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Old 05-23-2011, 08:50 PM   #14 (permalink)
Shadowex3
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I'm with Hektore pretty much across the board. I think the real change here is not the death of the PC but rather the evolution of technology away from the necessity of monolithic non-portable devices.

We're all familiar with telling people that a computer with the power of a 90's era cellphone used to take up an entire room, but I think a lot of people have selective blindness to the fact that that same kind of inexorable technological advance has not stopped. Right now sitting to the left of my keyboard is an 800mhz 3g android phone. Even as recently as last year I still had my pants sitting on a (working) computer with half the clockspeed. That phone is faster and has roughly the same screen resolution that old 30lb beigebox had when it was my primary computer. First they went from having a dedicated room to having a dedicated desk and now I think we're seeing them transition to even more portability.

Now I don't think the idea of a dedicated computer in terms of peripherals will go away completely anytime soon, after all a seperate monitor/mouse/keyboard is still not just more efficient but also a lot more comfortable for any significant length of time, but I do think eventually a "PC" may be a sort of auxiliary docking station for an extremely powerful and portable mobile device.

At least one of my friends has this already, he's got a laptop that uses fullsized desktop processors and GPUs that he's replaced his fullsized computer with and he keeps a monitor, keyboard, and mouse at his place and just treats the laptop as an extremely portable computer.

Personally I'll never give it up if only because I enjoy the physical sensation of pounding away at a keyboard. ESPECIALLY if it's one of those old IBM buckling spring battletanks that makes everything you do sound like you're reprogramming the matrix.
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