1. The iPad and other tablets are eating into the PC market.
No argument here. As a recent purchaser and user of an iPad, I do love my new gadget. I can listen to my music, read my emails, post to FR, browse the web, look at pictures on my home NAS, and do it anywhere in the house. All of this on a screen bigger than that of my phone, which is a huge plus.
However, as the article pointed out:
PCs are like trucks, and tablets are like cars.
Trucks still serve a purpose! I can't play Battlefield, EVE, WoW, Sim City, or any of my Steam games on my tablet, nor would I want to. The one game I purchased, Minecraft PE, is cumbersome and not enjoyable to play on my tablet, let alone my phone. I still go to my custom built, liquid cooled gaming PC with 32 inch monitor to do all of that!
2. Windows 8 is a confusing, unfamiliar and scary place.
Again, no arguments here. Microsoft seriously screwed the pooch on Win8. By some accounts, it's even worse than Vista. At least Vista's interface was moderately familiar. Win8 with its tile system is cumbersome and unfamiliar. Having worked in IT for almost 20 years, I can tell you that the number one complaint from the overwhelming majority of customers seeking tech support concerns interface familiarity. Once you change the littlest thing with the user interface, you force the user to change the way they use their computer, and that's NEVER an easy sell.
Most people I Know are using Windows 7 now and they love it. Microsoft did a good thing with Windows 7, and I believe at some point they may re-brand Windows 8 as a tablet/mobile platform OS and let it die on the vine like they did with Windows CE.
3. Windows 8 hardware is flawed.
At this point in the article, the bias is becoming VERY obvious. Microsoft does not manufacture hardware. They're a software company. The Intel Haswell architecture is just how the chip die is assembled. It has no bearing on the actual functionality of the system overall. Matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Haswell or one of its successors (specifically Broadwell) makes it into the next generation of Apple devices. This writer obviously has no clue about specifics in the hardware industry.
4. Where are the netbooks? PCs are too expensive now.
This is by far the worst section of this article. First he mentions netbooks. Then he refers to PC price points. Finally he gripes about touchscreens.
To make this more concise, one needs to consider touchscreens in general. The touchscreen on your iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device uses different technology than the larger screens on laptops and netbooks. People aren't going to pay the price for a netbook when they're familiar with the Apple or Android experience on a tablet. This all falls back in Microsoft's lap as an insufficient mobile operating system in Win8. This has nothing to do with the hardware overall. Besides, what the Hell do netbooks have to do with PCs?
When you say PC, I think the desktop computer sitting on the floor of my office or the 6 lb. laptop I tote around for work. Netbooks are mini-laptops. They're a jump between laptop and tablet. There's not enough of a market for that level of difference. People are either satisfied with the size and power of a tablet or they go for the larger platform for office automation, gaming, multi-tasking, etc.
5. People are just not upgrading that much anymore.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, but not for the reasons stated in the article. My 3 year old Intel i7 930 quad-core processor, 12 GB of RAM, liquid-cooled dual-SLI nVidia GTX460s, and SSDs do everything I could possibly want when it comes to gaming. There's little reason for me to upgrade to newer components. Thus the crux: while Moore's Law is still applicable for component manufacturing, it is not applicable to the software development lifecycle.
Unless you are using your home PC for VMware Workstation, running multiple desktop OSes from the same piece of hardware, running a multi-use server, or developing the next generation of 3D multiplayer video games, there's very little software on the market that can utilize the full spectrum of resources on a newer PC.
High-end video games like Battlefield, Crysis, Medal of Honor, etc. only get up to about 3 GB of RAM and two to four cores of processor at 90%-99% utilization. The graphics engines are doing a bulk of the heavy lifting.
So unless you're doing constant high-definition audio/video coding/decoding, running full-complement virtual machine labs, or doing some serious multi-tasking, there's little that even your retail consumer-level computer couldn't do that a comparable 2 year old machine can't. No one's developing software to utilize the full spectrum of resources on these new machines.
This doesn't mean that PCs are dead or dying. It means that there's an enormous market of machines out there waiting to be used in a more complete way. It's akin to a frontiersman crossing over the crest of a mountain and staring down into a wide-open valley of fertile land. You can't use it all right away, but it's all there for the taking.
A consistently true syllogism we use in the IT world comes from something we've all said at one point in time, "1 MB of RAM?! We'll NEVER use all of that!" Every new generation of tech nerds realizes, "Wow, how wrong were we?"
That's me. I could probably manage it on a really beefy laptop (would need at least 20GB of ram), but I just don't see that happening on tablets any time soon. Virtualization is da bomb as far as I'm concerned. I have an entire server rack that essentially fits right on top of my desk.