Is It Time To Call It Quits On The PC?
from the hanging-around dept
With Vista having failed to ignite a boom in the computer industry, some analysts are starting to turn dour on the future of the PC. David Daoud, an analyst at IDC, thinks it's time for computer makers to rethink the traditional PC, and to work on developing more innovative products. He notes that the basic PC (with its big monitor and QWERTY keyboard) has basically been the same since its inception, and that things like ultra mobile PCs, tablets and other forms that have yet to be invented will come to play an important part role in the industry. Of course, people have been talking about all of these things before, and despite grandiose ambitions, nothing has made a dent in the market. The latest, the ultra mobile PC (UMPC) has pretty much been a dud, despite plenty of backing and hype. This isn't to say that manufacturers shouldn't be exploring alternatives, but as Apple has shown with its resurgent computer business, there's plenty of room for innovation and growth within the traditional confines of the PC.
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The Network Terminal
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Ingrained.
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Re: Ingrained.
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I'm not getting rid of it...
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Re: I'm not getting rid of it...
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Re: I'm not getting rid of it...
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Re: Re: I'm not getting rid of it...
Though if they did that they would have to make sure they mention that there are no respawns.
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Re: Re: Re: I'm not getting rid of it...
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it will never go away
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The rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated
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Re: The rumors of my death were greatly exaggerate
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Linux Anyone?
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Re: Linux Anyone?
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As I get older...
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we were going to use pens rather than a keyboard and mouse, but that turned out to be slower than typing. We were going to speak with our computers, like hal in 2001, but that too hasn't borne fruit. (ever use one of those speech attendants for telephone based customer service? Consider that a superior user interface?)
Lots of minor tweaks that turned out to be misses, like the ergonomic keyboard, the pen pad, the trackball. Except, of couse, the GUI and the mouse, which are really a refinement since they coexist well with the keyboard and paper.
Turns out after a century of refinement, no one has come up with a better user interface than the keyboard as an input device and the sheet of paper (or its electronic analogue) as an output.
I have a feeling will see additional refinements of the same interface, (a sheet of paper in a holographic image, a virtual qwerty keyboard that you poke in thin air), before there is a fundamental shift from these basic elements we use to interact with the computers we use to create, transmit, and store information.
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...
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Give up on PCs YES!
I checked all the different PCs and laptops under my care at work and he only computer that the Ms Vista adviser liked was my Macbook Pro. The adviser said I could run the Ultimate edition which even the newest PC hardware in the building could not run without extensive modification! Those Apple Commercials are right On! (So was the Frenchman at Mac world! I never laughed so hard in my life) Oh, Uncle Bill, IT guys don't care about X-BOX 360 and Vista. IT departments would never support toys for the users at work, then nothing would get done at work. And the automatic software phone home to be re-activated every 180 days so without a server to manage this your office could find itself shutting down PC by PC. We won't live without the additional cost of a EULA management Server. (EULAMGR 2007 Enterprise Server, a marketing follow up product way to go marketing Guys)
When I install Apple servers running OS-X Server I don't need 30 million tools to deploy it to end users running Macs, they just work! That is what computers are for! THEY work for US! not the other way around! make them easier to use and more intuitive for the users, not this heavily layered with useless features that make it harder to run and maintain with manuals only a marketing guy could love (you too Uncle Bill!) Otherwise like the house of wax when Vincent Price's face mask was broken revealing the monster within. The Vista still is full of all the DOS underworld (DLL files, config files, etc) plus some new ones we need to go to school for to figure out their importance. Guys let's simplify for a change! OK?
I'm glad to get off this soapbox!
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Re: Give up on PCs YES!
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Re: Give up on PCs YES!
We all know if anything will nudge Windows out of dominance it will be Linux. Free, easy to use, great support from people who have a fucking clue and its free. Did i mention its free?
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Re: Re: Give up on PCs YES! - LINUX
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Re: Re: Re: Give up on PCs YES! - LINUX
I'm sorry, but that sounds like a lot of bull.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that somebody used to working with Adobe Photoshop, who now has to figure out a totally different linux-based program or set of programs to do the same things would most likely prefer to pay for Photoshop and continue using Windows, versus the effort of figuring out how to do it using linux.
However, the most "dads/moms" or "novice computer users" do not use any (or a lot of) complicated windows-based software.
In fact, a lot of dads, moms and novice computer users do little (if anything) more than:
- surf the internet
- read and send emails
- chat
- write a letter(, make a spreadsheet,...)
- listen to music/watch video
You can't honestly be saying, that if you would install for example Ubuntu, give them Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever linux version of the corresponding IM program, OpenOffice and a media player, that they would be lost...
or even have temporary transition problems, because if they do, I wonder how they managed to get familiar with the windows-based equivalents in the first place.
Because for all the linux alternatives I mentioned for the above programs, the look and feel is extremely similar to the windows programs...(not to mention that most programs I've mentioned also run on Windows).
I had no problem using OpenOffice equally efficient from the moment I installed it, which had absolutely nothing to do with my age or technical proficiency/adaptability, but with the Open Office interface being quite similar to the MS Office one.
(side note: I must limit my claim: I have only used the writer, so I can only comment on the similarity to Word, I can't say anything about spreadsheets and can't be bothered to check it right now, mainly because a whole lot less of those novice users and moms and dads would be using Excel compared to Word anyway)
Anyway, my point is: what you say can be true, for people who do use complex, Windows-based software that have no similar alternative in Linux. However, the number of "moms/dads" and novice computer users is quite limited, or I should say, much lower than the number of those users that just use their computer for "basic" things as I listed above, and those users would have no problem switching to Linux, because very little would look or be different for them
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gah
Thank god for that.
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Um... no
lol, that is defiantly not MY computer. But then I built mine to look sexy. The problem is your avrage joe and janes computer. My mom bought a computer from HP, it came LOADED with bullshit "Free trials" and "OMG AOL", they gave her a cheap ass ball tracking mouse and a cheap keyboard. They problem is computer companys are cheeping out on people who don't know any better.
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its even been adapted to email-enabled phones/pda's nowdays - it took a mini qwerty to make them catch on.
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It's Windows.
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Re:
Don't kill the system because the OS is weak....step on up to Linux!
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QWERTY?!
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If it's not broken...
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Uuuuh
...NO! Dont ask stupid questions.
Vista is doing better than XP.. its not going to be widelly adopted till people actually want new PC's, and with all the new tech coming out for Vista people are, of course and obviously, gonna wait!
I didnt bother with XP till SP2 and stuck with 2K just cos I could play more of my older games that way at the time... kept a 98 - 2k dual boot for ages. My point is we adopt as needed not as told. (Who actually owns an electronic auto-twisting pasta fork? I seen em!).
As for Apple.. Oh my gosh! They totally sold out.. nothing but PC parts in their boxes now.. dont even have to have the apple processor. The only Apple things about an apple are, a) the case, b) the (lame) mouse, c) the operating system. Get it in your heads.. Apple = PC = Apple = PC = Apple.
I could be ademant that a dyson is not a vaccuum cleaner but a revolution.. that would make me a dork a nerd and blatantly an idiot.
And having a go at QWERTY!? People come up with totally new keyboard layouts and input devices ALL THE TIME.. and release them into the market, where they fail! Cos we teach QWERTY in SCHOOLS. As fun as chopsticks seem, I was TAUGHT ("hold them the other way round, elbows of the table, stop humming, eat with your mouth closed, no hold them like this..") to use the knive and fork!
Dont ask stupid questions!!
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MS & Apple are not providing what many customers want: a high-performance operating system that runs programs - period. I don't need DRM or eye-candy.
I'm sorry Mac fan-bois, but until I can run OSX on a machine that I build, OSX will not be the solution, either. I've looked inside an iMac, and I can build a more suitable machine to my purposes, a lot less expensive than a Mac Pro.
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You can run MacOSX..
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Re: You can run MacOSX..
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for example, windows has the upside of running more apps that work on any other operating system, but this is only due to the fuctional fixidness that people have on their windows machines, when it boils down to it people would rather use what they know how to use instead of learning something new, you only consider windows the best because it all you know how to use well.
i have windows, mandriva linux, and ubuntu linux running on my mac pro through boot camp AND Parallels...heck, i even merged the OS's from both programs so i can run them in EITHER boot camp or parallels without having four operating systems (2 duplicates).
linux has the upside of being free, you can also do anything you want to do with the operating system IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING, most people dont even know how to install ANY OS let alone linux. but, this only causes it to have a cult following, meaning that less applications will be designed for it due to the smaller amount of users.
Mac has the upside of being extremley user friendly and simple, the gui is scripted in java, an extremley secure script developed by sun microsystems (their solaris was scripeted in java in its entirity) and the core operating system is scripted in UNIX, and frankley anyone who bashes unix is a fool.
"I'm sorry Mac fan-bois, but until I can run OSX on a machine that I build, OSX will not be the solution"
if you could run os x on any machine you build it would just cause it to have more of the incompatibilities on windows based machines. think about this, on mac the os is designed to run with very specific hardware, they pick a small group of each piece of hardware and make absolutley excelent drivers for it, and in some cases make their own hardware (airport extreme), with windows and linux there is an uncountable number of "compatible" pieces of hardware, would you rather have 100,000 people lets say work on 1000 drivers or all of those 100,000 people work on 3 drivers (the number of compatible graphics cards for mac pros), this leads to macs having drivers that actually work without hassles.
next, EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface. with a bios you need to tell tell the computer how to use the piece of hardware you have just installed, with EFI the software to tell the computer how to handle that piece of hardware comes in the firmware of the piece of hardware, wanna install that new graphics card....great, pop it in and it works, with nothing to install.
and finally, the gaming aspect of the mac pro (this is specific to this hardware, anyone who expects to run games extremley well knows this is the best machine for it), lets just say that under boot camp with all of the proper drivers installed, this machine EATS any game i trow at it, with everything turned all the way up i get maxed fps on just about any game (1680x1050)...(BTW i have Radeon X1900XT).
so i may have spent 4 grand on my computer but it has the best of everything:
1 - this machine is FAST, i can run wow in os x AND every other app on the computer and only max all four processors out at 68% with a stable CPU temp of 108 degrees F.
2 - UNIX, if you know what you are doing you can do ANYTHING in unix, VERY secure, os x is a nice addons for unix and the reason i say this is because you can boot into the command line or run it from os x.
3 - runs any os i want it to
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Different Interface
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Vista is not dead
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Re: Vista is not dead
(btw, only knocking it after you own it is a little stupid don't you think? You've already bought it so you're stuck with it...unless shops/MS suddenly have a 30 money back guarantee...I didn't think so)
So here goes: I don't like Vista, and I will never install it on any computer in my house (to be able to uphold that, I have been experimenting with linux distro's, not for me, I already have a tripple boot on my computer, but to check what would be most user friendly for my wife and other step daughter on their computers).
I'd also like to make a comment about (imo) bs arguments like: "Xp had the same problem and it wasn't that good till service pack 2": yeah, you're really making a strong pro MS OS case there...
1) there's no guarantee that Vista will have stepped up by the time service pack 2 is around, just because that was the case with XP, doesn't guarantee anything...it could be faster, it could be slower, it could be not at all...we have no way of knowing.
2) even if it would be guaranteed...how can anybody defend an OS that takes several years to develop before it's released in the first place, and then turns out to be not so great and we have to wait (again) several years before it becomes "that good"...?
I mean, seriously...would you buy a car that starts off with a max speed of 40 mph for the first couple of years, but after a couple of years, the car will have been worked in and finetuned so the max speed will then be 65....?
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I'm in the wrong line of work...
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So wait...an IMAC isn't like a traditional PC with its QWERTY keyboard and monitor? Way to kick Apple's a$$ techdirt.
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There is a reason why the PC hasn't changed
And from what I saw yesterday, tablet PCs do seem to be taking off, at least in one niche application. Marketing to medical doctors. I had to take the wife and the daughter to an appointment, and while I waited, one salesman was already waiting and 4 more salespeople came through the door before we left. Of course to some, tablet PCs are something new. I did some rudimentary development on one 17 years ago. What should be able to happen now with todays hardware and more importantly, communication should be just kick ass.
I've gone through (thinking...) 10 different computer builds in almost 20 years (those are my computers, not work computers that I used). I've gone through that many cars in 30 years, and cars wear out a lot more than computers do (and I bought used not new). My latest system compared to my first system? I don't want to go there.
Hell, we are still waiting for the software to catch up to the hardware at this point.
I'd love to have a UMPC myself, but the technology still isn't quite there yet (battery time being the biggest hurdle, along with screen size).
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I meant KISS apple's a$$ :-)
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Dad proof Linux GUI ..
I have the exact opposite experience, a dual boot Windows/SuSE box. People use Firefox and OpenOffice and go 'it looks just the same as Windows'.
There are a number of Windows lookalike GUIs out there. Xandros or Linux XP. You get a browser, emailer, wordprocessor, multimedia player and DVD burner. The average Windows users don't know the difference. What your dad don't get is a ton of spam in his inbox or some crook emptying his online bank account.
http://www.xandros.com http://linux-xp.com/
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Re: Dad proof Linux GUI ..
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Re: Re: Dad proof Linux GUI ..
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Re: Re: Dad proof Linux GUI ..
I don't want one but Anonymous Cowards Dad does. I prefer the Mac lookalike Xfce desktop myself.
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Re: Dad proof Linux GUI ..
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Re: Re: Dad proof Linux GUI ..
But it does prevent you from clicking on a URL or opening an attachment and your computer getting hijacked and spamming everyone in your address book. That and a keylogger being installed and your online bank account being emptied by Boris in Russia.
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I think we're all wiser
2 points:
I've done bleeding edge one too many times to bite on your new OS. I think it is only common sense to wait until Service Pack 2 comes out, before upgrading.
AND:
What performance gain can I expect moving to Vista? I think the 32 bit market is capped for significant gains in performance.
BOTTOM LINE: Vista = more bloat. We'll need more processing power to keep our systems as responsive as they already aren't. I'm looking at 64 bit systems with 8 gigs of ram or more for my next move - All that power to run a web browser!
What am I thinking????
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Humm
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Saturation
1. Vista is a frustrating PoS;
2. Everyone who needs a computer already has one, its not going to wear out anytime soon and there is no compelling reason to upgrade any computer running a pentium 4 and Windows XP except for teenage boys wanting to run the latest games.
3. Higher end home computers are competing with game systems for a place in the home and the game systems are winning.
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this makes me SICK!
FURTHERMORE
- Vista has not already wholly failed at ALL. Vista's going through the same crap XP went through at its inception.
- Tablet PCs and mobile computing are OLD IDEAS
- Apple has never *ONCE* innovated *anything.* In their long history, they've always taken an idea and ran with it, or pioneered something that was just forgotten and become moot. Apple is HARDLY INNOVATIVE AT ALL -- they just have fashionable commercials that somehow make them able to support the ridiculous markup they place on their products.
How much more WRONG can this one article be?!
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Future
The key to the future is basically what I'm seeing with my new car (2007 G35) it's giving you X number of ways to accomplish a task, then let someones personal style or habbits drive how they work. for instance, in the car to change radio stations I can use the following:
1.) Radio knob
2.) Touch screen
3.) Voice command
4.) Steering wheel
5.) Media wheel
I've found that I don't use just 1 method, I use what's easiest, which is a mix of all 5 methods.
The PC will always be around in one form or another, but I don't think we're going to see such a fantastic invention that everyone ceases to buy a traditional PC.
Wacom has that tablet that has an LCD screen in it, that's pretty cool, it's like a tablet screen, however it's much more precise and has an erasing pencil and senses levels of pressure. Fantiastic for graphics and note taking.
Microsofts OneNote is a great addition to this tablet style.
But nothing beats a good old mouse. I will say that the new mice from Logitech i.e. G7 are fantastic, erganomical and precises and are rechargeable.
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Why do we need Vista again?
I am now a loyal Ubuntu user. My system runs so much faster/smoother than it did before. The OS is not constantly looking for something to do; it only runs what I tell it to. I have no blue screens of death. I have access to a free copy of Windows Vista through my university, but I will never touch it. I already use Vista more than I want to; I can already attest to the fact that anyone that says "I've never had any problems with it" is NOT a power user. I'm sure Windows Vista runs just fine when browsing the Internet and creating documents/spreadsheets... why do we need Vista again? Anyway, as a software developer, Linux best adheres to my needs, and it's NOT that hard to learn.
As for the article, I'm perfectly happy with the keyboard and mouse. Sure, I want clever minds out there to slowly conjure up possible new interfaces, but I won't be too disappointed if they fail.
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I use 2000, XP and Vista..
And you know what - I like Vista (bought new, not upgraded) and in my opinion it is the most intuitive OS of the 3. Its just that if you know 2000/XP - you need to 'unlearn' some stuff.
Yes, the hardware reqs for Vista are steep. But I, for one, am satisfied so far....
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OMG! The Sky Is Falling! (Part 57...)
Really.
I can remember back when people were making this lame prediction in the MID 80'S! That means that this prediction is over 20 YEARS OLD!
I can't even keep track of all the reasons why the PC should be dead & buried already. Let me try to remember all of the "credible" arguments...
Apple computers in the classroom means that kids will grow up so accustomed to Apple computers that they will want nothing else when they get older.
Computers are too expensive.
Computers are too specific-oriented to appeal to the general masses.
Computers are too generic to appeal to specialized fields.
Computers are becoming more powerful too quickly & everyone will wait until they "level off" before getting one.
Too many viruses out there (And this was pre-Internet).
Computers are becoming so complicated that only tech geeks will even bother with them.
Arcades will make PCs obsolete.
Consoles will make PCs obsolete.
Networks will make PCs obsolete.
The Internets (all of 'em) will make PCs obsolete.
Because workplaces have computers now, no one will want a computer for their own & simply use their workplace computer for all of their needs.
Microsoft is an uncontrollable monopoly & their monopolization of the PC platform will forever doom it.
There are many others but I'll just stop it here.
In short, I've heard this prediction before. I've laughed at this prediction before. Odds are, in 2008, someone will come up with a new argument. In 2058, someone will come up with a new argument. They will both be wrong.
Stop the fear-mongering & get on with your life.
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Why change a good thing?
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Don't Knock It Til You Own It?
It's a pretty theme that eats hardware, hogs resources and changes every Windows standard interface option for the sake of pretending that your computer is actually running the internet. Why the fvck else would every control panel become an Explorer window?
In a word, it's shit. The UAC "security" option is EXACTLY as described by the Apple "Security" commercial. Network options are a pointless flowchart of everything connected to your system except any other Windows computer not running Vista. The amount of clicking and pointing required to navigate the system has more than doubled, and you have to relearn even the most basic of options because, again, everything in pointlessly renamed and regrouped to provide maximum aggravation.
People aren't rethinking the PC. They are rethinking Microsoft. It's just so sad that so many are only now realising that MS' OS monoculture has sold them a bill of goods.
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Lets get Back on topic
For Home use, a thin client is hardly worhtwhile, since in home situation susually only one or two computers are in use at any given time, and often some of the computers are work-supplied laptops. Also, in home settings, ordingary thick clients can be cascaded for a long time after thay are obsolete, from the main computer, to a kids machine, to a server, to a web proxy, and so on until it has no use except as a source of power supplies and other odd parts. A thin client/dumb terminal relies on teh speed of the central server, which needs to be kept reasonably up-to-date.
While I would like to see new input devices, I would only consider getting one if it offers me a faster, easier way ot enter data, and does not cost too much, otherwise it can stay in the shops or the mind of the inventor.
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Is It Time To Call It Quits On The PC?
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