I am obnoxiously copying this comment made by Mark Barbee (the bearded one) to a blog post,
Nobody cares about Windows anymore
You can see the original posting here:
I find it useful to compare desktops to Pickup trucks, sedans to laptops, compact cars to tablets, and motorcycles to smartphones.
Most people don’t really need a desktop when all they really do is consume content: websites, media, etc. Most pickup truck drivers, if they are honest, will tell you they hardly ever tap the hauling or towing ability of their vehicles.
A few people will keep a desktop around, but those will probably be mostly enthusiasts and hardcore (not casual) gamers, along with some business users.
I see compact Bluetooth keyboards with touch-pads and little quad core Android mini-computers with HDMI outputs (like this http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Tronsmart-MK908II-RK3188-Cortex-A9-Quad-Core-1-6GHz-Google-Android-4-2-Mini-TV-BOX-2G-8G-BT-External-Wifi-Antenna-Black-318432.html) under 65 US dollars, that live hanging onto the back of your TV eventually taking the place of many non-enthusiast desktops – they have more processing power than many people’s current PCs (since more and more people are delaying replacing their aging PCs) and more main memory to boot. Storage is another matter, but storage gets is cheaper every month.
I’ve been building PCs for around 30 years now. Last PC was built over 11 years ago (XP) and has been mostly abandoned for a laptop. I tried Win8 for about 30 minutes and haven’t touched it since.
Will probably build my last PC this year or next year, but probably will not use a MS Operating System because I don’t want to be forced to upgrade/migrate when I don’t really want or need to.
Probably will build a NAS/SAN arrangement running some flavor of LTS Linux, possibly with a RaspPi functioning as an energy efficient front end (and buffer) which can be used to run all the time and to wake up (wake on LAN) the PC if the processing power or mirrored HD storage needs to be accessed from lighter weight ‘consumer’ appliances…
I think laptops were the first step in this direction. The ability to sit comfortably on the couch and portability will probably turn out to be the Killer Apps that end up killing the PC for all but the very few, I think. Hell, some people still have horses.
Only real downsides are fingerprints.
Most people will blindly trade convenience for the privacy they forfeit when they entrust their data to cloud providers. Some people never learn.
Nice websites Hans. Enjoy the content very much. Cheers!
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