Is the PC Dead? Trends, Insights, and Observations from a Tech Enthusiast"

[Greg Bernhardt]

I've been intrigued by this statement for a number of years. Certainly there is still a need for laptops, but there are undeniable trends and mobile tech is getting better every year. I see the next generation almost entirely on mobile devices. Perhaps PCs won't go away but rather become special use.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3186782/computer-hardware/the-laptop-is-dead.html

What are your thoughts, personal trends and observations?

 

[DavidSnider]

I think PCs will rule gaming for the next decade. I don't think they are going away for 3D modelling, simulations, other workstation type stuff either.
All the new VR stuff requires extremely low latency in the entire chain of equipment, so you can't really offload that to the cloud.

The article talks about "laptops" specifically. I have a hard time imagining getting any sort of work done on a phone or tablet. Great for consuming, not so great for producing.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

hard time imagining getting any sort of work done on a phone or tablet

How is something like the Microsoft Surface tablet using a thin keyboard different?

 

[DavidSnider]

How is something like the Microsoft Surface tablet using a thin keyboard different?

I'm not sure how that's different from a laptop TBH.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I'm not sure how that's different from a laptop TBH.

Just an evolution. Not quite there, but I think tablets will take over from laptops in short order.

 

[DavidSnider]

Just an evolution. Not quite there, but I think tablets will take over from laptops in short order.

Aside from the name and form factor how is a tablet with a keyboard different from a laptop though?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Aside from the name and form factor how is a tablet with a keyboard different from a laptop though?

The form is the factor

 

[phinds]

I don't think anyone develops smartphone apps on a smartphone. A powerful laptop, maybe, but I expect most of it is done on workstations. Development is, I'll grant you, a niche market.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I don't think anyone develops smartphone apps on a smartphone. A powerful laptop, maybe, but I expect most of it is done on workstations. Development is, I'll grant you, a niche market.

Exactly, so what percent do power users and developers make up the general market? I'd say less than 1%. The next generation is growing up almost completely on mobile.

 

[DavidSnider]

Exactly, so what percent do power users and developers make up the general market? I'd say less than 1%. The next generation is growing up almost completely on mobile.

High End Gaming PC sales are growing.

 

[russ_watters]

I've been intrigued by this statement for a number of years. Certainly there is still a need for laptops, but there are undeniable trends and mobile tech is getting better every year. I see the next generation almost entirely on mobile devices. Perhaps PCs won't go away but rather become special use.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3186782/computer-hardware/the-laptop-is-dead.html

What are your thoughts, personal trends and observations?

I've heard such statements for a number of years too, and don't buy them overall. What I see is:

1. Moore's law is dead, so people are replacing computers less often. That's being confused for using computers less.
2. Other side of the coin: cell phones/tablets have not plateaued (or have just recently plateaued), appear to have a growth rate that is awesome but in reality won't be sustained. They aren't replacing computers, they are replacing themselves.
3. Cell phones aren't replacing other types of computers, they are diversifying computer use. As intriguing as the cell-phone docking station idea is, the claims of their prowess are wrong: a 1-watt processor cannot and will not ever be able to compete with a 100-watt processor. It's simply mathematically impossible. So we will continue to use cell phones for what they are good for, laptops for what they are good for and desktops for what they are good for (caveat: laptops and desktops are much closer together than laptops and cell phones).

Important caveat to all of this: I bought a good quality Samsung Galaxy tablet 4 years ago and it never really caught-on for me. It filled a gap I didn't need to fill, between the cell phone and laptop. By now software updates have rendered it unusably slow. But I'm considering taking the plunge to a Surface, which is vastly more expensive but seems to bridge the gap better. We'll see.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

That's being confused for using computers less.

I generally agree with all your statements, however incredibly if I didn't have PF to manage, I bet I'd be fine just using my mobile phone. What does the average person need to do that they can't on a phone?

 

[DavidSnider]

I generally agree with all your statements, however incredibly if I didn't have PF to manage, I bet I'd be fine just using my mobile phone. What does the average person need to do that they can't on a phone?

I'd say phones meet most peoples consumption needs pretty well.

My feeling is that the number of people interested in doing digital content creation is pretty large though and phones won't cut it for that except for a very amateurish level.

 

[russ_watters]

Hopefully not off topic...

I've always considered my tech-heavy investing to be gambling and keep it largely separate from my savings for retirement: long-term savings should be based on reliable, sustainable growth. Tech stocks tend to be explosive growth followed by a crash and are just too unreliable to bet on for the next *50* years.

For example, Apple, since its rebirth, has *appeared* to sustain growth for 15 (!) years, but that has been based pretty much entirely on three explosive-growth-crash products: as long as the next product picks up as the last one falters, investors don't notice. But how long can you sustain a company on new, world-changing products? It just isn't realistic to think you can do that for the long term. Ford can make a slightly better car every year, forever, but Apple is unlikely to be able to make a game-changer every 5 years (that crashes in 10 years), forever.

With one caveat: some of those products will "collapse" into sustainable growth products. The iPod? Gone. I don't think they even sell them anymore. And it's only 16 years old. I still use PC software older than that. But the cell phone? And laptop? These products (particularly the cell phone) are ridden hard, and will have rapid replacement cycles, pretty much forever. The iPhone 10 looks like a flop, but it isn't: it just isn't explosive. Sustainable growth is boring, but it is real and near permanent.

 

[russ_watters]

I generally agree with all your statements, however incredibly if I didn't have PF to manage, I bet I'd be fine just using my mobile phone. What does the average person need to do that they can't on a phone?

I suppose I'm not "average", but there is very little I do on a phone that I wouldn't prefer to do on another device. And tablets for me have been extremely limited in usefulness.

@anorlunda created a thread titled "What do Smart Phones (Partially) Replace?" that rapidly reached 200 items of pretty significant utility. But the "Partially" is clearly a critical caveat, as the thread was mostly things that a cell phone "can do", regardless of how well. Perhaps we could have a new thread targeted for what cell phones or tablets do better (or just preferred) over other devices that could hone-in on that a little better. E.G.:

Word Processing/Spreadsheets? Nope.
GPS? Yep.
Calculator? Yep.
Planetarium? Nope.
Photo Editing? Nope.
CAD? Nope.

And where a tablet failed for me was that it wasn't any more capable than a cell phone; it just had a bigger screen...which is nice when I am on an airplane where I can't unfold a full-sized laptop, but that's about it. So while I can't see docking a cell phone to simulate a laptop*, I could see snapping a cell phone into a dumb touchscreen if it was cheaper and could dock with multiple generations (similarly, I have used monitors for 10+ years).

I bought my tablet just before a vacation to Europe, primarily for such travel (true story: I won a poker tournament on purpose to buy it), and today I pretty much only use it to watch movies on a plane. Any business trip or personal trip of longer than 2-3 days, I want a full laptop (though I often bring both). It was only barely adequate for that week-long vacation to Europe where I barely needed it. I'm hoping the Surface will be truly capable of replacing a laptop.

*Memory trigger: when I bought my house 12 years ago or so, my realtor had a Palm Pilot or Blackberry that she snapped into a fold-out keyboard to type emails. I don't recall having seen one since. Your article predicts they are coming back.

 

[donpacino]

Heat dissipation is one of the primary reasons towers are used over laptops. That goes Triple for tablets. You simply cannot get the same horsepower AND dissipate the heat at the same. You will either destroy the life of the component or destroy the component (possibly in a thermal event). I do not foresee any major innovations on the heat dissipation side, but efficiency can always increase. New more efficient algorithms, computer architecture schemes, etc might help change that... But programmers are lazy and development time and effort will always be a thing. Why spend a month optimizing when you can just use more horsepower and create a better less efficient product. For that reason towers will not be replaced until the computer bandwidth (referring the cpu,gpu, and future device throughput) greatly exceeds the needs of software. For mobile type games we see that, but for heavy computation games we are not close.

As others have mentioned there is an inherent latency in even high speed wifi, let alone cloud based solutions.

Also I for one find myself to be much more efficient with a keyboard and mouse and multiple monitors (the monitors can be mitigated by a more powerful gpu on-board tablets).

 

[donpacino]

true story: I won a poker tournament on purpose to buy it

This makes it sound like you said, "I want a tablet, I guess I'll go win that tournament." :)

 

[donpacino]

Now things that do not require low latency feedback is already being offloaded. A lot of computation heavy software in industry is moving to the cloud, computer platforms in house or external. If we see significant increases in parallel communication (multi band data transfers) things like streaming could start to work for low latency devices.

I can foresee in the future after the multi band transfer problem is fixed or advances in 10+ GHz coms, (0 - 50 years?), people installing server type devices in their house. Stick it in the corner of your office and forget about it. Your work station consists of 1-3 monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, and a docking station for your tablet which is really just chromecast 8.0. Note these products are already coming out, but for the non tech savy people they are in their infancy.

There might exist a dial up type era of household arguments (get off the tv, I am trying to play video games) because like I said programmers will always utilize that extra horsepower, and companies will always sell cheap versions of hardware.

 

[Fra]

What are your thoughts, personal trends and observations?

I personally do not like tablets, i certainly have one but the only one using it is kids playing games. I just don't see what purpose it fulfills for my own use. To me a tablet isn't more capable than a smartphone, and its too big to put in pockets of shirt or pants. I ALWAYS bring my phone, its my notepad, calendar and basic emailing and surfing, gps navigator. Its small enough to really NEVER be too big. I wish only for one things to improve in phones - battery life.

For those more qualified applications where you need more speed and bigger screen a tablet is still too small. I have own during the years 10" 13" and 14" laptops and has come to the conslusion that 10,13" is too small for serious work. 14" fullHD is to be a good compromise. Also due to the low power technologies there are thin laptops today with quite excellent performance that will do for everything except heavy 24/7 numerical simulations because then you run into thermal throttling. Image editing, wordprocessing and basic computations are fine.

So an ultralaptop and a smartphone covers 90% of my daily needs. When this fails is a fullfledged workstation which is designed for constant peak load without getting overheated that i need, but it also happens that when you edit images on an network drive, wifi simlpy isn't fast enough, so a wired ethernet then becomes necessary.

From my personal use, i would say the tablet is dead ;-) The future is smartphones and ultralaptops.

/Fredrik.

 

[PeroK]

I generally agree with all your statements, however incredibly if I didn't have PF to manage, I bet I'd be fine just using my mobile phone. What does the average person need to do that they can't on a phone?

For me, everything is just too small, slow and awkward on a phone. I see people tapping away with two thumbs, but I have nothing like the dexterity needed for that. Also, I don't know how people manage multiple windows and tasks on a phone. And, everything is so small!

I can't imagine managing without a full-sized keyboard, mouse and a full-sized screen.

 

[Asymptotic]

An Octobet 1991 article by Paul Saffo is cited as the first to claim "The PC is dead". To put this into perspective, Windows v3.0 MME (Multimedia Extensions) was introduced that same month, and Windows 95 was still a gleam in it's developer's eyes. PCs are the "A-10 Warthogs" of computers - bulky, and not much to look at, but for certain missions nothing else will do.

 

[DrClaude]

Word Processing/Spreadsheets? Nope.
GPS? Yep.
Calculator? Yep.
Planetarium? Nope.
Photo Editing? Nope.
CAD? Nope.

Exactly what I was thinking. Concerning the first point, in any office environment, I don't see how a tablet could replace a PC. I would also add any kind of programming and number crunching (including Matlab, Mathematica, etc.).

 

[mfb]

A tablet backed by a computer in the same house (no bandwidth/latency issue) could be an interesting combination.

I have used the phone for websites a bit more in the last weeks. It works, but it can’t replace a larger screen and a proper keyboard (although the phone docked to screen and keyboard would work - computing power for most websites is irrelevant).
Working with it? Nah. I have an ssh client installed but more than very basic commands are just not reasonable there. Everything else works better on a laptop or PC as well.

 

[davenn]

What does the average person need to do that they can't on a phone?

For me, everything is just too small, slow and awkward on a phone. I see people tapping away with two thumbs, but I have nothing like the dexterity needed for that. Also, I don't know how people manage multiple windows and tasks on a phone. And, everything is so small!

I can't imagine managing without a full-sized keyboard, mouse and a full-sized screen.

my sentiments exactly !

just about everything I do, I want a decent sized screen, mouse and keyboard

I don't want to be doing spreadsheets, word processing, my seismograph data processing, photo image processing, electronics circuit cad drawing and a dozen other things on a tiny little screen.

I have a good laptop and it goes with me on holiday, hospital etc
I have a reasonably high speed desktop at home with 8TB of storage that is fast filling up ... I need to buy another 4TB HDD this weekend
I don't want to watch movies on a tiny smartphone screen

It's VERY RARE for me to log into Physics Forums or any of my other forums on my smartphone. It's just too difficult to use and hard on my eyes

What does my smart phone get used for away from home ?

1)Facebook
2) Checking my online seismograph page for quakes
3) Weather radar when I am storm chasing alone ... if the wife is with me, we will use her I-pad with the larger screen
wifi connected to my phone which is acting as a wifi hotspot for net access
4) and as strangely enough ... a phone hahaDave

 

[russ_watters]

This makes it sound like you said, "I want a tablet, I guess I'll go win that tournament." :)

That is precisely what I said.

 

[jedishrfu]

I lump the PC and laptop together as they are functionally with the laptop being more portable.

I use a combination of devices:
- smartphone: good for talking, texting, photos, videos, maps and quick internet searches while at the store (swiss army phone utility uses)
- tablet: good for doing internet research, taking handwritten notes, recording lectures, drawing, music composition, watching movies (creative/entertainment uses mostly)
- PC/laptop good for formal writing, coding, organizing digital content (everything not covered by smartphone or tablet)

I'll choose the device based on the need:
- for photos and music I choose the phone
- for drawing and music composition I'll use the tablet
- for writing will use the PC/laptop (including PF responses as the smartphone / tablet introduce too many auto correct errors)

Development-wise, I code mostly in Java for desktop and web:
- smartphone viewing code (textastic app), coding for fun (pythonista app)
- tablet viewing code (textastic app), coding (pythonista, codea apps)
- PC/laptop formal code development using Netbeans and other development tools

For me it boils down to the ease of use interface and portability:
- keyboard + mouse useful for so many things in development
- soft-keyboard while totally reconfigurable not as easy to use, touch screen is awesome
- smartphone in general real estate is too small to do anything longterm on

If they changed up the UI with full voice control, projected keyboards, and displays then maybe a smart phone will replace everything with a docking station for plugging in your phone when working with keyboard, touch display/device, voice... then you'll see things change even more dramatically.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I suppose I'm not "average", but there is very little I do on a phone that I wouldn't prefer to do on another device.

But you stay at home most of the day so you can use your computer?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I can't imagine managing without a full-sized keyboard, mouse and a full-sized screen.

But is this the apex of technology? In 100 years we'll still be chained to a mechanical keyboard, mouse and screen?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I don't see how a tablet could replace a PC.

The MS Surface uses Windows 10. The touchscreen is really good and the soft keyboard super mobile.

 

[anorlunda]

Maybe it would be fun to start a list of what smart phones do better as @russ_watters suggested. But we must remember that those here on PF are much more geeky than the "Aunt Millies" of the world, and that we are far outnumbered by the "Aunt Millies"

• Camera. "The best camera is the one you have with you." -- Chase Jarvis Photographer
• Social media. For millions of "Aunt Millies" and their nephews and neices that's all they want.
• GPS assisted weather and Doppler radar. Invaluable to me during 12 years traveling by sailboat.
• GPS assisted emergency alerts. I'm working on tornado evacuation plans for the community where I live. Phone based alerts are the best way we have to alert people in time.
• GPS assisted maps such as Google Maps are better on a phone than free standing devices or maps built into the car. Paper maps are almost completely obsolete. Nautical and aviation versions back up expensive seaworthy/airworthy systems.
• POTS, plain old telephone service. Don't forget the advantage of carrying one device instead of many. Having the phone integrated with computer greatly aids portability. In the old days, I went hiking with phone, handheld GPS, weather radio, AM/FM radio, and paper maps.
• Your smartphone would be a vital part of multi factor authentication for many security aware purposes in the near future. (Think of the key fobs and Secure-ID fobs that many of us carry in our pockets today.)

You may be surprised to hear that I do most of my PF browsing on a tablet. I set up the laptop only when I need to type more than one sentence.

Bill Gates had a great idea around 1991. He called it the wallet computer. It would be like a smart phone minus the screen, but it would automatically, seamlessly, and wirelessly pair with any nearby keyboard/scree/printer. So even if you can't do a spreadsheet on the pocket device, you would nevertheless have your spreadsheet software and spreadsheet files with you no matter where you go. (Gate's idea predated the WWW and most LCD screens) Workstations would have screen/keyboard/printer/charging station but no computer. If it weren't for proprietary protocols, Gate's vision might have been realized today, but it would have to compete with the cloud.

 

[PeroK]

But is this the apex of technology? In 100 years we'll still be chained to a mechanical keyboard, mouse and screen?

It's not a question of being the Apex of technology. It's a question of what's practical in the foreseeable future. I do a lot on my phone but there are a lot of things - studying Physics being a case in point - that I.can't imagine doing with only a phone.

Planning climbing trips is another example. I can make a single accommodation booking on my phone, but researching mountains, routes etc.needs the functionality of a laptop or PC. I can do in 5 minutes at home what might take up to an hour on a phone, even if it were possible.

Phone apps are in the process of replacing hard copy climbing guidebooks. They've a way to go yet, but it's only a matter of time. I use a combination of both at the moment, which is the best of both worlds

 

[russ_watters]

But you stay at home most of the day so you can use your computer?

Like everyone else, I'm constantly chained to at least one device and need for portability (or lack thereof) generally drives my choice on what to use.

I spend a good fraction of my time on the couch or at a desk, but I also spend a good fraction of my time on the road, in meetings or at construction sites.

Cell phones have two real advantages: portability and integration. But unless portability is a task-requirement (for example; non-car GPS navigation, personal music playing) or the integration outweighs the inferiority (cameras), they are inferior to other devices for virtually everything they do. People don't do real "computing" on a cell phone because a cell phone is good at it, they do it because it wasn't convenient to carry a real computer with them.

And it is because cell phones are not *actually* good at most things they do that they won't ever replace real computers.

But is this the apex of technology? In 100 years we'll still be chained to a mechanical keyboard, mouse and screen?

For certain things I think yes and others probably not. How long have car controls beein a steering wheel and two or three pedals?

A mouse is better than any other pointing technology or voice control for most normal "computing" tasks. It has the best combination of precision and speed. So I don't think it is going anywhere (we've had it 35 years already). Voice will probably take over for "unchained" tasks as the Alexa/Echo are doing, but I'm not sure if it will ever replace a keyboard. I've never gotten comfortable with it for writing, though I'm not one who used dictation for letters before computers either.

The MS Surface uses Windows 10. The touchscreen is really good and the soft keyboard super mobile.

And that's why I'm considering it: it might be a light and flexible enough laptop to replace a tablet. I don't think the inverse is true:I don't think tablets have become powerful and featureful enough to replace laptops. I don't think they can, so long as a keyboard remains essential.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

I've been intrigued by this statement for a number of years. Certainly there is still a need for laptops, but there are undeniable trends and mobile tech is getting better every year. I see the next generation almost entirely on mobile devices. Perhaps PCs won't go away but rather become special use.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3186782/computer-hardware/the-laptop-is-dead.html

What are your thoughts, personal trends and observations?

So many jobs these days come down to producing quality documents as the primary work product: spreadsheets, word documents, presentations, etc. Other jobs focus on multimedia: video editing, sound files, and photographs. And of course, most science and engineering software is far superior on a personal computer than on the mobile devices.

Most of these tasks (as well as programming) are so much more efficient with a keyboard and a mouse that I don't see the PC (laptop, notebook, desktop) going the way of the dodo anytime soon for real work. The other devices are making strong inroads into the recreational and communication markets, but the PC will continue to be more important for most real work for decades to come.

I see more of a future in telecommuting as employers seek to cut costs maintaining office work spaces and employees wish to skip the time, effort, and fuel use required to get to urban work areas in person every day. Most productive telecommuting requires a real computer rather than a mobile device. Further, in some jobs, employers are going to want to be able to effectively monitor employee productivity to telecommuting to work. This monitoring is much simpler with a fixed platform (Windows PC) rather than the plethora of mobile devices.

Finally, there are also significant movements to deliver more secondary school content and college coursework via computer. Distance learning courses are designed around the personal computer and will likely continue to require student work products that would be frustratingly slow to produce on mobile devices but very workable with a keyboard and a mouse.

 

[russ_watters]

• Camera. "The best camera is the one you have with you." -- Chase Jarvis Photographer

Expansion: cameras are the ultimate integration/portability vs quality trade-off. Most people probably don't even know or recognize the trade-off until it burns them badly even though it affects most of what they do with a camera:

In high light, no zoom situations, a cell phone camera may be just as good as a stand-alone. Throw in some built-in processing and it may even be better (HDR, panorama, selfie mode, etc). But as soon as the light gets low or you need zoom, they become very poor. I put considerable effort into camera selection when I went to Africa and I think I made the right choice: a pocket-size/point and shoot extreme zoom. Way more portable than an SLR with similar zoom and way better than a cell phone.

Bonus: the digital camera has wi-fi, which facilitated transfer to a cell phone for uploading, eliminating most of the interation drawback while picking-up some of the photo editing capability of a stand-alone computer.

You may be surprised to hear that I do most of my PF browsing on a tablet. I set up the laptop only when I need to type more than one sentence.

Bill Gates had a great idea around 1991. He called it the wallet computer. It would be like a smart phone minus the screen, but it would automatically, seamlessly, and wirelessly pair with any nearby keyboard/scree/printer.

Ditto. And Bill Gate's vision is almost realized with a program called "SideSync", which docks a cell phone to a computer a "remote desktop" type function. I'm using it to type this post.

 

[Mark44]

For me, everything is just too small, slow and awkward on a phone.

Amen to that.

I can't imagine managing without a full-sized keyboard, mouse and a full-sized screen.

My monitor is a 28" flat screen.

I don't want to watch movies on a tiny smartphone screen

Nor do I. I don't even want to look at ordinary photos on such a screen, not much larger than a postage stamp.

But is this the apex of technology? In 100 years we'll still be chained to a mechanical keyboard, mouse and screen?

To me, the apex of technology right now, is a fast computer with lots of RAM, a large monitor, full-size keyboard with keys that click, and a mouse. I'm not concerned about what the technology will be in 100 years. Even some of the technology now -- meh.

One of my main uses for my computer is programming -- lately in Python, C++, and MIPS assembly, with the latter two languages for classes I've been teaching. A laptop would be marginal at best, and a smartphone would be completely useless.

Phone apps are in the process of replacing hard copy climbing guidebooks.

The places I go cell phones are a non-starter, as these places are out of range of cell towers. My hiking/climbing buddy has a De Lorme sat device that he can use to send texts to his wife, and it has GPS features and can store map data. I'm thinking about getting one of these, but I prefer paper maps. All of my guide books (such as Fred Beckey's "Climbers' Guide to the North Cascades") are dead tree versions, which is just fine for me.