Tablets proved that "AOL users" never wanted a PC to deal with.

[GoodEnough]

This post by poofyhairguy was good, and I think it warrants its own discussion.
I've been saying for a few years something similar...that only 10% of users actually need a keyboard.

Uh...I think you are reading too much into all of this. No one cares about fucking you or me. We aren't important enough because we aren't good barometers for what "people" like.

The hard truth that EVERYONE on this forum hates to admit is that the nerd free ride is over. For DECADES we benefitted from consumers buying general purpose computer hardware and software they personally didn't really like because there was no other credible option for them. For decades we have enjoyed an economy of scale that fits OUR nerdy demands while being sub-optimal for Joe Consumer. The free ride is over.

Joe Consumer doesn't want to deal with locally managing pictures. Joe Consumer wants them all in the cloud so if he loses his phone at the bar he didn't lose all his pictures. Joe Consumer doesn't want easy mass editing and tagging, he wants some magic server to scan his photos and organize them for him. With the Photos app Google is giving Joe Consumer what he wants, rather than what we want.

And it will get worse. Joe Consumer NEVER wanted Windows, NEVER wanted the "responsibility" of managing a real consumer OS and having to know which warning messages were real and which ones are malware vectors. Joe Consumer loves his iPad that a 2 year old could use because it is just a row of icons with almost no easy ways for him to screw it up. So going forward Joe Consumer isn't buying more PCs that he will eventually hate, which means in ten years our elite gaming rigs will be built with expensive server parts as all the economy of scale will be in mobile. Powerful general purpose software will be synonymous with business software.

The sooner you accept the fact that the affordable general purpose consumer computer (and all that comes with it such as software like Picasa) was a market quirk, a mirage, the sooner you can make peace with it.

 

[videogames101]

You are mostly correct, however high(er)-end gaming PC sales have only been going up while general PC sales have been trending downwards.

It is possible that continued growth in that market could drive availability of "the affordable general purpose consumer computer." 🙂

Or it might not. 🙁

Also if artificial market segmentation continues to be a thing, server parts might be available at desktop prices with cut-down features just to increase the addressable market of the parts.

Don't lose hope yet!

 

[Strk]

I'm not exactly sure what the 'AOL user" thing is, but I'm guessing you just mean general user. It has always been the case that the average person doesn't need much.

They need a decent word processor for their kids (or themselves) for school, check emails and browse the internet.

That pretty much sums up what most people use a personal computer for

 

[Jeff7]

This post by poofyhairguy was good, and I think it warrants its own discussion.
I've been saying for a few years something similar...that only 10% of users actually need a keyboard.

Watching some people at work, yeah maybe.
Mouse. For. Everything.

Page-up/page-down? Nah, just keep hammering away at the scroll wheel.

Home/end? What? What are those? Lots of people don't even know that they're on the keyboard, or what they do.

I use keyboard shortcuts constantly, and can get around a computer pretty well without a mouse. It's just so much faster and easier.
According to Whatpulse, Scroll Lock, Pause, and F12 were the only keys that saw virtually no use over nearly a year of monitoring. Hell, the Ctrl key alone made up 4-5% of all keyboard hits.

I'm really hoping DARPA's research leads to keyboardless/mouseless PCs. USB port somewhere on my head, plug in, and control away, hopefully at a rate exceeding what my uncoordinated, arthritis-destined hands can manage.


Referencing the quoted post, "Joe Consumer" wants a machine with a single magical button, the "Do exactly what I want the computer to do at this particular point in time" button.

 

[Brian Stirling]

General purpose PC's are in decline, but higher end PC's for gaming and video editing are growing. The gamer market has been around for a while now, but the video editing market is just beginning to take off. A tablet is OK for image editing and you might be able to live with a high end tablet for 720P video, but doing 1080P video or 4K video takes serious power and I mean high end gaming power so tablets need not apply.

In addition, an engineering workstation isn't going to fly on a tablet for much the same reason the editing 4K video on a tablet isn't going to happen.

So, PC sales are going to continue to decline, but higher end systems will increase in the near term then hold steady over the long run.


Brian

 

[Ken g6]

I thought I heard tablet sales were declining as people prefer large phones.

According to Whatpulse, Scroll Lock, Pause, and F12 were the only keys that saw virtually no use over nearly a year of monitoring.

I see you don't use Firebug. (F12) I guess you don't pause games much either?

Hell, the Ctrl key alone made up 4-5% of all keyboard hits.

Ugh, an Emacs user. D: 😛

 

[Dr. Zaus]

You are mostly correct, however high(er)-end gaming PC sales have only been going up while general PC sales have been trending downwards.

It is possible that continued growth in that market could drive availability of "the affordable general purpose consumer computer." 🙂

Or it might not. 🙁

Also if artificial market segmentation continues to be a thing, server parts might be available at desktop prices with cut-down features just to increase the addressable market of the parts.

Don't lose hope yet!

Correct.

I don't foresee the death of the PC any more than people eating TV dinners and going through Drive Through were the death of the Frying Pan.

Instead, it was the death of crappy frying pan: with what (at the time) were much much better pots and pans spiking in sales.


What we have is a bifurcation of a market, and economies of scale will continue to exist for the prosumer market.

 

[Jeff7]

I thought I heard tablet sales were declining as people prefer large phones.


I see you don't use Firebug. (F12) I guess you don't pause games much either?

Ugh, an Emacs user. D: 😛

I...actually didn't know what either Firebug or Emacs meant, so no actually. 😉

F12: I don't do as many games as I'd like these days. See previous mention of arthritis-destined hands. And I'm unfortunate enough to like first-person shooters and flight/space sims, but have the reaction time of a snail that's holed up in a very popular bong, so I tend to kind of suck at them. (I never could beat any FPS game in Hard mode.) Back in the heyday of the original CounterStrike, I noticed that I was spending most of my time in it dead, with very few kills in each round, if any.

That's also work stats, so there's not much in the way of games going on there.😉 I never did get around to putting Whatpulse on my home PC though. I suppose I'll do that now.

Pause: That gets some use at home, though some games don't look at that key at all. Escape or P or Ctrl+P will pause.

General Ctrl key usage in various applications: Ctrl+C, V, F, R, H, A, W, T, O, Y, Z....I think that's all of them.

 

[Skeeedunt]

Agreed that most only want and need essentially an Internet appliance (my iPad capitalized Internet for me). And I think that's fine. Techno snobs will laugh, but I think the expertise required to keep a PC running (well) and to differentiate between more advanced threats vs benign system pop ups, isn't as trivial as some would imply.

The death of the PC is overstated though. As long as there are servers or laptops you'll be able to piece together what you need. Prices may go up, but who builds their own PC to save money anymore?

 

[Crono]

Not really much of a revelation. Almost all technology gets easier to use around or after mass adoption begins. Just look at how difficult early cars were to operate and maintain, or even to start up versus cars in the mid 1950s and 1960s and with the arrival of automatic transmissions. And now we have even more features leading up to self-driving cars. Reliability has gone up a great deal, as well.

Photography is another example. For a long time (decades) you pretty much had to be a professional or at least a very dedicated amateur with money to burn and time to develop your photos. Now your toddler - literally - can take photos with zero cost or time.

Most people aren't going to spend the time or resources to become proficient to a pro or prosumer level for any technology if they don't have to. Not at all surprising if 90% of the population can get by with tablets or smartphones 90% of the time.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think poofyhairguy is correct in some of his basic points, though I wonder whether there's an underestimation in this thread of what "most" people do with their computer devices.

From what I've seen, IMO tablets are only good for "consuming" or minimal productivity. While I don't think that "most" people engage in significant amounts of productivity at home on a regular basis, I wonder whether they do it often enough for only owning a tablet to become a serious problem.

My point here isn't generally about touch-screen, but that IMO tablets aren't about general purpose and flexibility in productivity. I'm sure that most people here could come up with a task that a home user might want to do from time to time that tablets can't currently do, and just because those devices could theoretically do it, it doesn't mean they ever will do, partly because it starts infringing on what is an absolute must for small touch-screens, being "keep it simple".

Microsoft wants you to have a PC, even if it's tablet-shaped (ie. it also has a keyboard and mouse in order to get its full potential). Apple wants you to "collect the set", so therefore they're not going to remove their desktops and laptops from the market (unless they come up with "the next big thing" that renders all three product lines as-is to be obsolete). Google's not really interested in either, it wants your Internet traffic and data primarily, the devices are simply a means to an end. I wonder whether the same could be said for Apple.

One further thing, the cloud is only a feasible solution if one has access to a fairly hefty upload as well as download speed, or if one is has very little data. I'm also not sure how many people are going to be willing to play a cloud provider rental space for their multitude of poorly-organised family photos when say a 500GB HDD has all the advantages except one (accessible from any device).

 

[John Connor]

I love my laptop and my desktop. They will never replace a tablet or smartphone. I mean I have programs and do stuff that a tablet can't do. Hell if I'm installing a Notepad++ App and editing PHP code on a damn tablet. Video editing and audio editing are two other factors. My desktop is for gaming mostly. I can't play FS2004 on a damn tablet. Besides, my FS2004 install is 50 GBs.

I do use my smartphone to lie on the couch and read Facebook, Twitter and play a few games. Other than that it's just a portable small computer I can check the Internet for something quick, take photos which is rare and check the news feed in Twitter/Facebook.

I can see high performance PCs being the biggest seller. But with all my doctor visits I see Dell Optiplexs in all the rooms and wonder about that market.

 

[Artdeco]

It's taken you all how many years to figure this out?

I remember the Samsung Note series being laughed at by reviewers for years too.

BTW, nerdlings, prepare to plug into the matrix, VR is going to be massively massive.

 

[purbeast0]

I thought I heard tablet sales were declining as people prefer large phones.


I see you don't use Firebug. (F12) I guess you don't pause games much either?

Ugh, an Emacs user. D: 😛

chrome dev tools >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> hot steamy shit >>>>>>>> firebug

and i know i'm now in the minority, but i will always have a use for a pc of some sort and have no use at all for a tablet. there is simply no way that real world development will be done on a tablet any time soon. good luck creating an iphone app on an iphone/ipad.

my desktop on the otherhand, that thing is rarely used. macbook is all i ever use outside of work for about 99.99% of my pc time at home.

 

[poofyhairguy]

What we have is a bifurcation of a market, and economies of scale will continue to exist for the prosumer market.

It won't be the same economy of scale though. Back when everyone HAD TO buy a PC to get on Facebook/Gmail we watched the PC drop from a cheap one being $1k to a cheap one being $300.

Since the rise of mobile we have watched as the economy of scale no longer applies to consumer PCs in the same way. Right now the sweet spot in GPUs (aka what most gamers use according to Steam) is around $300. It used to be around $200 was the sweet spot for GPUs. Also we have watched as CPUs have lost a lot of economy of scale. On the used market five year old 2500ks still have incredible value, partially because of Intel hitting a wall but partially because there aren't enough used two and three year old CPUs to price them out of the market. Solid state drives (that have flash memory that can be shared with non-PC devices) have come down in cost but hard drives have remain fairly steady compared to a decade ago.

Looking at cheap monitors we are stuck at a 1080p plateau, which is technically worse than the 1200p monitors that could be had for the same price five years ago. 4K and 1440p monitors exist but without a pile of consumers buying them we don't have the economy of scale to drive out the 1080p like what would have happened ten years ago. In fact in this example we can see how bad it is because TVs (which used to move slower than computers as a market segment) are ahead of monitors when it comes to 4K adoption and pricing. I know more than one person using a 40 inch 4K TV as a monitor because 28 inch 4K monitors are unreasonable in price. They are unreasonable because the regular Joe isn't helping us by buying them anymore.

The PC isn't dead or dying. But it will be an expensive hobby going forward because regular people aren't helped us make it cheaper. Also there will be less variation and innovation because companies cannot afford missteps.

 

[Anubis]

Watching some people at work, yeah maybe.
Mouse. For. Everything.

Page-up/page-down? Nah, just keep hammering away at the scroll wheel.

Home/end? What? What are those? Lots of people don't even know that they're on the keyboard, or what they do.

I use keyboard shortcuts constantly, and can get around a computer pretty well without a mouse. It's just so much faster and easier.
According to Whatpulse, Scroll Lock, Pause, and F12 were the only keys that saw virtually no use over nearly a year of monitoring. Hell, the Ctrl key alone made up 4-5% of all keyboard hits.

I'm really hoping DARPA's research leads to keyboardless/mouseless PCs. USB port somewhere on my head, plug in, and control away, hopefully at a rate exceeding what my uncoordinated, arthritis-destined hands can manage.


Referencing the quoted post, "Joe Consumer" wants a machine with a single magical button, the "Do exactly what I want the computer to do at this particular point in time" button.

pause? WTF there is no pause button on any KB I own

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'm sure that most people here could come up with a task that a home user might want to do from time to time that tablets can't currently do

Like what? Seriously, like what?

Let's examine the basic tasks of general users:

-Facebook? There is an app for that
-Word processing? Real MS Word on an iPad, just add a bluetooth keyboard
-Email? App plus maybe keyboard
-Accounting and Taxes? An app for that
-Basic photo editing? A ton of apps, in fact many smartphone camera apps have it built in
-Basic gaming? Mobile gaming is the fastest growing segment in that industry
-Education for their kids? Better apps on iPad than PC

Seriously, I used to sell computers back to "normal people" at Dell ten years ago. In that job I asked thousands of people their computer needs, and for each one of those needs in 2016 the iPad or a large iPhone can do it.

Now for nerds we can easily make a list of what a PC can do that an iPad can't, but we alone aren't enough for economy of scale. At best we are a big enough market to make it worth giving us defective rebranded server/workstation business parts rather than throwing them away.

Google's not really interested in either, it wants your Internet traffic and data primarily, the devices are simply a means to an end. I wonder whether the same could be said for Apple.

Android has full mouse support and Google wants either it or Chrome OS to go almost everywhere consumers go (to get their data). Meanwhile Apple just launched a Pro iPad with a real CPU in it. I think that clearly shows they intend to replace as much of the traditional PC market with mobile as soon as possible.

I'm also not sure how many people are going to be willing to play a cloud provider rental space for their multitude of poorly-organised family photos when say a 500GB HDD has all the advantages except one (accessible from any device).

Wow, you are out of the loop.

If you just have a pile of poorly organized photos than Google's cloud offers a KILLER feature over that hard drive- it organizes the photos for you. I have uploaded a lot of my photos to Google Photos and it scanned them all. Now if I want to see pictures of my dogs I search "dogs" and they come up. No metatagging or organizing needed.

THAT is the future. THAT is how most people want their data managed. Doing it themselves in an application is a chore compared to an automatic cloud doing it for them. Hell I am a nerd and I prefer Google Photos. One less thing to worry about in life.

 

[Jeff7]

pause? WTF there is no pause button on any KB I own

Huh. I guess that's a reason to not monitor that key for presses.

What else: Keyboards without a dedicated PrintScreen button, or where the F1-F12 keys are secondary to some other functionality.
PrintScreen gets a pretty good bit of use at work, and some of the F keys are pretty useful too.
F3: Find.
F5: Refresh. Ctrl+F5 for force-refresh without using cache.
F10: Full spellcheck.
Games: You might use all of the Function keys, possibly with modifiers.

Insert is also falling out of favor. I only use that at work though.

 

[ControlD]

pause? WTF there is no pause button on any KB I own

The keyboard I am typing this on (cheap Dell) has a Pause/Break key above the numpad. Next to scroll lock and print screen.

Actually, just taking a quick look around I have yet to see a keyboard that doesn't have that key.

 

[darkewaffle]

God can you imagine how much better the internet would be if 90% of the people using it didn't have keyboards - just buttons? That sounds amazing.

 

[Anubis]

The keyboard I am typing this on (cheap Dell) has a Pause/Break key above the numpad. Next to scroll lock and print screen.

Actually, just taking a quick look around I have yet to see a keyboard that doesn't have that key.

mine just says "break" that's why I was confused

 

[pete6032]

Lenovo business keyboard here, has pause key.