lol
“But where is the PC going to go?”
The PC ain’t going anywhere. When someone needs to do heavy-duty content creation, they’re not going to use a tablet and a cloud, they’re going to (as I’m using right now) use a big- or multi-screen display, tactile-feedback keyboard, pointing device, megabits of bandwidth, gigabytes of memory, terabytes of storage, and physical media.
We’re not looking at a “computerless world”, we’re looking at ever more power being squirted into ever smaller devices.
Come 40 years hence, I’ll expect my iContact augmented-reality interface always-there always-on, AND my _Minority_Report_ 3D full-vision interface which will sit at my work desk. The leading edge of convenience and the leading edge of power will always be divergent.
The cloud is just another rebrand of the thin client which they’ve been predicting was going to kill the PC since the LAST time Jobs was in charge in Apple. And all those predictions forget that the PC emerged FROM thin client, it’s like trying to replace cars with trains, it’s a giant leap backwards that isn’t going to happen.
From Steve Jobs —Pathetically clonish cultish slavish gay shyte. Like I’m going to put everything in a cloud or Icloud or what have you. I do in fact back up a few gigabytes on Sugar Sync cloud and it costs me $00.00. You get 5 GB free from them, more if you pay. Of course I can access my Sugar Sync account on any computer
Other than that I back it up at home
The PC isn’t going away, just certain things are becoming more doable on portables. With the iPad, email now doesn’t suck. Picture browsing and movie watching are fully in portables now, as is limited Office-type work. One guy actually filmed and edited a movie short entirely on an iPhone. The iPad is already running the smaller games of the consoles. Newer smartphones can do most PopCap style games already, and the iPad 5 will probably run the equivalent of Modern Warfare 2 or Metal Gear Solid 4 just fine*.
Most of what we do we will be able to do fairly well on a tablet within a few years. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and cable out to a larger display (or daisy chain two huge monitors with one Thunderbolt cable), and you can do what most people already do on a desktop. This is especially true with OS X Lion blurring the lines between a tablet and desktop OS, and Windows 8 running both tablet and desktop apps.
But portables will never do pro HD video editing, you need massive parallel processing speed, lots of memory, and lots of very fast storage. Gaming will continue to move on, so that Modern Warfare 2 will look primitive on consoles and PCs by the time the iPad 5 is out. There’s just not enough power, memory and fast storage available on a portable to do some things the best they can be done.
* Patent-prevention prior art statement: cut up the levels into finer sections, download from the cloud as needed to save local storage space, cache recent sections (in case someone turns around, but let it go out of cache after they’re far into the next section) and next likely sections based on direction traveled or for programmed game flow. Give sections a small low-fidelity version to be downloaded rendered when seen from afar in open worlds, the higher-fidelity data is downloaded with a higher priority as you move towards that section. Data for sections viewed from a sniper scope, or susceptible to be viewed during sniper missions, can be given highest priority.
Even more astounding...
Apple Sounds the PC Death Knell
On Monday, during a presentation in San Francisco to showcase its new software and services, Apple finally began giving people the option to bypass a PC altogether.“We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Mr. Jobs said.