The day of the PC over?

[filephump]

Desktops are pretty much ancient in my eyes. Laptops are the way forward for most people these days. Light weight, portable, almost en par with desktop PCs.

[qasdfdsaq]

Almost being the operative word. So close, and yet still so far...

[Stuart]

The problem for Desktop PCs is that Laptops are powerful enough for most things the average punter would want, and a hell of a lot neater and more convenient than Desktops.

Even in areas that make heavy use of a computer's hardware (Gaming, video editing etc), high end laptops are often powerful enough for the job, and a lot more conveniently than a desktop.

[bw41101]

Originally Posted by peanut

I don't like laptops, I don't like the keyboards

Ditto, especially when (like me) one has fingers like cows t*ts!

Sigh..................!

Si thee

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Stuart

The problem for Desktop PCs is that Laptops are powerful enough for most things the average punter would want, and a hell of a lot neater and more convenient than Desktops.

An iPad (or other tablet/smartphone) is powerful enough for most things the average punter would want, we're not average punters though.

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

An iPad (or other tablet/smartphone) is powerful enough for most things the average punter would want, we're not average punters though.

I suspect you do plenty of perfectly average things with your home computer.

You have a specialist use for your IT kit, but when you're not putting it to that specialist use, would it be fair to say that even you, a non-average punter, could get along better with something that doesn't tie you to a desk?

I'm posting from an iPad at the moment, which I have found to be surprisingly flexible at a whole range of tasks I wouldn't have expected to be able to perform quickly and easily on it, such as issuing invoices for my business, or performing certain moderation or admin tasks on this forum.

There are still things I need to sit at my desk for though; the full-size screen with separate keyboard and pointing device is still unsurpassed when productivity is all-important.

When Saint Steve of Jobs annouced iCloud he said apple was demoting the iMac from 'the centre of your digital life' to 'just another device'. I think that's the essence of what we're discussing here. It is no longer necessary to have a bulky, general-purpose computer at the heart of all your various productivity and entertainment activities. That computer has its place but when those activities are not best performed sat in that place, there are an increasingly affordable and accessible range of alternative devices that can help.

[Waldo Pepper]

An interesting debate we were discussing at work today.

I have a 3.4GHz P4 super PC (well it was in 2004). It's noisy because of the fans but still works and I used it when my laptop went dead.

Keyboards and mice scare some older people as they are totally alien to them. My old Pa struggled to use a PVR I bought him as menus were alien to him. (as he mentioned growing up watching silent movies, things were a little different). He had a point.

However after a few minutes using an ITouch on the Internet and he was away with it albeit browsing the local newspaper sites, some old WW2 archives and the Daily Mail. He thought he could spend the rest of his days reading online archives from soldiers on the thing.

Net use is becoming something most want. Even myself. I use my fast lappy for browsing most of the time.

I think Pads generally are the future as they require nothing technical to use once set up. Large touch displays and very colourful. They are also very intuitive. having played with a borrowed iPad I have to agree despite my opinions.

Much as I do not like the iPad because of price and lack of interface (which are my personal concerns only as a techy), they will be taken up by our non computer literate population who care little about Flash players and USB ports.

That's the whole point though - those that complain about lack of interface have rather missed the point, and are effectively demanding that the iPad be more like a laptop than what it is actually designed to be, which primarily is a dead simple means of consuming content.

[Uncle Peter]

Until some kind of standard is agreed upon this notion is pure fantasy. Too many companies waving their dangly bits around saying "look at what I've got, it'll have yours any day". Some devices do things that others can't.. iPhones can't do some fundamentally useful things that many people might want to do then we've got this whole dirty business of an Apple landgrab going on where they've prevented a competitor from releasing a similar technology to theirs in the European market. No thanks.

What about in the enterprise? maybe when we can take thin client computing really seriously we can talk about using a diverse range of non-pc devices which meet some basic criteria to deliver business critical functionality. This is happening to a certain degree as we speak but it's not going to be the norm anytime soon.

[Tezcatlipoca]

Originally Posted by Waldo Pepper

Much as I do not like the iPad because of price and lack of interface (which are my personal concerns only as a techy), they will be taken up by our non computer literate population who care little about Flash players and USB ports.

I don't see the iPad as being high-priced, myself. Cheaper tablets are generally cheaper for a reason...

All the "quality competition" to the iPad costs pretty much exactly the same (e.g. £479 for a 32GB WiFi-only Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, exactly the same price as the 32GB WiFi-only iPad 2. Ditto for the Blackberry Playbook). OK, the Moto Xoom had a price cut, but AFAIK that was purely down to disappointing sales (it was originally the same price as the iPad 2, but is now IIRC £400 for the 32GB WiFi model & £480 for the 3G model... and even at that reduced price, I'd bet that the majority of tablet customers would rather pay the extra for the iPad 2, apart from the Android fans and Apple haters)...Oh, and there's also the TouchPad, but there's a special reason that was going for less than £100 this week

It's strange. The iMac and iPhone are arguably very expensive, yet Apple is far more reasonable with the iPad's price. I guess sacrificing the higher margins is worth it if it means total dominance of the market...

Smartphone, Tablet, Laptop, PC - they all can do some of the same stuff, but some of them do somethings better than others; it depends what you want to do (small portable device - Smartphone; bit more functionality and better media consumption - Tablet; more functionality, transportability, and ability to produce stuff (like large docs and presentations - laptop; something with grunt that will last a couple of years and you don't have to lug around - desktop.

It's like saying now we have motorbikes, we don't need bicycles, cars, or buses/trains - there will be a market for all of the devices (sometimes in the same house). I use my iPad/Xoom for consumption (browsing/films/books/email etc), my smartphone for music, calls, texts, and to take out with me on an evening, my laptop for moving work between my offices, and my PC (which I am typing on now) for gaming and others stuff.

[peanut]

I might have to take back what I've said in my earlier post about the iPad being useless as I've just borrowed one to prove a point and I can say I've lost that point.

Having used one and using for the things I would use the PC for in general, I can say I've been converted. Watching films (via air video), iplayer etc, and browsing has been quite a pleasure and I know I could tailor an iPad to my own personal use quite easily. If I owned a hat I think I would have eaten it by now.

Saying that, I wouldn't know if a low end (the average laptop) would be enough to go with the ipad for things like on the fly streaming/converting, I've yet to try that out. It seems that to get the best out of the iPad I'm glad my PC isn't just 'average'.

As for laptops doing what desktops can do for things like gaming, well I don't think that's the case, unless you pay that premium amount of extra money that's never going to happen, unless you like playing games like farmville or other low end crappy games. And if you are a gamer, unless you have access to crazy money and can throw sense out of the window, desktops still have and will have the edge for gaming and video editing.

A mate of mine has a m17x2 alienware laptop, just under £4k worth, yet a desktop PC under £800 will still beat it. No brainer really.

[Gavin78]

I dont think the pc is dead at all I Just think its moving in a different direction, sure you might not see as many games as a console but then some games just aren't meant to be on a pc.

Lets look at the specs I have a mid range pc quad core 3.4ghz AMD with 4 gig of ram and a geforce 260GTX graphics card.

As others have said I can run pretty much any game at the moment this is only because developers are sloppy not using the pc's for full use and they have to tailor to the market which aren't running high end machines.

But you get companies like game, steam, EA....they all offer pay to download now which makes it cheaper for them and better for the home user on there 10-100mb BB connections and lets not get away from the pirate copies.

You've also got Metaboli they range from £6-£13 a month to play as many pc games as they supply. £6 for around 250 games and £13 gets you access to 700+ games a lot of companies are going this way well not all EA dont like the idea at least at the moment but renting pc games seems to be a good thing if you dont mind paying £13 a month to get the top games.

I recently bought a ps3 still seem to hold the price after all these years but I say this even though my pc is mid range the graphics card cost me £60 it wipes the floor with the ps3 the CPU was £130 thats less than £200 and cheaper than a ps3 which I can say the graphics aren't that impressive for a machine still stuck in 2006 with its old componants.

I suppose the only problem is as others said all the cables and room for a desktop which for me I dont mind.

Finally the pc as moved more onto online games rather than solo playing which the ps3 doesn't have access to a large portion of games that the pc does. although I like the ps3 for the idea of sitting and chilling infront of the tv I like online gaming and wouldnt' give that up for an out dated console.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Chris

I suspect you do plenty of perfectly average things with your home computer.

You have a specialist use for your IT kit, but when you're not putting it to that specialist use, would it be fair to say that even you, a non-average punter, could get along better with something that doesn't tie you to a desk?

See that's the thing. I do have a tablet laptop and a smartphone. I'd rather do everything on my phone and forget about the desktop, only those devices don't have enough power or flexibility for what I need. If I didn't have to get out of bed to do my gaming, I wouldn't. I wish I wasn't tied to the desk, but until laptops are powerful enough, I am.

---------- Post added at 23:45 ---------- Previous post was at 23:44 ----------

Originally Posted by Chris

I think that's the essence of what we're discussing here. It is no longer necessary to have a bulky, general-purpose computer at the heart of all your various productivity and entertainment activities. That computer has its place but when those activities are not best performed sat in that place, there are an increasingly affordable and accessible range of alternative devices that can help.

For some people, yes. Don't get me wrong, I like the concept. I'd rather have all my devices just be cloud-connected I/O devices but things just aren't moving fast enough.

We're moving closer, but the days of the PC aren't numbered just yet.

[danielf]

I'm tempted to think that the desktop's days are numbered. I need computing power for work. I used to get a new pc every 3 years, bought mac pros for work etc, and in recent years I found that a performance laptop does the job quickly enough...

I don't game or do video processing (much), but it seems to me that most PCs (and laptops for that matter) are becoming increasingly overpowered for what they're actually used for.

Couple that with cloud computing, and I'd say that a lot of people need little more than the computing power of a Tablet.

I think the end of computing done in a big box under your desk is quite near.