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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: 1, Offtopic) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 06 2017, @11:08AM (1 child)
I've learned to be precise, and specify GNU/Linux instead of Android/Linux or systemd/Linux.
At least systemd/Linux is still somewhat compatible with GNU/Linux. But just somewhat.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:34PM
At least systemd/Linux is still somewhat compatible with GNU/Linux.
Things like PID 1 and hardware support services are not part of GNU, apart from GNU/Hurd. From sysvinit's project page on Savannah [nongnu.org]: "This project is not part of the GNU Project." So systemd vs. sysvinit makes no appreciable difference as to whether you're running GNU/Linux.
In my opinion, as long as the userspace relies on GNU Core Utilities and two other major components of GNU [pineight.com], such as glibc, Bash, GCC, or Emacs, that's enough to call it a "GNU/" system. For example, Cygwin and MinGW with MSYS are so named because they're "Cygnus GNU/Windows" and "Minimalist GNU/Windows", providing Coreutils, Bash, and GCC as part of the standard loadout.