[cm3]

> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.

Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.

> What's the next step?

Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.

All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?

[jonahx]

> All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?

But this isn't an absurd question at all: Fast food and packaged food have dramatically changed the way people eat, for the worse.

[chii]

Fast food has some undeniable short term benefits, which the lizard brain considers more important than long term benefits. It's no wonder why a lot of fast food chains are massively profitable. The same can be said for walled gardens.

[jraedisch]

Following that reasoning, there are other substances that have similar short term benefits. Like cocaine.

[silence4802]

Many things have both short and long term benefits, in addition to their both short and long term detriments... Like Cocaine.

[elevenfist]

This is just the marketing hypnosis speaking. Fast food tastes awful.

[frio]

> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone.

Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.

[rnovak]

To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.

Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.

[sloanesturz]

Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better and better.

[themodelplumber]

Yeah, but these people with such great apps are also consuming stuff (like apps) created by people with more expensive hardware. A Pakistani friend of mine just received a laptop from a government program and he seemed like he was about to burst with joy. Now he has more power to create.

For the foreseeable future, the guy with the laptop and phone will be able to do more than the guy with just the phone.

And any person with six monitors stacked, a nice keyboard, a mouse, an office chair, large desk, dedicated office phone, large screen TV, new gaming console, cup full of pens and a pad of paper (all these are technologies) plus a laptop and a smart phone will probably tell you the people in developing countries are missing out if they want to experience what he experiences, let alone compete with him. This is why all that stuff is still on the market, and people are really pessimistic and fearful about whatever weird plans Apple has for an iOS/OSX merger.

[rnovak]

The whole point of my comment was that anecdotes are by definition not universal. Maybe you missed that?

[Godel_unicode]

Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean Ubuntu droplet.

No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?

[cm3]

While this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.

[fsckin]

Remove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been totally out of reach on a student budget.

[Godel_unicode]

I suggested this because I've tried it, and it works well if you have no privileged reference frame to which you're comparing it. A new Precision with a Xeon and 32GB of ECC RAM is nice. Not necessary for the vast majority of development jobs.

[vacri]

That's a 'cool trick', but it's not 'nice to code'.

[Godel_unicode]

Compared with what? If you're stacking it up against what Western first-world developers use (macbook with an SSD and more RAM than my first dev box had HDD) then of course you're correct. That's also emphatically not the use case I was addressing.

[ekianjo]

Why would u want to carry so many things if you can have a cheap laptop that packs everything nicely?

[Godel_unicode]

Weight and battery life.

[pjc50]

That seems far more Heath-Robinson than even the old days of plugging a computer into the TV and saving programs on tape.

Mind you, I learnt to program BASIC before I had reliable access to a computer too, so I programmed on paper. I wouldn't reccomend it for any but the most determined student.

[chrisan]

> To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.

But will that always be the case, especially when the "next Netflix" comes around?

I'm in the same boat as you, everyone I know has both a laptop and/or desktop as well as a smartphone and possibly tablet.

However, less and less of these people I know are buying new laptops/PCs because for the average person... why do they need those?

[frio]

You're absolutely right -- it is just an anecdote :). hk__2 further down points out that these are possibly people who've never owned a computer, and that this should be viewed as a step forward -- hk__2's right! The devices they own are cheap (or at least: are much more affordable than a laptop has ever been) and limited, but having them is still better than having no device.

With that said, I'd argue that selling at these (absurdly) low prices is creating a new market segment. I guess I wanted to express my concern at dismissing the part of the population that "don't use more than a smart phone". They exist!

[Amezarak]

A friend of a friend saw me working on my NAS a few weeks ago and said "I didn't know anyone used those anymore."

I said "What do you mean?"

"Computers, I didn't know anyone used computers anymore."

[bad_user]

Arguably the people using restricted mobile devices exclusively would have never used PCs. These are the same people that 10 years ago where buying DVD players, PlayStations and other limited appliances for their living room, because PCs are way too complicated for some people. And you can't really blame them. Just the other day I cleaned my father's computer of viruses.

I also believe the market for content producers that need general purpose computing devices is bigger than ever, and growing. It's just that it's being eclipsed by the market of content consumers. Plus upgrade cycles have gotten much longer, 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine. And speaking of phones, dumb phones are dead, the smartphone is the new norm, yet how many smartphone users are heavy Internet and apps users? I bet it's not that many.

[cm3]

> 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine

Especially content producers can easily use up all hardware enhancements for rendering and such, so they do appreciate a newer machine.

[bad_user]

I'm a software developer, so I'm arguably a content producer. I have a 4 year old laptop that's still fine for software development, even though I'm using heavy tools to do it (e.g. Scala, IntelliJ IDEA), I only had to replace its battery.

Producing content doesn't necessarily mean 3D rendering. It can mean just writing Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents.

[cm3]

I struggled to find a single short description for activities that can easily saturate a modern PC's processing power and I/O, but I couldn't really. Let's not get hung up on naming here.

[dzhiurgis]

I guess in your case you are more of a content input, rather than producer. Or perhaps producers should be called content farmers/hackers.

[bad_user]

Content, noun:

   1. the amount of a particular constituent 
      occurring in a substance.
   2. the material dealt with in a speech, 
      literary work, etc. as distinct from 
      its form or style.
   3. information made available by a 
      website or other electronic medium.

Producer, noun:

   1. a person, company, or country that makes, 
      grows, or supplies goods or commodities.
   2. a person or thing that makes or causes
      something.

Maybe we are not speaking the same language.

[hk__2]

A lot of the people who now own a smartphone didn’t own any computer-like device (i.e. laptop/desktop/tablet) before; I think that’s a step forward, not backward.

[hinkley]

Agreed. Getting hung up on percentages is anxiety inducing for early adopters, probably of every stripe. At some point you have to look at raw numbers.

[frio]

Yes, I agree (and for the people I'm talking about you're absolutely right).

[Kurtz79]

I think it is largely the same segment of the population that before didn't use computers anyway, or used them as dumb browsers or e-mail clients.

[e12e]

>> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.

> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.

I don't see why (if we're talking 10 years time here). Cameras comes with wifi, Photoshop and other software is rented in the cloud, arguably it's easier to have your data in one place, close to the processing -- publishing is done in the cloud (even if the end result is a photo print, it's likely that you use a third party to do the printing).

Games streaming is already a thing. Granted, there are some hard physical limits on latency (speed of light roundtrip) -- but I see no particular well-founded reason to believe all our computing privileges can't be locked up in "the cloud".

It's much more feasible for a small team to produce an entire computer today (as in instruction set, volatile and non-volatile memory, i/o etc), than it was in the 70s - but it's still fantastically more expensive than buying off the shelf hardware. Which means that if the majority of the market truly moves to locked down devices, everyone will have to move to locked down devices.

>> What's the next step?

> Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.

I think how Apple handled Final Cut Pro is a great example of how dangerous tivoization of an entire platform for computing can be.

[EGreg]

Funny enough, home kitchens used to not exist in Roman times as far as I know.

[ant6n]

And home computers didn't exist in the 60s. What's your point?

[EGreg]

What's yours?

[TrevorJ]

The trend has been towards locked down hardware and software, and that trend is starting to encroach on even desktop systems.