Is the PC, as embodied by a tower chassis hidden away under a desk, dead?
I don’t believe so. The PC in a tower is still the most affordable way to get a ton of compute. With Sandy Bridge, I finally could get enough performance in a 15-inch notebook to ditch my Mac Pro. Lately I’ve been testing Intel’s Sandy Bridge E and man does it tempt me back to a desktop as my primary workhorse. If I didn’t travel so much for work I’d definitely use a desktop as my primary machine (note that I still have multiple desktops that I use, but most of my work is done on a notebook thanks to its portability). We may see the desktop turn into something a bit more modular (notebook external attached graphics and storage), but we’re still a bit away from making that happen. I’d also add that the technology world is very cyclical. When I was a kid, folks were talking about the mainframe dumb terminal model. A couple decades later, we pretty much have a version of that with the cloud smartphone model. Moore’s Law has given us a new category of “fast enough” computing devices (see first page of my original article on the Atom back in 2008). However to completely abandon the PC and embrace the smartphone/tablet does mean you are giving up around 5 years of performance improvements to do so. For many users that’s fine, but not for all. This industry is built around progress, forcing everyone to take a step back in the compute department doesn’t make sense. Within the next 5 years, many very smart people believe that mainstream computing will move to wirelessly dockable smartphones. I believe this is a valid vision. It’s not for everyone, but it can surely happen. (via 5 Minutes on The Verge: Anand Shimpi | The Verge)
