Relevant
meh, now there’s two proprietary os’s installed, big whoop
android’s open source, at least
That article didn’t seem to make much sense. It rightly acknowledges that while Win8 did a pretty good job at adding touchscreen support, it ignored M+KB support. I fail to see how bundling Win8 with a mobile OS is going to make the system more appealing for M=KB users.
From what I can tell, “PC plus” just fixes win8’s inferior app marketplace. Doesn’t seem too much like a rebellion against Windows to me. If that’s going to happen, it’s either going to happen through desktop linux distros or android completely reworking itself, the article really indicates neither.
It seems like a desperate attempt from PC hardware manufactures to not understand and adapt to a changing market making death throws at gimmicks to save the old system. Traditional desktop and laptop computing models are losing traction in the mainstream. Pretty soon it’ll be a niche thing for gamers and professionals. Mobile devices with different form factors have advantages over traditional methods and portable computing / arm processors are strong enough to provide for students and casual computing.
They don’t understand the market change is a result of new technology and not failure from windows. Its “tablets and phones are killing our product” what can we ape to try to win them back?
actually I think Wni8’s failure has a lot to do with it
if desktops/laptops came with a good os (or even a choice between a number of os’s), which ppl are somewhat familiar with, i bet they’d be selling much better
I really don’t see the desktop PC disappearing any time soon. It has too many advantages and unique uses over tablets/phones.
Name some?
Mind you I never said dying just becoming niche product.
average office productivity? general home usage? gaming? homework, university papers, research, crap like that
basically anything that relies on persistent and localized usage, rather than mobility and connectivity
i think that once m$'s monopoly over office products and directx dissolves, we’ll see a shift towards open source software, including linux distros and various open office type programs, which can all open the same files without any problems, without interruption by arbitrary shifts to new and exclusive software
These days any laptop can be connected to the internet all the time most of the places you go to. Unless you go to remote, isolated places all the time.
A tower PC’s only advantages these days are the ease of upgrading and being generally more powerful than portable devices because it doesn’t have to worry about battery usage. A good laptop can do nearly anything a desktop PC can do. There are some limitations that depend on the place you’re using it at, but besides that there’s not much you can’t do with one.
Tablets are a different ball game tho, but they’re getting increasingly more reliable and useful.
I’m sorta with Bur on this one. I still don’t buy the whole “Tablet revolution” thing everybody is scrambling over now. Laptops are needed for nearly ANY level of serious work. The future of the industry is NOT tablet based. It’s in laptops integrating the features of tablets. IE touchscreen convertible laptops like the Ideapad Yoga (god I hate that name) series. Tablets emerged and stole a massive market share from laptops and grabbed some new costumers on top of that, eventually laptops will jump back in and take the market back. A tablet is just not convenient for work, it’s more convenient to have a laptop that doubles as a tablet. I’m really sick of companies jumping on the touchscreen bandwagon and shoving the feature up the ass of every unwilling and willing customer (see Win8). And the worst part is there’s so many willing customers jumping on the bandwagon too it just might pick up steam before 50% of people realize they’re being duped and their touchscreen was just a useless gimmick thrown on top of a perfectly decent laptop.
As Maxey said, towers are largely dead for the nonperformance market. They’ll still be used by shit like libraries at least, but that’s not much. Laptops are even breaking into the gaming market, I had a laptop for my main gaming computer until I realized the glory of owning a tower and bought a new one.
I didn’t say that laptops and desktops wouldn’t be viable for professional settings. I was referring to the casual market for entertainment or maybe even students. With “computerless printers” and a lot of other improvements in feature set of tablets and phones the average household user has no need for these form factors.
Example: My eldest sister is in her early 30s and has a family. She is a nurse who makes decent money and her husband is part of the family’s car shop and does other seasonal jobs in the summer. Probably nail on the head average middle class income as well. Now at both work places there are computers that get shit loads of usage for business reasons. But at home there’s a computer that’s several years old that back in the day would be replaced but hasn’t because why should this average family bother. They have a tablet for serious web browsing and other crap. Each of them has a smart phone and shit even their Xbox 360 can access the web and netflix. My nephew (currently 3) will probably never in his life ask to have a computer. He’ll ask for phones, tablets, maybe even if consoles he grows up into gaming. He is going to need a really specific reason to want one over these other things or even bother in addition to these things.
Everyone gets fond of shit they grew up with but realistically I don’t think the model for average household computer will last. There is no marketable advantage.
At most we will see something like what the steambox is trying to do that provides a hub for connectivity and streaming computing similar terminals and mainframes. But even if steambox takes off I don’t see it expanding outside gamers. (though % of population that is gamers or has gamer in household increases as time goes on so that may be a moot statement at some point)
Back in the day the notion of being able to sell computers to every house in a developed country was absurd. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” - Ken Olsen 1977. But only a few years later Mac and Personal Computers destroyed that. They changed the form factor to be more appealing to consumers smaller and found ways to convince people they needed them. Realistically computers aren’t cars, most people don’t need their own personal computer to live their lifes most of the things computers do that we love came after the computer penetrated the market place as a justification for owning it.
Its no “tablet revolution” its just another example of the march of technology and time. Desktops and laptops aren’t going to disappear over night but sales are going to decline. And household machines are going to see less usage.
I’m still not convinced. Tablets are disposable products. Like any other cheap electronic device, it’ll break within a couple of years, or at least be horribly outdated.
Desktops (even more so than laptops) have the huge advantage of being modular (i.e. you can replace parts when they break, instead of replacing the whole thing), much more reliable in terms of data storage, and just generally less fleeting in terms of fads.
Any way you look at it, dedicated computers will always be more reliable, have a much longer product lifetime, and have many more features and available software thanks to being a well-established platform that’s been around for decades (ever since the first home computers, pretty much).
I’m not gonna be buying a tablet any time soon, for example. Or a smartphone. I don’t see why I should. At all. I don’t want to instagram my cup of starbucks coffee or wish all my friends a happy tuesday at the same time.
I don’t need a computer unless I’m doing something productive (i.e. at a desk, with more than only a computer. Tablets aren’t handy at a desk.) or just relaxing, browsing the web, playing games, etc.
Don’t you always need to be holding your tablet? So you really only have one hand to use it with? Unless you use some kind of support system, at which point you’re basically converting it to a laptop with the most closed system since Mac.
That’s the biggest pitfall of tablet computer atm imo. All the systems are closed. The market is closed. Microsoft is trying to push closed software philosophy even more, even as users in general are seeing a shift towards free and open software.
I think probably new features from tablet computing will be integrated into the desktop/laptop platform, and tablets will become a niche product for people who value on-the-fly and on-the-go productivity, or basically just another multimedia device for the living room.
Not to mention our planet won’t be able to sustain endless mass production and consumption of electronics in their current form. It’s massively polluting our planet and exhausting the resources on which they rely.
You’re making the same mistake everyone does when they complain about games becoming more like Call of Duty. You and I are the vocal minority. We shape the opinions of the majority and such but the most sales are to users who aren’t as committed to such things.
PCs and Laptops aren’t going anywhere. The people who build their own PCs will probably be building their own PCs in 30 years but the people who go buy OEM towers and laptops (the vast majority of computer sales) are probably not going to be buying those in the future.
The point of the article and why I posted it is the growing frustration with all things microsoftie. The restriction of the latest directX build to the latest expensive copy of windblows coupled with the leaping improvement of openGL from mobile OS’s like Android and IOS is why valve felt the need to build their own open source OS. The expense of Bell Labs Unix is why microsoftie was able to ditch their unix build and offer NT and *nix builders like Torvalds and BSD had any traction at all. IBM ditched its proprietary unix builds for Linux over a decade ago because the combined brain power of the open source community could deliver for free/ego where their own programmers cost too much. There are several android gaming consoles on the market now, IOS gaming is on the rise and they use openGL. All of this is why I think the Steambox will take off. Even the PS4 OS uses FreeBSD as its base.
Just because everything is pushing towards linux doesn’t mean the Steambox can entirely ride the wave. The average user doesn’t care what’s under the hood, they largely just care about what games are offered and how accessible those games are. Steambox maybe be a niche hit for what you discussed above, but to hit the traditional console market and compete with M$ and Sony, they’ve gotta have a good easy to use library. So far what I’ve noticed from youtube videos is games’ menu systems aren’t being optimized for controller use (not even Valve’s first party games) and the controller isn’t working around this, it’s just emulating a mouse. This is a HHHHUUUGGGEEEE problem. Even a simple nitpick like that can make a big difference with an accessibility obsessed crowd. Valve needs to lead the way by updating their games to work well with controller input, not just mouse input.
And back to the tablet argument
I agree that tower use from casual customers is plummeting, and laptop sales have dropped, but I don’t see the tablet replacing the laptop. Tablets in their current iteration just aren’t efficient productive systems for any level of productivity, including casual. They’re not even good at web browsing, which is their whole thing. The second you need to type in a URL or a post or a comment or a search, their shortcomings are apparent. Not to mention their software suite is heavily lacking in terms of anything productivity based simply because a touchscreen is a shitty input for productivity. Honestly Win8 is the future of the tablet market: a full desktop eocosystem combined with a shitty touchscreen ecosystem so that a laptop can double as a tablet (or the reverse if you really wanted to).
In my personal opinion, and I know this part isn’t representative of the market, the tablet form factor is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. If I want to sacrifice experience for portability I’d use my smartphone (which already has a pretty big screen, it’s an S4). If I want to sacrifice portability for experience, I’d use my laptop. And If I’d want to completely throw portability out the door for experience, I’d use my tower. It’s just a smartphone with a bigass screen, doesn’t improve the experience enough to be dropping loads of money on one. Your money would be much better spent buying a laptop for the same price that’ll last you longer anyway. Hell, even buy a laptop that flips the screen backwards and doubles as a tablet if you were really that obsessed with the whole tablet gimmick form factor.
looks like good value for some of those machines
Gabe Newell Unveils 13 Steam Boxes - CES 2014
CES: Gabe Newell Talks About Competing With Microsoft
Digital Storm’s Bolt 2 Steam Machine
Yeah, but I’m actually disappointed with Gigabyte’s system requirements what they provided their own Steam Machine, 4GB of RAM example, which IOM it’s not enough.
2 x 4GB… = 8GB
Worst part there is the integrated graphics.