The Future of the Desktop PC

[EdT]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

i think the desktop will be like imac or it will have a small box near the screen.
it will not go away; maybe the size will not be the same.
i like the idea but i don`t know if i can count on that small box.

it depends how reliable are they.
i don`t wanna buy one and do a reflow or a reball after 1 or 2 years.
do you wanna live in world where you can`t RECAP your motherboard ?

If people what something that small, I recommend them to use an Andriod mini PC for under $50 brand new. Great for occasional use users and older people that require it only for surfing the net and emails ...plus it blows away a PC if they want to use XBMC for free first run movies ...I use mine daily, pays for itself in less than a week !

This was a 1st generation device back in July 2012, These mini PCs are now the 5th generation with quad core and 2GB of RAM:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28tAyq_o5o

[dj_ricoh]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

If people what something that small, I recommend them to use an Andriod mini PC for under $50 brand new. Great for occasional use users and older people that require it only for surfing the net and emails ...plus it blows away a PC if they want to use XBMC for free first run movies ...I use mine daily, pays for itself in less than a week !

This was a 1st generation device back in July 2012, These mini PCs are now the 5th generation with quad core and 2GB of RAM:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28tAyq_o5o

i still like the lenovo better.
its still a PC; that`s a toy with limited functions.
i saw a colleague convincing a guy to buy one like,i jiggle and then i walk away

[brethin]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

True Desktops will never go away. Those that never needed a Desktop will use other things (Phones / Tablets / etc). But those that need a Desktop will always have one because when you need a Desktop nothing else comes close.

[eccerr0r]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Remember that companies _want_ you to keep on buying new hardware, the bigger the piece the better, means all of the profit goes to one company instead of being shared. The small box PCs are no better than laptops or even tablets, at most you can replace the box as a unit, likely the CPU is soldered (but not always), etc. and all custom parts (board, voltage converters, etc.) meaning you pretty much have to buy from the vendor again.

Lock-in is great... for one particular party...

[Elysarian]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

I like my desktop - use it for coding, browsing and gaming...

I like my laptops - use them for coding, browsing and gaming too (lower-spec games than the desktop)... along with writing up documentation on site at work

I have a Galaxy Tab3 that work forced on me, I use it to make phone calls, download manuals for stuff on site at work and as a WiFi hotspot when there's no free WiFi where I'm working and I need to upload docs from the laptop.

I have a Galaxy S4 smart phone that mostly gets used as a phone but I also play games on there when I don't have much time or am away from the mains.

As for the future, I believe the desktop will hang around for a while yet ("niche" markets such as gaming, serious coding etc. may never let go)

for less intensive users though I do think the "next gen" consoles will fill some of the roles not already filled by smart phones and tablets with office users who don't want to lose local storage going over to something like the Intel NUC.

People who don't mind losing local storage could possibly have something similar but with reduced local storage (enough for the OS) and run everything over the network.

This latter option is something I can't see catching on for home users until bandwidth is much higher than currently available (at least in the UK) and security concerns are completely eradicated (so maybe never).

I already use some cloud technology in the form of Google drive as it does make swapping files between my devices easier (no need to hunt down the USB cable or even have them in the same room/building/county)

[eccerr0r]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

It's kind of sad, people wants higher bandwidth to download, companies want higher bandwidth to stream and keep DRM (i.e., watch once, pay again.) I have mixed feelings of higher bandwidth...

Personally, I would rather keep the USB drives handy. By virtue of copying content to a third party (or second party) violates confidentiality of data...

Also as a curiosity, people are still making videos of course. Do people dump the original file straight to Youtube or do people preprocess before sending it off into the public? These newer machines I wonder if they have hardware to deal with transcoding or generally still requires CPU or a powerful GPU to do this?

[TELVM]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

... People who don't mind losing local storage could possibly have something similar but with reduced local storage (enough for the OS) and run everything over the network.

This latter option is something I can't see catching on for home users until bandwidth is much higher than currently available (at least in the UK) and security concerns are completely eradicated (so maybe never) ...

I guess that's the wet dream of some, to have everybody running on hardware-crippled tablets/phones and totally enslaved to their web services .

Everybody caught by the balls. All your data are belong to us.


An SSD is several orders of magnitude faster than the highest bandwith network, and infinitely more reliable and secure to store our data.

[Elysarian]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

I guess that's the wet dream of some, to have everybody running on hardware-crippled tablets/phones and totally enslaved to their web services .

Everybody caught by the balls. All your data are belong to us.


An SSD is several orders of magnitude faster than the highest bandwith network, and infinitely more reliable and secure to store our data.

I completely agree, my comments were in relation to where the "general public" might be persuaded to go, not where people who actually care about the security of their data might (I can only imagine what would happen should one of the cloud services go down for an extended period or fail - how would you get your stuff back?)

I'll be keeping my data on an external HDD that I keep at another premises thank you very much

[spleenharvester]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Desktops? Perhaps but unlikely. I know plenty of people, me included, who have gotten rid of theirs for laptops. But I don't see laptops going anywhere anytime soon.

[Elysarian]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Desktops? Perhaps but unlikely. I know plenty of people, me included, who have gotten rid of theirs for laptops. But I don't see laptops going anywhere anytime soon.

I can't see myself losing the desktop anytime soon - I can game on my laptop but not comfortably, that's where my desktop excels - same goes for coding/compiling.

I'm not saying a laptop couldn't replace my desktop but the price difference is a little steep for my pockets. If my desktop starts to flag, I can upgrade it a bit at a time, can't do that with most laptops

As an example: last year I went from a dual-core socket AM2 to an 8-core socket AM3+ - this involved motherboard, CPU and ram replacement (total cost: about £300) - over the next few months, as money allowed, I upped the RAM from 8 to 16GB (had the foresight to buy the ram as 4GB sticks), upgraded the gfx from the 460GTX to a 760GTX and installed an SSD as the boot drive (these upgrades cost me around £400 in total)

Upshot is I now have a capable gaming rig again that cost me around £700 spaced over around 6 months, if I'd saved that money to buy a laptop then I wouldn't have anywhere near the same level of gaming performance (nor the option to keep my existing HDD as a data/games storage device).

My point here is that, for the enthusiast (on a budget), there's not really an option in any other form factor other than a desktop

[LLLlllou]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Let the debate begin!

Kinda tough to stick 20 terabytes of RAID storage in an iPad.

[Hondaman]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

A few different angles on this:

1. Some tasks, like dood mentioned, need a "big" computer. Writing code, photoshopping, or business use really need a desktop (I would list government offices, advertising agencies, maintaining business inventory and scheduling patient visits and tests at medical facilities as some of the users of desktops/laptops).

1b. I also suggest businesses will maintain land-line phones for a long time after land-line phones fade from residences worldwide. Multiple incoming lines, transferring calls to the parts department (or to the other branch of your employer's medical practice across town), well, I just don't think cell phones do that.

2. What computing tasks do you perform? Word processing? AutoCAD? How, how much and where do you use the Internet? And mobile internet (laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc) may be more costly per GB. But if you need internet AND mobility, laptops can do that, but pure desktops cannot.

3. How much are the recurring costs? TELVM mentioned this. Mobile internet may be more costly -- and tied to your provider. For tablets and smart phones, cloud storage may be almost a necessity. Will virus protection be needed? Replacement costs are also different (those "free" phones with US contract plans are not free. It is hidden in the monthly payment). IIRC, people and businesses alike are encouraged to upgrade their phones often. Many businesses plan on replacing their desktops/laptops on a regular cycle, individuals often do not.

4. Portability of data and its integrity. How easy is it to get the data from a failed device? How often do you migrate the data? Is your data in the cloud? Does your cloud provider care more about your data than, say, the government auto license agency that will get paid even if they make lots of mistakes?


Conclusion: Desktops and laptops probably won't die out for many years. They have advantages, and if you need those advantages, they can be a much better choice than tablets, smartphones or PDAs.

[Elysarian]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

A few different angles on this:

1. Some tasks, like dood mentioned, need a "big" computer. Writing code, photoshopping, or business use really need a desktop (I would list government offices, advertising agencies, maintaining business inventory and scheduling patient visits and tests at medical facilities as some of the users of desktops/laptops).

1b. I also suggest businesses will maintain land-line phones for a long time after land-line phones fade from residences worldwide. Multiple incoming lines, transferring calls to the parts department (or to the other branch of your employer's medical practice across town), well, I just don't think cell phones do that.

Many of the functions you outline for businesses can be performed by a thin client these days - especially maintaining inventories and scheduling patient visits (I've written software that performs similar functions myself - SQL back end with a browser-based interface) - there are companies that use mobile devices to do this kind of thing.

As for telephones, here in the UK a lot of firms are switching to IP-based telephones now, one of our clients only has analogue phone systems in their older premises where they haven't refurbished yet - the IP system we use has the major advantage for the client of centralised management of the system as a whole (hell of a lot easier to keep an eye on/control what your employees are using the phones for if it all goes through your own dedicated server farm!)

[Kiriakos GR]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Even Mac-crap-dos by loading computer parts behind a TFT panel it does not translate as death of desktop PC.
The expandability offered by PC full tower boxes, it can not be offered by anything else.

In the far past desktop PC was having a size of a complete room.
We did manage to shrink it enough, now its time to work on other developments.

[rhomanski]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Kinda hard to make one of these with a tablet.

[Pentium4]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

A little late chiming in here but I'm also one of those guys that always prefers a desktop over anything else. Nothing beats a full keyboard and a mouse. And a large screen. It's also much easier to squeeze life out of a desktop, because of cooling. An older desktop has to work harder than it did when it was brand new, just like a laptop, but at least you can beef up the cooling (easily) in a desktop.

Browsing the web on my smart phone, convenient but such a pain, even with young eyes! And I hate how you can't view some pages in desktop mode. Give me a full ATX tower computer any day!

[Jcas]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

By here, desktops will live 'forever'.

Here we have many stores - the commercial sector in general - that have several machines and seems they will always be there - it's less costly to make a good repair than buy new ones. Laptops in these areas are only at the frontend and some offices, the real job - database, server, data manipulation is done by desktops.

So, for home users(the general user), desktops tend to disappear as we have other devices such as tablets, ipads, smartphones... that are even more 'powerful' but for industry, commercial sector, I suppose I'll die and they will be still alive for a long go!

At the other hand, I see that we could use devices such as mini pcs (cubieboard for example or even mini pc tower) to replace several desktop areas(reducing the cost).

[Warwagon]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Where is your Cloud data? Who else is looking at it? Yes, make it easy for the NSA... What happens when the cloud provider goes bankrupt or gets shutdown? Yep, your data goes to digital #ell. Not that it matters to a 'ignorant' public that doesn't backup their fail prone drive anyway. For those people a cloud service is a better bet to keep pics of fluffy around. Till they forget to pay the bill and watch their data get expensive or told to go pound sand because the service will not pull a backup tape for them.

Then again who really cares about pics of fluffy? Usually they are not worth the $1200 data recovery cost. On the other hand emails used in a lawsuit can be expensive to recover esp when you have to haul the cloud service into the courtroom to recover lost data for other lawsuits.

Of course with the Facebook 'careless' generation... They will be learning hard lessons about privacy they gave away and will not be hired to do anything IT because data security is a lesson they do not understand. Yeah, lets store our trade secrets in the 'cloud' and hope the cloud provider doesn't store passwords in plain text or some other easy hack issue... then go bankrupt and the hard drive filled servers hit a bankruptcy auction full of your sensitive data.

As far as tablets or other 'jokes' of an all in one cell phone: They kinda suck really well at everything. From butt dialing everyone including 911 from the touch screen, slow limited experience web browsing, to poor call quality.

Laptops tend to overheat and melt the video chips off the video card. iPhones are known to overheat under stress.

So for the "dumb" general consumer you can sell the suckers anything. For corporate and heavy users there will always be a need for desktops. All in one phones work with desktop and/or enterprise offerings.

I agree the Thin Client server model is returning. The thin clients have enough power on their own to run (light duty) word processing and web apps without a server expense. You are pushed away from Microsoft to do this is they are too greedy to let you run business apps like MS Word on a Windows 7 Embedded Thin Client. Non-Business use like education or home use is a different story.

[goontron]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Where is your Cloud data? Who else is looking at it? Yes, make it easy for the NSA... What happens when the cloud provider goes bankrupt or gets shutdown? Yep, your data goes to digital #ell. Not that it matters to a 'ignorant' public that doesn't backup their fail prone drive anyway. For those people a cloud service is a better bet to keep pics of fluffy around. Till they forget to pay the bill and watch their data get expensive or told to go pound sand because the service will not pull a backup tape for them.

Then again who really cares about pics of fluffy? Usually they are not worth the $1200 data recovery cost. On the other hand emails used in a lawsuit can be expensive to recover esp when you have to haul the cloud service into the courtroom to recover lost data for other lawsuits.

very true, once you stop paying they don't have to hold your data!

Of course with the Facebook 'careless' generation... They will be learning hard lessons about privacy they gave away and will not be hired to do anything IT because data security is a lesson they do not understand.

On one hand i have to agree, most of the kids at my HS are stupid when it comes to computers. " hey whut will happen if i push this buton" *computer re-starts* "oh shit is blu screenin" "i dint do nothen"

but on the other i'm an IT engineer at 16 and a leader of a project to move about 30,000 windows computers to linux, A.K.A sensitive data up the wazoo.
so being the exception to this rule that teens are stupid computerwise i personally have to say fu(k you, but i also have to agree with you for every other teen.

Yeah, lets store our trade secrets in the 'cloud' and hope the cloud provider doesn't store passwords in plain text or some other easy hack issue... then go bankrupt and the hard drive filled servers hit a bankruptcy auction full of your sensitive data.

As far as tablets or other 'jokes' of an all in one cell phone: They kinda suck really well at everything. From butt dialing everyone including 911 from the touch screen, slow limited experience web browsing, to poor call quality.

Laptops tend to overheat and melt the video chips off the video card. iPhones are known to overheat under stress.

So for the "dumb" general consumer you can sell the suckers anything. For corporate and heavy users there will always be a need for desktops. All in one phones work with desktop and/or enterprise offerings.

I agree the Thin Client server model is returning. The thin clients have enough power on their own to run (light duty) word processing and web apps without a server expense. You are pushed away from Microsoft to do this is they are too greedy to let you run business apps like MS Word on a Windows 7 Embedded Thin Client. Non-Business use like education or home use is a different story.

+1

[ratdude747]

Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

On one hand i have to agree, most of the kids at my HS are stupid when it comes to computers. " hey whut will happen if i push this buton" *computer re-starts* "oh shit is blu screenin" "i dint do nothen"

but on the other i'm an IT engineer at 16 and a leader of a project to move about 30,000 windows computers to linux, A.K.A sensitive data up the wazoo.
so being the exception to this rule that teens are stupid computerwise i personally have to say fu(k you, but i also have to agree with you for every other teen.

As a 21 year old EET student and avid computer nut (and arch linux freak), I also agree. There are some of us who know computers, and most who are morons. But most is not the same as all, now is it.