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posted by on Wednesday April 05 2017, @09:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the vive-le-roi dept.

You may never buy another laptop.

Ten years ago, laptop sales overtook desktop PC sales to become the dominant hardware platform for computing. Now smartphones are about to do to laptops what laptops did to desktops.

[...] The first fatal trend is that young people are already choosing smartphones over laptops, even without docking and clamshell smartphones. ComScore reports that the use of laptops and desktops among younger people is on the decline. Some 20 percent of millennials use their smartphone as their only computing device, according to a recent report, and this percentage grows each year. Raw demographics alone favor the end of laptops.

The second fatal trend is that the industry is champing at the bit to move everything off Intel and onto ARM. (Intel and Intel-compatible chips have powered desktop and laptop platforms for decades; the smartphones and smartphone apps run on ARM chips.) Once laptops, especially laptops from Apple, run ARM chips, they'll run iOS and Android instead of OS X and Windows. And at that point, they'll essentially be identical to docking solutions, but more expensive.

The third and final fatal trend can be found in your wallet. Smartphones are becoming amazing. The Galaxy S8 is amazing. And this year's iPhone is expected to be mind-blowing as well. The new phones have cameras that rival DSLRs. They have performance that rivals desktop PCs. They run increasingly amazing apps, including professional-quality apps. Unlike laptops, smartphones are exciting.

And they're expensive.

Consumers are now ready to pay $700, $800 — even $1,000 and upwards for a phone. (Already a top-of-the-line iPhone 7 with AppleCare costs $1,100. The iPhone 8 is expected to be more expensive.)

Consumers will pay this amount because smartphones are worth it. This is especially true if they don't have to shell out $1,500 or more for a laptop as well.

Laptops are too boring and expensive. The industry is churning out new designs that enable smartphones as laptop replacements. Young people are favoring smartphones. The industry wants to use smartphone OSes. And consumers are spending more on smartphones, which will make us spend less on laptops.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday April 05 2017, @09:29PM (7 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday April 05 2017, @09:29PM (#489355)

    Read this report as people do not want Windows 10 and the Mac has returned to the art dept niche.

    I maintain that 90% of people never wanted Windows, never liked Windows and bolted at the very first opportunity, to netbooks, tablets and now phones. Anything to avoid the nightmare that is Windows that didn't have insanely high Apple pricing. (iPhones don't count because of carrier subsidy) And even if Windows didn't suck, they simply never needed a Workstation type machine. They want to play games, surf the web and perhaps type up a paper for school. Well unless you are building a serious gaming rig, a Playstation or XBox does your gaming now and a tablet or phone can deal with most of the rest, perhaps a Chromebook for "Productivity" type use.

    And this is good, most people do not need a workstation. But now we get to the bad part though, as us who do need more no longer get to benefit from the economy of scale imposed by Microsoft's monopoly. Remember how much workstation level hardware used to cost? If you want unlocked gear with good specs be prepared to pay, if it remains generally available at all.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @10:37PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @10:37PM (#489386)

    Well, no, not really. Sadly, the 99.5% that are the focus of this piece never cared what OS was installed. They wanted something from the store that worked when they turned it on. The reason they are going the route of phone only isn't because of android/ios, it is because the only use they ever put either their workstation or their laptop to was consumption. They watched youtube videos, they watched their facebook feed, they watched their twitter feed, etc., anything where they were not the creator of stuff (ignoring tweets and facebook posts as "creating content", which it really is not). They did not need a workstation to consume their twitter feed. They did not need a laptop to consume their facebook feed. But at different points in time, each was all that was available, so they used what was there.

    Now, the phone they have in their hand allows them to consume all the content created by others that they were already exclusively consuming anyway, and since they never create they see no need for a laptop or a workstation. The phone is "just good enough".

    This is the same effect that cell phone cameras are having on the compact point-and-shoot camera market and to some extent the DSLR market. The camera in their pocket, that isn't forgotten at home, is good enough for the photos they are skilled enough to snap, that they see no need for the other piece of hardware.

    Same with the laptop and the workstation before it. No need for buying that other, more bulky, thing, when the thing in their pocket is good enough for what they try to do.

    Sadly, your last statement is all too true. For those of us left who actually use a computer to create stuff vs. simply watching what others created will no longer get the pricing benefit that comes from churning out millions of the same item over and over. Sadly, our wallets will be much thinner in the near future because our needs will only be met with what will become specialty or professional level equipment, with the attached 10x price increase to go with that label.

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:20AM (1 child)

      by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:20AM (#489469) Journal

      > [...] the only use they ever put either their workstation or their laptop to was consumption.

      I use mine for that purpose. When I do, it's often CDs or DVDs that I'm "consuming." I'm not sure that's feasible with a smart-phone or with a tablet computer.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @09:28AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @09:28AM (#489586)

        DVDs are being replaced by streaming and media servers. And at home they get played on the bit smart TV.

        But I agree: It's not simply phones that replace the laptop for most people. It's the fact that for all the stuff the majority of people uses their laptop for, there's now a specialized device available that's more practical for that specific use. Smartphones and tablets allow to surf the web and watch media while away from home. They also double as camera. Smart TVs allow the same while at home. The need for data storage is taken by the cloud.

        The people who do anything that requires a full-fledged general-purpose computer are in the minority. The visitors of this site are definitely not representative of the general population.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:19AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:19AM (#489511)

      Perhaps at least our professional equipment won't come with a tablet touch screen interface.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @04:30AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @04:30AM (#489504)

    Can't speak for the Win10 thing, but Apple may be losing the art department thing as well, inch by inch.

    Evidence: I work in music, and the latest macbook pro is Just Not Good Enough. Sure, the touch strip is not bad when scrubbing over audio, but it's not good - not compared to a mouse, and it's not much better than the touchpad was anyway. The loss of function keys is A Very Bad Thing, because many DAWs (no, Virginia, not everybody uses Logic) use them. And 16GB of RAM is stupidly inadequate when what you're doing depends on huge sample libraries, and reliably low latency (i.e. welcome to 2010, Apple). Can you scrape by? Sure. If you reflexively mixdown all your tracks all the time. That doesn't make it good. You could get a trashcan, which is out of date, stupidly overpriced, and upgrade limited, and even then you have to deal with Apple's walled garden bullshit.

    More and more musicians and their software providers are moving to Linux. Not because they want to - because Apple and Microsoft are damn well making them do it.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 06 2017, @01:28PM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday April 06 2017, @01:28PM (#489642) Journal

      That's interesting that people are moving to Linux for music production. I was aware there was a shift toward Linux a decade ago for rendering, but a friend who composed electronica/techno swore he would use Apple until he died. Do you suppose the uptake of Linux is solely because of missteps at Apple or MS, or are there other factors like cross-pollination from the Maker/DIY movement or a generational shift to younger people who are more tech-savvy?

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @10:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @10:50PM (#489907)

        Hard to say.

        What I usually hear is a scream of frustration at Apple or Microsoft, and then a morose look at, respectively, Microsoft or Apple. Win10 has kind of won some hearts with recent moves towards lower latency, and willingness to install on massive hardware. On the other hand the: "Oh, hey, I see you're booting me up so I'm going to finish installing that long list of updates that I didn't tell you I got, hope you have a nice 45 minutes while your audience gets restless, then leaves." shit is something you only need to experience, or see once and then Microsoft is an instant no-go for the stage. And Apple's walled garden crap is just escalating to the point of no return - while, of course, stupid crap like unilaterally deleting music files is a complete showstopper as well.

        Linux is an option for quite a few people, but another big beneficiary has been the music hardware industry. They had been collectively shitting themselves over laptops and plugins but they've discovered that their promise that the damn keyboard will WORK when the show starts is actually worth some sales. I myself have determined that I just do not require a general purpose OS on stage. Not Linux either (except in embedded format, maybe). I tweak knobs, hit keys, and play strings.

        It's kind of liberating.