[asdfpoiu]

Open hardware to the rescue of the PC!

I think the (not-too-distant) future of home computing will have a lot in common with today's PCs. Articles like this one always seem to underestimate the amount of real creative or productive work people want to do -- something which is still a challenge on the iPads of today. Have YOU compared typing on a small screen to a big one?

With custom manufacturing becoming affordable, as traditional computers start dying, open source hardware will start replacing them. I think we are seeing the first steps in this direction with Raspberry PI, hobbyist open hardware people, 3D printing (in the future: cheap chip printing?), CryogenMod, etc.

[jiggy2011]

Interesting, maybe in the future you have 2 options either a fully closed ecosystem or a fully open one.

I wonder if you will be able to use the open one to create stuff for the closed one?

[orangecat]

I wonder if you will be able to use the open one to create stuff for the closed one?

More disturbingly, I wonder if the open ones will be allowed to have a fraction of the functionality. Hollywood would love to only allow Internet access from locked down devices, and if 98% of the population ends up on appliances, things like that actually become feasible to enforce.

[jiggy2011]

Perhaps though the 2 devices will have massively different use cases.

This is already happening for me to an extent, I run a dual boot of Linux and Windows 7. Essentially Linux is my "programming workstation" and Windows 7 is my entertainment.

I would quite happily replace my Windows 7 boot with something more like iOS since the only applications I really use there are Steam and Netflix.

I'm actually quite glad that Linux does not support most of my games, since this keeps my productivity high.

The only irritation is when I want to watch something from netflix in the background whilst working on some code but even that is easily overcome by running netflix from a PS3 on my TV beside my computer.

Regards restricting internet access only to certain devices. At a government level that would be difficult legislation to pass.

I can see domestic ISPs only supporting specific devices perhaps to keep their support costs down, but I'm sure there will always be ways around this. I remember the guy who came around to install my first broadband connection insisting that I would not be able to access the internet at all from my Linux laptop until I showed him how I did it.

[asdfpoiu]

Also, I should say, the tablets will probably start doubling as powerful PCs with a wireless connection to the display and keyboard and mouse. Uh-oh.