Great Youtube Documentary: Death of the PC - the Greatest Story Ever Told

[Markbnj]

That's the name of the documentary: "Death Of The PC: The Greatest Story Ever Told."

It's part 1 of his series.

True. Not sure why I read it the way I did.

 

[Jeff7]

Yeah, you just can't get away from a keyboard & mouse. I just setup a Leap Motion sensor at work, and while it's cool, I'm not going to be waving my hands around all day long, especially since I'm a big keyboard shortcut guy.
...

Same here. Using the tablet:
- Chop off my mousing hand.
- Chop off three fingers on the remaining hand.
- The keyboard may only be used if it is laid down on the screen.

I call my smartphone (iPhone 4S) my "infotainment recording device". It provides entertainment (Youtube, Apple Movie Trailers, etc.), information (calendar, email, etc.), and recording (photos, video, audio).
...

That's what my tablet is.
Phone: That screen's just way too tiny, and I'm not willing to pay much more than $5/month for cellphone service. It's just not worth much to me.

My phone right now a Tracfone flip-phone - I had an AT&T pay-as-you-go thing, but they wanted $20 every 3 months. I eventually didn't top off because it was used so infrequently that it just wasn't even worth that much money to me, and at some point I lost the number.
So, I finally needed a phone for work for something, and since I didn't have anything with an "unlimited" minutes plan, they were willing to front the cost for a basic Tracfone. I keep the phone at home, where its primary purpose is to serve as a backup alarm clock.
If my employer ever needs me to have a better phone, such as when I'm traveling to job sites, when it sometimes would be handy to be able to get e-mail or send pictures, they'd have to be the ones to pay for it.

 

[CPA]

phones and tablets are already getting bigger...because the idiots finally realized that they can't actually do work on them.

tablets and phones are great distractions, but the format will forever fail at aiding you in doing actual work.

Great points.

One area where the "PC is dying" argument fails is the corporate world. Yeah, you might have some hipster, small companies using tablets (for sake of argument let's assume tablet is it's own category) and phones, but ALL large companies still heavily rely on desktops and laptops.

Microsoft will stop supporting XP at the end of this year which is causing many companies to upgrade equipment to handle Win7. I know mine is.

 

[Kaido]

Great points.

One area where the "PC is dying" argument fails is the corporate world. Yeah, you might have some hipster, small companies using tablets (for sake of argument let's assume tablet is it's own category) and phones, but ALL large companies still heavily rely on desktops and laptops.

Microsoft will stop supporting XP at the end of this year which is causing many companies to upgrade equipment to handle Win7. I know mine is.

Yeah, and in my experience, thin clients are garbage. You just can't beat a full desktop experience yet. Even the latest Wyse's are not up to my liking, whether they run the thin linux OS or WinCE. Right now I'm in the process of switching over to Intel NUC's at work - Celeron, i3, i5, and i7 models available with up to 16gb RAM & 480gb internal SATA-III micro SSD's. I have a couple USB DVD drives for the people who need them, but most people either use the network shares or USB sticks.

Then slap that together with a 28" LED Hanns-G monitor for $249 and a nice wireless keyboard & mouse and voila - an amazingly fast Win7 computer that only chugs 60 watts total. In case people haven't seen the NUC line, they're basically laptops (minus the keyboard, trackpad, screen, and battery) - here's one of mine with a USB stick on top for size reference:

http://i.imgur.com/GFFTq.jpg

And the trend for home users is to either go with a laptop, or hookup the desktop to their flatscreen HDTV with a wireless keyboard/touchpad combo. Heck, Best Buy has a Dell laptop with a Celeron (with modern Celerons being the same as a dual-core i-series minus Hyperthreading & Turbo, so actually pretty good chips), 4 gigs of RAM, 320-gig drive, DVD burner, 15" widescreen, and built-in battery backup...not much reason to have a desktop at home anymore unless you need the power for gaming or whatever.

 

[JimmiG]

I'm done watching it. Was a nice piece. Looking forward to the next one.

Vilified Bill Gates a little to much at the end there though. He took a product and made it better. Took something and smoothed it out and cleaned it up to what people would want. What Steve Jobs had just wasn't good enough or polished enough. Needed Bill Gates to make it truly work and be worthy with what he added.

I agree. According to the video, Jobs ripped the ideas from Xerox, and then Bill Gates stole the stolen ideas from Apple. Why was it OK to steal from Xerox, but not from Apple?

The user interface and design wasn't something that a single man came up with overnight. Like everything else, it has been built on previous work and evolved into what we have today. As for the Metro design, either it will eventually become a success in which case Apple and other companies will try to copy it (they've already started doing that with the flat icons in iOS7) or it fades into obscurity.

 

[Skel]

I agree. According to the video, Jobs ripped the ideas from Xerox, and then Bill Gates stole the stolen ideas from Apple. Why was it OK to steal from Xerox, but not from Apple?

The user interface and design wasn't something that a single man came up with overnight. Like everything else, it has been built on previous work and evolved into what we have today. As for the Metro design, either it will eventually become a success in which case Apple and other companies will try to copy it (they've already started doing that with the flat icons in iOS7) or it fades into obscurity.

That one is simple. It's because Microsoft was the villain of the tech universe in the 90s which gave us the impression that anything that came from them was either stolen or bought. As Apple was small enough then that no one cared what they did.

Oddly enough, from what I remember (which I really didn't pay that close of attention) MS and Apple both stole from the same source, MS just had the decency to pay for it afterwards.. sorry.. forgot 90s rage taught me that they only did that for the patents to sue anyone for graphic interfaces..

 

[BladeVenom]

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." -Steve Jobs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

 

[lxskllr]

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." -Steve Jobs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Inside all those fine little boxes with the lit up apples on them that I see all around the room, is a bunch of free software tailored to give *him* control. Nothing illegal. Nothing wrong. He obeyed the licenses. He screwed us every time he could, and he took everything we gave him, and he made beautiful stuff that controlled its users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVY

 

[Aikouka]

Honestly, I was expecting something a lot better based on what I read here because this documentary wasn't that good. To be clear, the information presented wasn't bad, but the way it was presented was just downright awful. I had a feeling when I saw the first shot of the ocean that the movie might have a bit of fluff in it, but even I didn't expect as much as it had. The obsessive nature of writing out points on the screen really perturbs me. It's this silly, hipster way of trying to get your point across in the most direct yet substantially-elongated method that just sets me off.

If I had to guess, there was about eight minutes worth of content in this 24-minute video.

 

[jumpncrash]

Yeah, and in my experience, thin clients are garbage. You just can't beat a full desktop experience yet. Even the latest Wyse's are not up to my liking, whether they run the thin linux OS or WinCE.

At work we run thin clients on bsd I believe, and they run fine, most of them are atom 425s with 2gb of ram, we connect to a vnc server and that does everything. Only thing we don't have is sound, but that I believe is more of a configuration issue than anything else.

 

[Kaido]

Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JOXUNX66Cs

Where did our technology come from?

 

[Kadarin]

That was well done.

 

[videogames101]

yeah.. no

some people actually use compute

my productivity on anything less than 2x 24in monitors and slower than an i5 is at least halved


i mean, maybe people who just watch movies, #tweet, or look at cat pics can get by with an iPad

but at that point, isn't an iPad really just a fancy thin client?

 

[luv2liv]

i almost forgot netscape. thank god he didnt mention anything about aol.
scary how much we've advanced in the past 10 years. cant wait to see what comes around the next 10

 

[Hugo Drax]

whats neffing?

 

[ringtail]

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[leeland]

marked