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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
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @11:34PM (5 children)
It does sound infuriating that a school - which is supposed to help people educate themselves and encourage self-sufficiency - is aiding and promoting non-free proprietary user-subjugating software. Proprietary software doesn't allow for education, since no one but the developers can see the source code. Proprietary software discourages independence because users can't edit the source code and perhaps share the modifications with others. Proprietary software also has a higher probability of being dangerous to users' privacy, since the developers have all the power and such power is often abused.
Why is that even legal?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:00AM (3 children)
Yeah, yeah ... this again. Back in my day school books and research books (you remember dictionaries and encyclopedias, right?) were not free or open source. And if you had some volumes of the encyclopedia you needed to get the rest of that encyclopedia.
FOSS is great and all, but let's not pretend that computing devices have turned things into "school children are consumers now". They always were. It's just companies you hate are now getting the sales rather than companies you didn't care about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:47AM (2 children)
At least with those old school paper encyclopedias or even the slightly less oldschool cd-rom encyclopedias, you didn't have to worry about developers potentially spying on you while you are looking up the entry for {insert embarrassing topic here} and selling that info to advertisers/insurance companies.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:44PM (1 child)
Your ISP can't see what you're viewing on the https://en.wikipedia.org and https://upload.wikimedia.org origins apart from hostnames and rough file sizes, with two exceptions. One is if your ISP is intercepting HTTPS, with a custom root certificate installed on each device. The other is if your ISP controls the trust database that your browser queries, such as a phishing filter. Which of these attacks were you thinking of? Or what am I missing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @08:31AM
Perhaps using an encyclopedia was a bad choice for an example, given the fact that we have wikipedia for that. The problem I tried to adress is that every single thing you do on your phone seems to require a dedicated app and possibly even an account at some cloud service.
The average device user has no control over which data is collected and send to developers or advertisers when the app is used. The app needs internet data to even function, because it requires access to some web api which again connects to some database. And all of that to store freaking post-it notes, instead of simply storing the data locally on the device itself. Same things for map data, public transit route calculators and schedules. Sure you have some limited control over permissions granted to apps, but you can't simply deny it internet access to prevent it sending all kinds of stuff, because then it will just keep asking for permissions, or in the worst case outright crash.
The companies Google, NS and 9292 probably know more about my traveling habits than I know myself, due to the fact that the apps simply send queries to back-end services. If I have a problem with that then I can choose to suck it up and accept that or not to use these apps at all and get my information elsewhere. There is no middle ground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:26AM
> Proprietary software doesn't allow investigating one's tools, and all the wonder of discovery that can bring, since no one but the developers can see the source code.
ftfy