How I (and you?) am hurting the PC industry
cringely.com
cringely.com
I have been in the middle of the microcomputer revolution from the start. As high school student when the Altair 8800 was released and an engineer during the second generation of IBM PC compatibles, and as an engineer and user during this third generation of utility computing. For most people who own a laptop today, and perhaps everyone who owns a laptop but does not own a desktop machine, what we call computers are just a tool for them. Cringely falls into that category, he writes about computers and so has one, but he hasn't bothered to get anything since 2010 to replace it because, and this is the key here, things that are popular as "computers" today (Raspberry Pi's Arduinos and what not) are not all that useful as "writing tools" relative to what his 2010 Macbook provides.
So generation 4, computers eat the rest of the workbench, is where the action is today. Software defined radio has replaced a crap ton of parts with a single platform. People build timers and pre-amps and automatic sprinkler systems out of chips with ridiculously over powered CPUs for what they are being asked to do. So we see this interesting fork with "general purpose" computing being a server somewhere on the other side of a network, "utility computing" being a dedicated UX device (Chromebook as an example), and "embedded computing" where the computer is a bolt on to some other function. But the old "PC" business that powered Comdex in the 90's and early naughts? That is dead dead dead.
[1] So people like Apple sell a bunch of things which are computer tech in other form, phones, media players, tablets.