On Wed, 12 Oct 2022 12:42:38 +0100, JAB <
noway@nochance.com> wrote:
As Spike Milligan said the reports of my death have been greatly
exaggerated much like the death of the PC. Moving on I have seen a few >interesting articles (some a bit clickbait) about the future of the PC
as we know it. One is less drastic in that it's looking at the demise of
the tower type system in favour of both laptops and more compact
solutions. That seems probably plausible as to me the advantage of my
tower system really rests in the ability to upgrade it. In my social
circle no one does that but instead if the feel they need a new machine
then they buy a new machine.
Is the PC dying again?!?? I just unburied my last computer, now I
gotta have another funeral for it?
The biggest threat to PCs isn't changing hardware; it's mobile gaming.
Mobile is huge. I mean, it's really, really big. IIRC, Activision
raked in about $8 billion USD last year and half of that was mobile...
and that number is just going to keep growing. Why do you think
Microsoft is so interested in them? It's not for "Call of Duty".
Big publishers are going to put increased emphasis on mobile gaming in
coming years, even if it means diminishing returns from console and PC
games. They almost have to do that; mobile is where the money is, and
it's their job to (say it with me!) 'maximize shareholder profits'.
So we might see fewer 'big name' games in the future... but does that
mean the PC is dead? Nope. It's more likely the consoles will die
first. But PCs? They have an ace in the hole: they can be used to do
work. Which means if you ever need to do your taxes, or create
anything more complex than a 10-second video, you'll want a PC. And,
hey, since you have a PC, maybe you'll want a game for it too? Can't
be doing your taxes all the time.
Will towers/desktops die off? Not anymore than they already have, I
think. They'll never die away completely, because desktops will always
be cheaper because they don't have integrated displays... and when it
comes to business, cheaper is better (it's harder for employees to
walk off with a company desktop too). Plus, you can hang a lot of
devices off (or in) a desktop.
The second which I'm not so sure about is PC's moving to system on a
chip and less individual components. The reason I'm not sure about that
is I'm unclear as to the technical challenges involved in moving to a
new CPU architecture and problems of compatibility.
PCs have been increasingly moving towards "system on a chip"; I mean,
in the old days, almost every thing a PC did required a separate
chipset, be it memory management, keyboard access, or disk drive
controllers. But these days, almost everything - sound, network,
serial - is integrated onto the motherboard, and increasingly those
subsystems are being integrated into "single-chip" solutions, which
allow for smaller (and cheaper!) boards. This trend will definitely
continue.
But, given the nature of the PC's use, there's a limit as to how far
you can take it. As a general purpose device, its upgradability is its
greatest strength, and it always takes a while before new features get
embedded into the system. So ethernet might be on the 'board, but Super-neuro-netlink 3.0 (or whatever future technology gets invented)
will be an add-on card... which means you can't easily shrink the PC
down to handheld size without sacrificing what makes the device so
useful.
TL;DR: is the PC dying? No. Is it - and its market - changing?
Definitely... but that's been par for the course ever since it was
first made.
So any thoughts keeping in mind that in five years time everyone will
have forgotten about your predictions, well except for Spalls who will
add them to his dossier!
It's not a dossier! It's a list of all your old usenet posts that
never get deleted because disk-space is cheap and I'm too lazy to
configure auto-purge ;-)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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