I don't know really - PCs have saturated a good share of the US market.
True enough, but then a lot of that saturation is with really old clunkers, and most of those aren't going to survive for much longer. With the way people treat their PCs (mostly, with the way that they <i>never</i> clean out the dust) they're bound to start failing sooner or later.
And for email and AOL alot of people are learning they don't need a faster machine for it.
While true and a good thing, sadly there are still a lot more people who <i>don't</i> know that. They just go by what the salesperson tells them that they need, which is usually something insane like an extremely over-priced Wilty (P4 Willamette Celeron) with 100MHz SDRAM and a TNT2 graphics card.
In fact faster internet connections make the difference anymore. I had an old PC with broadband connection, and it sufficed just fine. My friend got a Pentium 4 1.5GHz with DDR when it first came out. I noticed how much faster things opened, but it was only a sec or two faster and when I got on the net with 56K connection my old clunker was a speed demon in comparasion.
Umm ... that's the point. Internet performance is driven primarily by bandwidth and secondarily by hard drive speed. CPU has virtually nothing to do with the internet, nor even memory. After all, 56K doesn't even come close to saturating a PCI bus, not to mention memory bandwidth or CPU power. (Though if you have an old enough PC, you can find that your hard drive is slowing you down.)
It's not a secret that the future of computing is in small, mobile, easy to use systems.
No, it's a farse that the future of computing is small, mobile, and easy-to-use systems. It's a myth. There is barely even enough market for PDAs for all of the vendors to keep from tearing into each other like a pack of wild dogs. And that isn't likely to change even in ten years.
Just like the myth of the PC becoming a replacement for the TV as a home-entertainment center, the future of PCs is not voice-driven pocket PCs. There will always be niche markets for the strange, but it is not likely to <i>ever</i> be more than a niche market, no matter how hyped a story you get from Bob The Marketting Drone.
People who are most interested in technology, people in the IT industry are getting laid off like bloody mad. IBM just announced it's axing 5% of it's work force, some 15K people over the next year. This and many other lay-offs are leaving the employed enthusiast group small.
What great logic that is. A whole 5% get laid off (meaning that a whole 95% are still employed) and suddenly the majority of computer enthusiasts are unemployed? In case you haven't been keeping tabs, the whole US economy is verging on the fringe of a recession. Almost <i>every</i> company is 'restructuring to eliminate unnecessary overhead'. It isn't <i>just</i> the IT sector being hit.
, a tech push will happen again, but will it really be in the desktop sector?
Damn straight it will. With the excessive prices and limited upgradability of laptops and the near-uselessness of PDAs (as a regular computing device that is) companies are still (and at this rate <i>always</i>) going to be looking for the good old Beige Beastie. (Even if a lot of them are black instead of beige these days.)
Will Intel and AMD be important in say 10 years when a good number of people will be able to have a handheld PC with tons of computing power, a fast wireless connection that is simple to use anywhere on Earth? Seems like companies making handheld chips may come out on top, like motorola and IBM.
1) Maybe you haven't noticed, but INTEL MAKES PDA CPUS AS WELL. So even if your warped view of the future were to somehow astound the world by becoming true, Intel at the least will still be a part of that game.
2)Handhelds will <i>never</i> have even a quarter of the computing power of the most modern desktop PCs, and they don't even begin to compare to a workstation. So long as people need computational power to do their daily work, no PDA or tablet PC will ever suffice.
3) I highly doubt that there will <i>ever</i> be such a thing as "a fast wireless connection that is simple to use anywhere on Earth". It's a ludicrous concept. First you would need actual coverage of everywhere on Earth. Satellites don't even come close to covering that, <i>and</i> they would require you to be completely stationary while using them.
Then you would need it to actually be fast. Satellite internet connection imposes a serious delay which makes internet gaming virtually impossible. No matter how fast they are, you still have to somehow beam data from and to the satellite, which takes time. (Unless someone can somehow design a faster-than-light comm unit.)
Wireless radio networks are extremely range-limited and require millions if not billions of access points if you were to cover the whole world. It's a worthless persuit as well for sheer price and complexity alone.
nja469, I don't know where you get your information from, but you're only parroting the drivel of marketting zombies. Your views on the future of PCs are just as warped as the ludicrous claims made during the dot-com era. (And we've all seen how <i>that</i> turned out.) The whole point of hiring a marketting staff is to have expert liars weave the web of a ludicrous future into the believable so that they can hock useless wares.
If you want to stick to them and hang on their every word, go right ahead. Meanwhile the rest of the world will continue to go on using desktop PCs. They <i>might</i> get smaller (maybe even the size of a Game Cube, though that's many years off still) but they'll <i>never</i> be replaced for the pure simple reason that handheld PCs will <i>never</i> have the computational power needed.
Just to give you something to mull over, in case you haven't heard, one of the next major operating system breakthroughs (even if it is an extremely old idea that is only finally being implemented) will be using 3D acceleration in the OS's GUI. Primarily it will be to run 'windows' as textures, but it should also allow for things like 3D icons as well as other nifty eye candy. Microsoft is working on it, and Linux might even follow. (If the open source community can ever really get it's act together and decide on a universal scheme for a GUI that is.) PDAs, having <i>no</i> 3D acceleration, would never get away with this. Heck, they can't even run full versions of Word or Windows! They're extremely storage and memory limited and processor-hindered. They're good for writing email, but damned if you could ever play a decent game on them or dare I suggest actually <i>work</i> on one.
<A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/171.htm" target="_new">The corpse you find may be your own.</A> - Black Mage
It certainly is interesting though...
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