I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".
The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)
I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.
We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.
Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.
They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".
The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)
I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.
We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want.
Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
Two different populations — those interested in computing, and those interested in computers.
Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David Patterson was a mistake to begin with.
Looking at AMD's x64 server offerings, I don't see why that would go away.
But I can imagine that it would become less prevalent on personal machines, maybe even rare eventually.
Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.
Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.
They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop. It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.
The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player).
Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing.
Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)
>(Same like getting rid of awful flash player).
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.