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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @04:30AM (2 children)
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)
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
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.