Re: Do you think PCs will become obsolete in near future ?
Traditional desktops are very likely to continue shrinking in applications as better task-suited devices take over more of their roles. I do think convertible tablets are going to continue to cut into laptops for a lot of applications, too. But I think as long as we have tasks designed for sitting at computers doing them, we're going to continue to have computers designed for that, too.
Gaming or ownership of your data I don't see as major long-term forces. Storage and data ownership mainly because the soft sell of the cloud is going to continue to chip away at those niches until they become impractical for the diehards left in them; the more broadband we have everywhere, the more this incomparable appeal of having access to all your files on whatever device you're using takes over for some deep need to know where those files are actually being stored and have that version of control over them.
Gaming because gaming is changing fast itself. Gaming consoles are still taking up the spot for the living-room PC, and the clock is ticking on them for being the best or most convenient way of delivering their core application of gaming, while set-top boxes and smart TVs are offering a subset of that living room computer functionality and waiting to bloom when consoles do die or be killed off themselves by the replacement. I really do think there's going to be a boxed solution at some point and that we haven't seen it yet, and it's not (yet) taking the form of a Windows or Mac PC just plugged into the television set with a 10-foot interface (like, even Xbox isn't fully a member of the Windows 10 convergence family). But I really think that games are going to stop being one of the things pushing bleeding edge hardware in the process of all that change. Hell, right now, bandwidth is already a more prohibitive cost on gaming in most situations than local hardware is.
It's hard for me to imagine that anything that qualifies as a "desk job" right now isn't going to continue being best facilitated by large displays, comfortable keyboards, and relative pointing devices. Those jobs and those computers have been designed around each other in the last thirty years. There's no benefit to putting a tablet in a dock and calling it a workstation. The benefit is taking the "computer" out of the "desktop" completely - making the workstation a thin client with a VM in the server room, or an outsourced server farm, that the tablet can also access on a business trip. Which I guess is a little like the death of desktop PCs, except that most of the people using them will literally not know the difference.
Keyboard, mouse, big screen, interfaces that fully utilize them? Those are going to last for a very, very long time. Intel architecture? Eh, they're either going to fix it or everything's going to go to ARM, but convergence will happen and the software division will cease to exist. Little boxes that you plug everything into to make go? Probably going to look more and more like the Mac Mini with time, but we're still going to need sedentary computing devices of some kind we can leave around.
Last edited by Copper Bezel; November 25th, 2015 at 10:42 PM.
I know I shouldn't use tildes for decoration, but they always make me feel at home~
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