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Think of PC as standing for an innovative pocket computer not personal computer. This is a made-in-Finland computing rethink called Solu, now up on Kickstarter seeking funds.
It's a tiny box, made out of wood, that serves as a pocket computer which you can use independently but it can also be connected up to a screen at the office, becoming your full blown desktop computer. Softpedia's Marius Nestor said they are using a Linux kernel based operating system, the SoluOS.
North America technology reporter for the BBC, Dave Lee, reported on this attempt from Helsinki-based Solu Machines to reinvent the PC.
Computing power is packed into the small touchscreen device. "It can be hooked up to a bigger display at which point the handheld device is used as a controller. Various gestures - swiping, tapping, pinching - are used to control what happens on the bigger screen," said Lee.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:37AM
Also very skeptical that they can cram the power of a full desktop into a pocket size.
Regardless of technology, a larger box that is plugged into the wall will do more and cost less, compared to a small and thin battery-powered box. They have different sets of design compromises. The only way for these to meet would be when there is no more need for CPU and RAM and storage. However even starships of 24th century are controlled by mainframes, not by a personal tablet. Even if a personal tablet can contain an AI that can maintain a conversation with a human in a natural language, a ship's computer needs to run enough threads of the same AI to support conversations with almost the entire crew at the same time, and to run the machinery, and to calculate trajectories, and to run holodecks...
It may be that computers in people's homes will transition to tablets as soon as the entertainment needs of the people cross the ever-growing capabilities of phones and tablets. I'm starting to feel this pressure myself. Only insufficient capabilities of mobile software stop me from abandoning a desktop at home. I cannot plug an Android tablet into a monitor and suddenly have a KDE desktop. I can have the same full screen applications, but why would I want to use them on a large monitor? However if a tablet one day acquires an ability to switch to a desktop role, together with the GUI that is proper for that, then there would be little reason to have a separate PC to just browse the Internet and read mail - and this is something that the vast majority of home users are focusing on. However at work there is no upper limit for performance. Even a secretary would benefit from a 100 GHz CPU and 1 TB of RAM because it would run speech recognition and OCR far better.