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The future of PCs (w/ poll)

S

SmooveB

Member
What's your prediction for personal computers 10 years down the road? Will we still all be trudging along with bulky 2-3 foot towers, or will they be <6 inches tall like some of the newer designs? Are we looking at cellphone sized PCs and eyeglass monitors with voice recognition (like the Intel commercial with the pidgeons)? Will we see dozens of people working off one computer (multiple monitors/keyboards/etc) in a time-sharing type setup? Are cellphone-PDA combo's the future?

What's your opinion?
 
All I know is I want the Monorail to return in whatever configuration they can cram in there now-a-days.

Realistically, wearable computing is still in it's infancy and has yet to produce any really tangable benefits. When we continue the path of micro-sizing the tower's we're so used to, (and the Shuttle SS50's and the Cubes are starting that trend), then we'll begin to go more mobile.

The cellular PDA has been around for a while with the Nokia Navigator, and it didn't fare too well with the tiny keyboard and the huge cost. We'll get there eventually.

DC
 
I don't think that we'll ever see voice recognition replace keyboards & mice/trackballs as the primary text-entry/pointint device for computers. Imagine an office full of people talking to their computers. I think micro towers and cubes will probably gain in popularity, particularly in OEM boxes and for people who are tight on space. I see techies like us still using something more or less resembling the mid-tower cases of today. They may come up with a new packaging for it, but unless mobo and storage device form factors change drastically in the next 10 years (which could happen, I suppose), geeks will still need the same functionality. With raw CPU power far out-stripping all but the most demanding applications, which relatively few people use, I think we'll see a continuation of a trend that we're already seeing the start of - that most people aren't going to upgrade nearly as often as they used to. I'm typing this on a PII-350, which while too slow for me (hence my upcoming upgrade), its still plenty fast for anything my parents need. Unless somebody comes up with a must-have killer app that everybody will want that also requires mega-CPU power (on the order of video games, but with mass-appeal), I could easily see Joe User who spends most of his time on the computer browsing and doing stuff in Office being quite happy with his P4/Athlon XP as many as 10 years down the road. Heck, in absence of aforementioned killer app, my parents will probably still be quite happy with this old PC for as much as 2-3 years from now for what they need.
 
Well, with the move to 3GIO and the trend towards more flexible interconnects, I think we'll soon break free of the "one-form" design option that we see in all PC's (including Macs). Pretty soon we'll have the flexibility to put critical parts (that need intense cooling) in one place and the frills (USB controllers, PCI cards such as NIC's) in another box.
As for the interface, who knows. That may take longer. People are use to the mouse and keyboard. However, I do think voice recognition and eye recognition may come in handy sometime in the future. Perhaps not for complex things but for simple commands such as turning on the computer, etc. And of course, there's that eye-tracking technology in which you can move the cursor and click using nothing but your eyes. I think that'd be a neat trick. No more mouse lag, no more imprecision. As for the keyboard, it'll be around I think. Perhaps in a different form. I'd certainly like a programmable touch-pad keyboard in which it's not actual keys but rather a touch-sensitive display screen in which it can be programmed to display any interface I want.
 
Always get a laugh out of imagining voice recognition in an office enviroment. "Open" "Scroll" "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" "&*! Windows....Noo, don't close!" "page up" "Close" "468 plus 71849.2" "recalculate" all at the same time.

I haven't seen anything that rivals the keyboard so far, though somehow I wouldn't be surprised to see mice with more functions. Voice is great for presets, say "word" it opens MS Word for ya. Or Email. Or whatever. But until there's some major breakthroughs not only in voice by ai I don't see saying "music, classical" and having the computer bring up winamp and find mp3s of classical music on my drive. Or last year's quarterly reports. Or my '97 taxes.

As far as the box itself, heck yeah. Though I'm not sure how small we'll get in the next 10 with CPUs putting out more and more heat and requiring bigger sinks/airflow (yeah, even P4's). Shuttle got their SFF pretty small though. I don't know how popular two piece computers would be really. Be handy to have the CDrom in the base of the monitor (already easily done with Firewire) but in the end you have to have the other part SOMEWHERE. So the other room gets hot instead and now you have cables to route, ya know? For some people it'd be ideal, for others a bigger pain than now, for most I suspect not much difference.

That's the thing with a lot of stuff, ideal for some, terrible for others. Think smaller will be a trend. Think more attention will be paid to noise, though who knows where heat will go. Think with LCDs catching on we'll see some iMac clones where the screen/computer are all together actually before we see split chassis - maybe one will be an inspiration for the other.

 
The rest of you don't have any input?

I know some of the other n-thousand Anandtech users have speculations! Lemme see some more posts from you senior/gold/plat/special people 8)

(bump)
 
Well, low-profile is starting to catch on. That'll help make PC's smaller.
Just imagine all your favorite cards around half the current height and/or length. That means you could fit a lot into a tiny case.
I can't believe CD-ROM drives (and its like) have not shrunk in 10 years.... they still take a full 5.25" bay. By now you would think they COULD make drives that are half that height. Fit two drives into a single bay. (We know they can, they just don't. That way they can charge twice as much for the smaller drives for laptops and micro-machines.)

But it's inevitable - they're getting smaller for Average Joe.
There will always be monster cases for the power users. 😉
 
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