think of virii (plural of virus) this stuff has evolved for millions of years and is the utimate form that all computing will take.
For I have seen it and it will come to pass and if it doesn`t well i`ll be really old and people will ignore me anyway.
Think of virii (plural of virus) this stuff has evolved for millions of years and is the utimate form that all computing will take.
Virii is *not* the plural of virus. Neither in Latin, nor in English.
/pedantic
I do agree with most of what he said, REmember folks he is talking 20 years out. 20 years ago, someone had just come up with the idea for a computer on every desk(mac).
As for the PC itself I see the tower slowly disappearing, instead we will get lcd’s with touch screens and built it docking stations for notebooks. (I should patent that, and sell it to apple) The keyboard and mouse will be present but touch will also be used. Voice recogintion, won’t be stable for another 5 years, and 5 after that before any real kind of mass market.
Also most people don’t want to sit in front of a keyboard and monitor, The ability to move around will be important, General surfing the web will be like surfing TV channels, mindless, yet our Phones may even reach the style that Earth final conflict had, Video phones, powerful enough to browse the web on and simple data info. Computers will be used in a variety of ways, with out desks always needed. Smart displays may make a comeback after the prices fall(really fall). I don’t like sitting up at my desk, if I could surf the web from a light weight(2lbs or less) device from my living rooom for 6 hours I would be happy, but that same device must also be able to travel to the park, and be used.
I seem to remember IBM developing a “PC” about the size of a pack of card that slotted into either a desktop cradle or a laptop cradle which poss 2/3 companies were attempting to commercialise.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/68/35018.html
If this form factor is possible now, isn’t it logical that mobile phones/pocket PCs will evolve to replace your desktop?
Howdy
Just a thought, if an OS was made like a virus then if a computational node was added to a network then it could install itself and overtake that node and hence repair itself if damaged automatically(after the hardware was fixed).
The Node would have to run some sort of OS or BIOS type of thingy so that the code would originally be able to be inserted and run though, using this idea one could say install some sort of VM and run some common form of byte code (say Java or CLI or is it CLR hmmm) so that the hardware wouldn`t actually matter and then just get it to respond to or request help from other nodes.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Howdy
“Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It’s true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that’s just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don’t do that; otherwise, everyone will know you’re just a blathering script kiddie.
Hmmm seems i was wrong :0(
I do agree with most of what he said, REmember folks he is talking 20 years out. 20 years ago, someone had just come up with the idea for a computer on every desk(mac).
You should be very careful comparing such scenarios. Twenty years ago, the PC – indeed, most of the computer industry – was nonexistant.
Now, computers are well established, as are the things they can do and the things we can predict they will do. Back then, neither of these things were true.
Trying to say the next twenty years will see as much change as the first twenty is naive, IMHO – we’re not dealing with an industry of marketplace made up largely of unknowns. The chances of any *fundamental changes* in how computers are used are much lower than over the next twenty years than they were from the beginning of the last twenty.
As for the PC itself I see the tower slowly disappearing, instead we will get lcd’s with touch screens and built it docking stations for notebooks. (I should patent that, and sell it to apple) The keyboard and mouse will be present but touch will also be used. Voice recogintion, won’t be stable for another 5 years, and 5 after that before any real kind of mass market.
That *is* a PC. A portable one, to be sure – but it’s still fundamentally the multi-purpose device paradigm that defines what a Personal Computer is.
Personally I don’t think laptops (as we know them now) will be a keystone of future computing. Laptops are simply too big to really be portable (you can’t put one in your pocket) and underpowered (and overpriced) for the high-power tasks people who need more than a 500Mhz P3 want to do (playing games, editing movies).
Realistically, the main reason a signficant chunk of people carry laptops around is to keep their *data* around, not to have a complete PC they can pull out at any time. I think the proliferation of phone-sized devices with easy and transparent synchronisation (and sufficient space), coupled with ubiquitous computers that can automatically interact with them, will kill the laptop for the somewhat-average consumer who really only wants his desktop environment (email addresses, bookmarks, etc) on hand.
Why would you carry an entire laptop around when regular computers are everywhere and all of your important data is on the phone in your pocket, which is automatically detected and utilised at any computer you choose to use ?
Also most people don’t want to sit in front of a keyboard and monitor, The ability to move around will be important, General surfing the web will be like surfing TV channels, […]
Uh, personally I don’t wander around my living room watching TV – I sit (or stand if I’m doing the ironing) in one place and watch it from there. Now, I can see the usefulness of being able to go out on the patio and still browse the web, etc, but that’s no different from just using a laptop and WiFi to do it now. Swapping that laptop for a “smart display” isn’t going to change the basic principle.
As I said elsewhere – I can see a greater proliferation of thin terminals and “smart” phones and huge advances being made in tying them all together in the future. However, I also see that they’ll all be interfacing back to a PC somewhere.
Hallo Nick, we must all get together in Vegas again some time. IMO it is too soon to tell whether a $100 computerette will doom Microsoft and replace the Windows X86 PC as we know it. It’s a nice thought though. I’d like to have a low power computer the size of a toaster and weighing about 10 pounds that pops out of the box with a basic suite of apps and a USB-size cord that plugs into a monitor or TV set and the whole system is ready to shake and bake in five minutes. That would be nice. That would be an attractive mass-market product.
It doesn’t have to be priced at $100 though. Look at the I-pod. People will pay a little something extra for a nice thing. So this alternative computer product could go for $200 or $250 or $300 and that might give a better margin and the company marketing this item would be better off. It could be a medium-size company. Only some giant mega-company could try to market and produce the massive quantities needed to sell such a machine at $99.95 or whatever.
I would point out (and I think you agree with this) that today’s massive, clunky, power-guzzling Windows PCs are vulnerable to a challenge from a smallish, stylish, low-power alternative computing device that does the same things home users tend to do, namely word process, email, web-browse, listen to music, create music or art or programs, and maybe also watch TV and make phonecalls. And surely it is possible to make such a device. If you build it, they will come. The challenge is to build it and make it easy-to-use for people. To me this means you standardize it and develop a baseline software that works well and requires little in the way of costly support.
I also like the idea of a carry-along device like a cellphone or PDA plugging into a monitor and “becoming a PC.” I would like to see that, sure.
Anyhow, great read, thanks!
…who will do this? Programmers ain’t wizards. Connecting everything will be a real pain in the butt. They won’t get suddently brighter in 20 years. Imagine how destructive viruses will be in such conditions. Then again, it might not be that bad if we have one or many standards… and I suspect that your Sony HDTV will first work only with Sony-approved cellphones or PDAs. Same thing for your fridge, your oven, etc.
I might be pessimist… but hey, only 50 years ago, we thought that we would have flying cars, intelligent robot servants and bases on the Moon in 2000… and we are still waiting them. I prefer to be realistic. The problem with the development of computing is not the technology itself… It’s the human.
My 2¢. And I do expect to type messages like this in 30 years with a PC.
I’d like to have a low power computer the size of a toaster and weighing about 10 pounds that pops out of the box with a basic suite of apps and a USB-size cord that plugs into a monitor or TV set and the whole system is ready to shake and bake in five minutes. That would be nice. That would be an attractive mass-market product.
Yea, well, people have been pestering Apple to sell a headless iMac for years
.
I would point out (and I think you agree with this) that today’s massive, clunky, power-guzzling Windows PCs are vulnerable to a challenge from a smallish, stylish, low-power alternative computing device that does the same things home users tend to do, namely word process, email, web-browse, listen to music, create music or art or programs, and maybe also watch TV and make phonecalls.
You have just described a PC. Making existing PCs smaller, quieter, etc is in no way “killing the PC”. It’s not even particularly revolutionary or innovative, given it’s been happening since they were invented.
If people want to predict that PCs are going to get smaller, cooler-looking, easier to use and more common, that’s great (not to mention obvious) – but please don’t try and dress it up with silly headlines like “death of the PC”. A PC is a multipurpose computing device. It is not defined by its case, power consumption, price or OS. You can put it into a shoebox, power it off a car battery, run FreeDOS and sell it for $50 if you want, but it’s still a PC.
I also like the idea of a carry-along device like a cellphone or PDA plugging into a monitor and “becoming a PC.” I would like to see that, sure.
I’d be much more interested in a phone that could hold all of my important data and synchronise up with my (and anyone else’s) PC transparently and automatically. A device the size of my hand is never going to be able to offer the computing power and storage capabilities of a device the size of a regular PC. Such a device in the form factor of a credit card or watch would be even better.
After all, it’s not the device that’s important, it’s your data.
…I can see hardware/software getting cheaper, but I will never sit down for a night of surfing on my cell phone. And if they start making cell phones with 101+ key keyboard connectors and digital monitor connectors, these phones are going to be VERY expensive. Crap, my cell latest cell phone which is not THE most feature filled, cost (with a rebate + 2 year contract deal cost) $150. It’s full cost isn’t much less than an E-Machine and it certainly cannot do nearly any of the things (comfortably) that a PC running ANY operating system can do.
Mike
If this form factor is possible now, isn’t it logical that mobile phones/pocket PCs will evolve to replace your desktop?
Provided there aren’t any additional tradeoffs, yes.
If you were to proposition me with such a device today, my questions would be:
1. Can it burn/play DVDs/CDs?
2. Can it tune TV?
3. Can it run Photoshop, Cubase, Reason, and Logic?
4. Is it as fast or faster than a larger, similarly priced (or cheaper) solution?
5. Can I attach a keyboard, monitor, mouse, scanner, drawing tablet, and MIDI controller keyboard to it?
Disc-based media will continue to get smaller and higher capacity, and might eventually be replaced entirely by streaming content. The same goes for television, hopefully soon there will simply be a subscriber service to streaming/on-demand content.
The real issue is that the problem domain of a PC and a cell phone/PDA are entirely different, and the groups developing each of these technologies has radically different requirements. There’s no real advantage to merging the technologies, at least until we can alleviate issues of power and bandwidth.
I think by the time those issues are resolved, we’ll have moved on to direct neural interfaces, at which point in time all technologies for interfacing with intangible media (PCs, cell phones, PDAs, TVs, radio, etc.) will be rendered obsolete.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14098 – maybe triggered by this article series.
Your article is quite interesting but unfortunately it is very difficult to predict the future. Others have tried and failed. Even the RAND corporation who might be considered the best in the business fails more often than not.
How about Herman Kahn (founder of the Hudson Institute and former thinker at the RAND Corporation) who thought in 2000 we would have underwater colonies and be hibernating for several months of the year [1].
Or how about Charles H. Duell (former US Comissioner of Patents) who thought that everything that could be invented had already been done so by 1899 [2].
This article [3] from the CIAs website has an interesting perspective on the future of computing and IT in general for the interested reader. There is an interesting point in the introduction about what a group of 74 people thought the future would be like. Read the paragraph on page 3 starting with “In 1983, as part of the Fourth Columbia …”. Granted it was 1893 but I so far I’m still not getting to work via pneumatic tubes (although I suppose you could make a parallel to the subway).
[1] http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Herman_Kahn
[2] http://www.insightmag.com/news/2000/01/10/TheMillennium/Politics.Th…
[3] http://www.odci.gov/nic/research_techtrends.html
Who needs connectors when you can use a wireless keyboard. The major obstacle is the monitor but if there is a PC connected to a video monitor somewhere the output of the phone could be transfered to the monitor. Some cellphones already have Bluetooth so they can connect to a PC without wires. Just add a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Cellphones are good to receive information that is needed on the spot. Weather, sport scores, grocery list, pictures, news headlines, driving directions, and so on. Some information does not need a full screen.
Fast always on Internet and wireless technologies will change the way the computer is used. You will not need to be sitting next to the beige box. The beige box can be in a closet. Input will be a wireless keyboard and mouse. The beige box will wirelessly communicate to the media player connected to a high resolution video display. So, the out put of the beige box will be sent to the media player then to the video display. In fact, if you have several video displays in different rooms, each one could be showing the output of the beige box in the closet.
You could use a cellphone as the GUI front end to the MP3 player on the beige box. Or use a PDA to control the media player box connected to your video display.
Who really knows where this will lead?
Without comments about PCs dying or what will do it, there were some points about the article that intrigued me and I thought I’d comment on some.
Phones as PCs:
While many people have commented on nobody wanting to do anything on an inch and a half screen are right. But there is a proper work around. On my cell phone there is a plug that charges it. It would be easy enough to make that not DC-in but video out too (bypassing the TVs needing IEEE### compatibility) Leaving the antenna to take mouse and keyboard in. And programmable to send video out if needs be. There is laready a headphone jack which a speaker could be attached to. A phone basestation with native wireless support if you will.
There are many possible problems, however there are always solutions. One such problem is battery life. Some people have posted links to phone friendly harddrives. If I were designing one I would make the unlikely assumption that when you are using your phone as a phone, (not plugged into the ‘basestation’) some of the features would be suspended for power consumption. (Not providing a video out unless explicitly commanded to, that kind of thing.)
Another point I fear about is security. While this could be dealt with, wireless is… I don’t think wireless seucrity is up to par with wired.
PC’s will survive the future. Even with the advent of HD televisions no one will want to use them as screens for reading from. Also remember there is an effort to up the dpi displayed on monitors to 300dpi to bring it inline with priont quality. No way will television in the next 10 years match that kind of display technology.
Also media will become more pervasive with the average consumer in so much as documents will incorporate many forms of media from written word to sound bites to video to animation 2D and 3D. As PC’s become more powerful and software more accessable to the average user, this format of information sharing will be more common. Current 500Mhz and 1Ghz processors will not be able to deliver the means to create this. The nature of information is changing and it is due to the PC and it’s capabilities to present multi media formats. Now we are seeing this multitude of media, though XML and PDF formats, becoming manageble to the average user. PC’s are to multimedia what the Press was to print but the ball is only starting to roll on this one.
The only way small computing/telephone devices will entice me is if they have photonic display capabilities where I can wear the display devices like a pair of sun glasses and have great colour depth and pixel resolution displayed. Current portable display technologies just don’t/can’t do it. Also cursor control (alla mouse) will need to be though eye movement at the same time and then there is some form of replacement for the keyboard but I think speach can help here but in a small phone like package? Not for at least 20 years and the display technology will need to be semi-translucent if the user so desires so there is some form of mobility whilst these devices are in use.
Until devices like the above mentioned are available, I think I’ll stick with my current desktop PC although a future version that doesn’t sound like a vacume cleaner would be nice. Hey, I forgot, I still need a joystick/throttle/peddle combo for my WW2 flight sim experience (-;
I’m still waiting for the hordes of floppy drives to flee their plugged-in confines and jump to their deaths over the precipice into /dev/nul like little data lemmings.
Yeah, the floppy drive is dead, but it will still outlive the Death of the PC.
::snicker::
*yawn* *yawn again* he almost put me to sleep. Did your gf left you author because of your wild fantasies. LMFAO. Its high time you stop trying to be a futurologist…do something better because i bet PC aren’t going anywhere but yeah with new device may start to look more like a PC with built in CPU and RAM, NIC etc
One of your points is that the PC is no longer alone, and that that market will become less popular while the market of other gadgets and devices will become more popular. PDA, barebone firewalls, GSM, Tablet, Music player, all these stuff will run on a CPU with some other hardware. The combination of that hardware, software, and finally: end product will differ.
You see i also i agree with other people here who say they got ie. a 400 mHz machine. Such a machine can do about everything a normal desktop user doesb (playing a movie, a music, browsing, email, copying a cd, etc etc). So why get a faster computer? There’s certainly stuff which needs a faster computer like huge eyecandy, Photoshop/GIMP/alike, Cinderella/movie editor, and all that other stuff. But who exactly needs this for personal usage and how many people do need that? End-users, even stupid ones, will find this out sooner or later. They’ll find out they don’t need the newest of the newest.
one thing though most comments go on about the small screen being an issue, have you heard of oleds ? this could very well be the future *IF* and thats a big if, oleds become stable and whats been promised of them in other words the screen can be enlarged on the device to massive sizes to watch films for example..
Its a possibility, its one mans views it doesnt necessarily equal the future but it may well happen. alot of people said mobile phones would never take off but they did in a big way.
so for example if your phone could run a 5inch screen with oled tech that then folds out becoming a 20 inch screen would it not be likely that this could take off ?..
the keyboard also being a touchpad again based on oled tech. where it folds out so the device becomes laptop sized when your working on the train and then you go to leave click a side thing that retracts the screen and the keyboard and the thing fits into your pocket again.. the mouse would be like ibm laptop mice the little red dot.. it will be shit to play games with, but it would be more than adequate to do work with / watch films on the move..
Most are looking at the guys views with current technology in mind, but you have to think in 20 yrs time about the new tech that will be available also dont forget companies like sharp are already using oled screens on their digital still cams. only problem with oleds now is picture degradation.. and also oleds uses very little power consumption.
and again for the cpus not looking at old technologies maybe something along the lines of optical processors, read the new news on this site about optical processors intel are working on, and you could definately begin to see this as a possibility for the future.
I think that the author makes too many predictions. Of course that something like 1% of them will become true just by chance.
Also of course that PC will die eventually in few thousands years but I think that it will not die in the near future.
The author forgot way too many things to mention as (PC Games which brings better and better video cards, even with today PC’s it takes a long time to convert a video from a format to another format, …). Even with a 2GHz PC it is not so easy task to record in real time (for example) a TV show using a TV card, speaking about TV-PC integration.
I think that somehow PC will reach its limits when it will be able to deal easily with audio and video content (encoding, decoding, transcoding, …). Today PC’s deal easily with audio content but they have problems with video content (they are slow).
Just a couple things … contemporary computers probably use more memory and CPU cycles than is necessary, but at the same time future and present enhancements require it. I was, up until recently, running Windows 2003 quite happily on a 400mhz machine with no problems … that is, for serving web pages. The moment I started dropping more and more server applications on the machine, the more it began to bog down. On the desktop our lust goes even further, think anything multimedia.
Sure a 400mhz will do you for encoding an MP3 (or OGG, WMA, AC4, pick your poison) but how LONG will it take? Try your CPU’s power at decoding present-day video compression without hardware assistance (a la DivX) or even keeping ANY full page of animation fluid. You can certainly ease the pain with a powerful GPU, but then isn’t that just another CPU that you’re not mentioning? I’m biased because my machine keeps my time occupied with programming, but I can think of other tantalizing notions to keep my beefy box bumbling along … for one thing I’d like my computer to become my slave rather than the reverse. In order for it to do that, not only does software have to become smarter, but it has to think a lot more and that requires a faster brain.
And so today a 400mhz will do you fine for work-related browsing and tedious office applications that work much like the electronic typewriters of ye olde past. But your time is worth more than your measly machine. When business gets a whiff of something that’ll make their workers more efficient and scents of saving money, they’ll be dropping your ball and chain of circuitry in lew of the next holy grail.
As for the future itself, many here have already noted how difficult it is to predict (and many more just bitch to bitch, eh?). This article was definitly a stretch, but there wasn’t enough information to back it up. Microsoft is raking it’s cash mounds into a serious horde, and they’re just going to disappear (funny I heard the big iron is still around too)? They are a business-oriented corporation, nuff said. Most businesses will not be able to sell $100 PC’s unless they come mail order, used (eBay, Amazon.com, etc.), or at a drive through window. The middle men are still wandering the store isles peddling their wares, and they want a piece of the buck pie too.
Geez, I’m going to bed. I can’t believe I actually wrote all this and there’s already so many comments no one will read this. This is what happens when the Adult Swim keeps you up.
Chao!
To date, computer industry has always preferred enhancing performance rather than reducing price. For more than 20 years, an average computer has costed about 1000$, 20 years ago it was an Apple][ but the price on the label was quite the same. Reducing price for an equal performance would reduce the overall income figures of the industry ( and bad for shareholders ) whithout raising significantly the user base. There has always been a search for what could Joe Average do with a ‘real’ computer : The solutions were : Playing Games, Surfing the Internet, Doing some Sound/Video/Image activities… For many years console manufacturers have threatened Home Personal Computers.
You can compare with cars : More gadgets have been added to prevent prices from falling ( well, it’s what occured in Europe, I don’t know what occured elsewhere … )
To date, computer industry has always preferred enhancing performance rather than reducing price.
Demonstratably false. Indeed, computer prices are still dropping (albeit at a slower rate).
For more than 20 years, an average computer has costed about 1000$, 20 years ago it was an Apple][ but the price on the label was quite the same.
Uh, ever heard of inflation ?
Not to mention in the US $1000 buys you a hell of a lot more than an “average system”.
For many years console manufacturers have threatened Home Personal Computers.
Consoles have never seriously threatened home PCs. They cater to a different market.
You can compare with cars : More gadgets have been added to prevent prices from falling ( well, it’s what occured in Europe, I don’t know what occured elsewhere … )
Prices *have* fallen. Just because the number beside the $ sign hasn’t changed doesn’t mean the value of the $ sign has remained static.
I remember when Futurists were a bit more adventurous, with their flying cars and robo-hoovers. Why not go the whole hog! For example
1. Phone as PC. Imagine a phone sized box that does your PC stuff. Fold out flexible organic screen (check Philips new invention) for more space. Or shine the built-in laser pointer at a TV/LCD/smart wall/microwave, and it turns into the real display to do all the other things all via remote display. Issues are cost+ human hand size & ergonomics rather than +5yrs technology. Bluetooth v10 AGP edition?
2. Phone not as PDA, but as clothing. cufflinks mikes, ties as earpieces, earrings/piercings as storage devices. Watch as display/output.
3. TV as PC, why not?? Set top boxes for digi-sat/cable can do dial-up internet now, can only get better from the functionality side. If TV does broadband + storage for digicam pics, PCs will be used less.
4. Remember, the Sega Dreamcast had a browser and modem – it was the cheapest way to get online until very recently! Future gaming devices can do so much more + thin client potential. Hire MS Word for 1EUR/night etc.
Come on, on with some crazy futurist stuff! Oh the fun.
By the way, Palm OS phones are quite handy. Got a Treo180 myself. And a few years back there was a Handspring plug in GSM phone module for Palm3’s.
Phones do have “Hard Drives” except they are far more sophisticated in theory, than compared to your average Gb HDD…sure the phones use flash memory, but my “mate”. Has a P900 which is the Sony Ericcson, and you can download software which treats the phone as a PC, with a windows explorer interface, i.e. C: D: E:/ etc…not only that but the software written for these phones is designed to be small and memory efficient which makes them very impressive to use, whereas PC memory is abudance, to coin the term “if u ain’t got enuff memory go and buy some more”.
I know for a fact Americans have slowly trailed behind the EU, when it comes to phones. Phones in Europe anyway, are changing faster than PC’s. Phones are the new PDA’s. Although I think PC’s far more fun, when you can upgrade them and open them up….but we are living in different times and are moving to a future where “fun” is about time, and making time to have “fun”. Just don’t seem like a reality…..
Hey ya
Well… Inflation. So let’s hope a big inflation to get paid ten time as much and hope computers be sold at the same price ;-). The price of computer is falling at the same rate as other technological devices, about the inverse of the rate of inflation in western countries, thus keeping a constant price number.
The use of personal computers by people not involved in I.T. is raising slowly. Right now, Internet is a major reason for buying a computer, years ago, it was games. For how long will it be necessary to possess a real computer to get on Internet ?
With 1000$ you will have plenty of gadgets with your computer ( scanner, printer, ADSL connection, … ), but it is still an average single user computer. What Really costed your computer to date ?
( Many years ago, an Atari or a Commodore 64 costed much less than 1000$ and the screen was not included in the tag price. )
I insist, I don’t believe in 200$ Really Useable Computers.
Firstly I was referring to “wintel PC”, not Personal Computer.
Secondly the title is a (deliberate) exaggeration, it’s called marketing and evidently it worked.
If you are reading this article you are probably a “computer enthusiast”, for you the PC (or Mac) will not die out, as I said in the article it’s users who don’t use or even need xGHz of power and users who have $1000 paperweights, unfortunately this part of the market is considerably larger than the “computer enthusiast” section.
Most people don’t seem to get this and confirmed exactly what I wrote: the $100 computer will not be of interest to geeks and will not be considered a threat. It’ll come in under the radar:
I insist, I don’t believe in 200$ Really Useable Computers.
Exactly…
If you look at the Open Source success in Munich the government body are replacing 15,000 PCs. Using a $100 device would save them $5,000,000 and do all the same stuff the PCs will do. That’s the sort of area it’ll make a difference in.
Phone Hard Discs
I should have given a link for that, there are HDs in development (if not on the market) specifically for Phones. These are not going to be always on paging all the time like PC HDs, these will just load / save the odd MP3 or Image.
Grammar
i speak as good England as the Queen himself.
I’m British and so is my grammar… “it’s” is perfectly valid here.
tame futurism, give me morE!
Music to my ears, There’s more to come…
*yawn* i am going to sleep again
Take the cars. Cars exist now for more than 100 years. Are the prices lowering? No. Do people want cheap cars? No. Are the cars easier to use? No. Do people want more features in it. Yes. Do people want a bigger car than their neighbour? Yes. Do they need such powerfull engines and overloaded features? No.
So why they spend all their money in it?
I think the same apply to the PC’s, and that for a long time to come.
I read most of the three articles and disagree with most of it. You may think you are a visionary but what turned me off is the lack of a vision (well that an your abuse of the word ‘of’ as a verb). In fact you are just rehashing old predictions (which so far have proved false).
Lets just summarize: your points about sw architecture are not necessarily false but you don’t seem to have found your way to the more enlightening material in this area (as opposed to the consultant crap you referred to). The point of software architecture is not to replace software coding but to let software coding scale to more massive projects (i.e. develop with 2000 developers instead of 20).
Your points on cpus and why x86 is going to die are amusing but conflicting. As you point out x86 can easily be emulated so there is absolutely no point in wasting energy on anything else. As intel is experiencing right now, covincing vendors that they need to drop their existing software base is proving extremely hard. IMHO x86 or any hardware tied architecture is going to be irrelevant from a software perspective in a couple of years. Research about virtual computer architectures is only starting to kick of now but will deliver real interesting stuff a few years down the road. X86 will likely remain as one of a few legacy protocols that can easily be embedded in the hardware.
Your comments about the PC dying are also not very accurate. The point that you seem to have missed is that the PC is not about the OS or the hardware, it is about a whole ecosystem of interoperable hardware and software components from multiple vendors. No vendor, not even microsoft, has the resources to control and develop all of them cost effectively. PCs are about combining these components to do something usefull. MS sells xboxes not for profit but to promote software sales. It is just another PC (a limited one too). In one form or another, there will always be endusers operating machines consisting of multi vendor hardware and software components. The diversity of components is likely to increase rather than decrease IMHO (architectural aspects definately help making this more easy). Something like a standard configuration of components to emerge is every monopolists wet dream and is therefore unlikely to ever happen.
Finally your comments on mobility: the whole point of mobility is 24×7 access to data anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Local storage is fundamentally incompatible with that. Storing 20GB of mp3 locally on a mobile unit is only interesting because the current generation of wireless networks is too unreliable. 20 years down the road, wireless ,low latency, high bandwidth connections will be a commodity and so will the devices using these networks. The current generation of mobile hardware is capable enough, it is just the infrastructure that is currently lacking.
So my vision for the future: hardware vendors will stop competing on the hardware interface, anything but x86 will basically be not worth the trouble anymore and the only things that will be written directly for x86 is compilers and virtual machines (both of which will see a number of research breakthroughs over the next decade). These will come in both commercial and oss variants (for a while). Eventually OSS will win because fundamentally customers pay for new features and not for commodity software components they already have. Of the latter there will be plenty (most coming with OSS licenses) because of improved sw architecture practice. Profit margins will shift from component development to component assembly (and associated services).
MS will eventually adapt, cut cost (they can only sustain their current style of operation because of insane profit margins, eventually share holders will figure this out) and remain a dominant force in the software business. Just like IBM is still around. Apple will need to decide whether gadgets, hardware or software is their core business. The brand name apple will stick in one form or another.
If you are reading this article you are probably a “computer enthusiast”, for you the PC (or Mac) will not die out, as I said in the article it’s users who don’t use or even need xGHz of power and users who have $1000 paperweights, unfortunately this part of the market is considerably larger than the “computer enthusiast” section.
Most people don’t seem to get this and confirmed exactly what I wrote: the $100 computer will not be of interest to geeks and will not be considered a threat. It’ll come in under the radar:
You seem to be basing this prediction on two rather huge assumptions.
1. Computers will continue to get cheaper at the same rate they have in the past; and
2. As time progresses, people will want to do less with their machines, not more – and thus be satisfied with relatively less powerful machines.
There is startlingly little evidence – anecdotal or otherwise – to support these assumptions. History (of both computers and other similar commodity products) suggests the exact opposite will occur – computers will stabilise in price at x% of the average wage (for the same amount of relative power) and consumers will continue to demand more from their machines.
Similarly, while computers have relatively dropped dramatically in price since the early 80s, the rate of that drop has been tailing off – instead machines are defining “price points” (as cars have) and over time the level of equipment at a given price point is increasing.
Well… Inflation. So let’s hope a big inflation to get paid ten time as much and hope computers be sold at the same price ;-). The price of computer is falling at the same rate as other technological devices, about the inverse of the rate of inflation in western countries, thus keeping a constant price number.
Here’s some numbers. The little calculator I found here: http://www.eh.net/hmit/compare/index.php was of some assistance.
Apple ][ introduced 1977. Price then: $1295. Today, that $1295 would be worth from $3200 – $6600 (depending on the method used).
Commodore 64 introduced 1981. Price then: $595. Today that’s $1,000 – $2,000.
Atari 520 ST introduced 1985. Price then: $800. Today, that’s $1,200 – $2,000.
Mac 128k introduced 1984. Price then: $2,500. Today, that’s $3,900 – $6,600.
IBM PC introduced 1981. Price then: $1,500. Today, that’s $2,600 – $5,000.
Personally, I think today’s PC at US$500 delivers far more (relatively speaking) to the end consumer than ever before – and at a price ranging from 1/2 to 1/6 it was previously.
*Best case scenario*, puts the Apple ][, Commodore 64, Atari 520ST and original Mac at anywhere from twice to six times the cost of today’s $500 PC. Personally I think trying to compare a C64 – where all you got was a keyboard and some cables – to a modern PC with a computer, monitor, often a printer and a vast array of included software to be silly, but you seem to think it’s fair.
This site: http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/htm/map102.htm might also give some indication. Translated to “2000 dollars”, the average wage in 1980 was about $30,000. In the year 2000, the average wage was about $37,000. Thus, a $1000 computer in 1980 represented somewhere between 5.6% and 10% of the average wage. In 2000, a $1000 computer represented about 3% of the average wage.
(Note these are websites I just pulled up in a quick Google search – there are probably ones with better figures – but it gives a ballpark indication).
The use of personal computers by people not involved in I.T. is raising slowly.
What are you comparing against to call it “slowly” ?
Right now, Internet is a major reason for buying a computer, years ago, it was games.
Games were a major reason to buy a _console_, not a computer. Games were one of many reasons to buy a computer (instead of a console).
For how long will it be necessary to possess a real computer to get on Internet ?
The question you should be asking is why do you think people will try to save comparitively insignificant amounts of money (maybe $150 at the most, or less than half a percent of the average US wage) to get a vastly inferior piece of equipment (single use “internet console” vs multi purpose “PC”) ? Particularly when they then have to go out and buy other single-purpose devices (“word processor console”, “games console”, “movie editing console”), spending the money they may have saved not just buying a multi-purpose PC in the first place ?
I insist, I don’t believe in 200$ Really Useable Computers.
Nevertheless, they exist – and a US$200 computer today is (relatively) a lot more useful than a (comparitively) $1000 – $2000 Commodore 64 was in 1980. Even at US$500 – half the comparitive price of a C64 – you get a whole machine (including screen and, often a printer) with a swathe of software to make it extremely useful out of the box. With a C64 you got a keyboard, some cables and a BASIC interpreter. Heck, even a relatively “luxury” consumer machine like an eMac only costs marginally more than a C64 would have in todays dollars.
Computers are cheaper then they ever were. Both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the average wage.
drsmithy
You seem to be basing this prediction on two rather huge assumptions.
1. Computers will continue to get cheaper at the same rate they have in the past; and
2. As time progresses, people will want to do less with their machines, not more – and thus be satisfied with relatively less powerful machines.
I assumed neither of these, why do you think I did?
The $100 computed does not require anything to get cheaper, it can be built today.
It’s use would be in areas where the use of computers is not changing rapidly. As I said it will not be “enthusiasts” who will be interested. As for capabilities, today it would be around 400MHz – 1GHz so it’ll not exactly be incapable…
Jilles van Gurp
Your points on cpus and why x86 is going to die are amusing but conflicting. As you point out x86 can easily be emulated so there is absolutely no point in wasting energy on anything else. As intel is experiencing right now, covincing vendors that they need to drop their existing software base is proving extremely hard.
I said it’s becoming possible to emulate x86 in software at rates closing on native CPUs or at least fast enough that no one will care.
Once this becomes the case there is no need for x86 compatibility in hardware, AMD and Intel can then spend their resources on developing smaller, faster and more importantly lower cost chips.
x86 is not something which can be added easily to hardware, but by moving it to software you can keep the existing software base.
People have forecast the end of x86 before, but the reasons were very different, now the situation has changed and it’s become the case that we simply don’t need it (in hardware) anymore.
You may think you are a visionary but what turned me off is the lack of a vision
These are not copies of other predictions, I came to these conclusions by my own means. But yes there have been in parts fairly conservative …so far, though if you read some of the other comments quite a few think I’ve been the opposite.
“Learn to read! Phones will interact with your High Definition TV”
2 points…
1. “Learn to read!” will be pretty hard if its on a TV screen rather than a much higher resolution monitor.
“Mom, I can’t read that screen!”
2. The biggest use of the internet is for —– Porn!
Now, how many folks are going to be sitting in the living room, browsing the babes, when Mom can walk in at any minute and whack them with a skillet?
Also games, the desire to do something other than watch tv/internet with the whole family, and just the need to do homework/work in a quite place will ensure that the PC (or a thin client from the main pc) will be around for a long time.
Does anyone remember commodore 64 it ran pc geos.
Then there was a 16 bit version Geos Ensemble
New Office 3.2 What made this operating system so good
was it could out perform Windows 3.1
Take 2 386 with 4mb ram 200mb hard drive
Put Dos 6.22 on them next put geos on one computer
an windows 3.1 on the other.
You could do a whole lot more with geos than windos 3.1
Im glad Breadbox computer now owns the source code to geos
They will be releasing a 32 bit os using a dos extender.
You dont need faster computers you need oses that
aint resource hogs.
The pentium is fine but windows keeps adding so much crap
thats not necessary.
I think that the author of this series of prophetic articles is not in touch with reality at all. His predictions are based on wild assumptions, some of which are just plan incorrect. Often logic is absent as well (win a price war against an opponent that can lower his prices by 400% and still make a profit? Nuh-uh.), and he seems overly dependent on the notion that only geeks buy high-powered computers. That is in itself a false statement ever since the computer became a symbol of social status among the average middle-class citizen.
1. “Learn to read!” will be pretty hard if its on a TV screen rather than a much higher resolution monitor. “Mom, I can’t read that screen!”
HDTV is the same or better resolution than most of the screens reading this site. Also TVs were used as monitors for many years, they just need a better connection than analogue RF, in Europe we have SCART for that.
2. The biggest use of the internet is for —– Porn!
Now, how many folks are going to be sitting in the living room, browsing the babes, when Mom can walk in at any minute and whack them with a skillet?
Also games, the desire to do something other than watch tv/internet with the whole family, and just the need to do homework/work in a quite place will ensure that the PC (or a thin client from the main pc) will be around for a long time.
You answer your own point, the TV will act as a thin client for the Phone, and the kid will have their own – just like now.