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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: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday April 06 2017, @01:59AM (1 child)
Sure the desktop computer might disappear into the high-end laptop. For a lot of real work you can get buy with that.
Or the desktop might become a small brick bolted onto the back of the monitor.
I think the opposite is more likely, at least for now. High-end desktops aren't going anywhere just yet, but tablets already gobbled up the netbook niche and laptops are next on the menu. I mostly abandoned my laptop for portable use when I got a 12" tablet with a keyboard case, but still come back to the desktop whenever I want to actually get something done.
The article makes the ludicrous claim that tablets and phones "have performance that rivals desktop PCs" but that's either a lie or completely delusional. Tablet and smartphone memory is still stuck in the 3-4gb ghetto that it's been in for years — even the upcoming Galaxy S8 that the article claims is "amazing" only has four gigs — and the CPUs may have similar core counts but their performance is miles apart.
The only way to make a claim like that is if you only look at Apple's stagnating non-iOS lineup and ignore everything else that exists, which might actually be what he's doing. With Apple's focus on making its hardware impossible to upgrade, the appeal disappears because it's turning its hardware into just another SoC in a bigger form factor. Meanwhile, I recently upgraded my system to Ryzen 7 and 32 gigs of RAM; I got a huge boost in performance for less than the price of one of those flagship smartphones, and when I did it I didn't have to throw out my existing components that still worked.
My main workstation as dual screens, fairly large. And I frequently fill up the real estate with multiple open text editors.
That's another benefit to desktops, since you can easily use a beefier GPU and power more displays without trouble. I've used four, even five in the past, mixing together a bunch of spare displays I had, though now I'm using three to reduce some desk clutter. With laptops you're lucky if you can use two displays, and even then you're stuck with the laptop's panel as the shitty third, and you have to use whatever rubbish mobile GPU the laptop has to power them all.
There's the possibility of laptops filling the desktop niche by using external GPUs and docking stations, but then all you've done is recreate the desktop, but with fewer upgradeable parts.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:33PM
sure the performance rivals a laptop.
if all you do is facebook google and share pictures.
Advertising for the relevant era's computer requirements for that has only changed to include the newest low end models, and now those low end models are high end phones that cost more than the low end models.
This is a prediction for the IT illiterate, not for you or me.