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Comment by romaniv | Hacker News Reader

Why cook when you can eat chips and order pizza? Probably because it's better for you and because cooking has cultural significance that goes beyond simply replenishing calories.

People who cheerfully proclaim that PCs are dead forger that PCs aren't just devices, they also attained a certain level of cultural significance. IF the death of PCs also means the death of PC culture (which involves things like game modding, hobby website making and so on), then the death of PCs is a really, really bad thing.

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Division of labor. Not everyone has to be a producer in every sphere; it's okay to be a producer in some, and a consumer in others.

Plenty of people are too busy with other aspects of their lives — doing things which may, for all we know, be of great cultural significance — to spend time being a producer in the digital sphere as well.

Some people devote their lives to cooking for others; others devote their lives to other pursuits, and only ever consume food produced by others.

That's where the analogy falls apart, people who only eat out are a small percentage of the overall popular whereas people who only need a tablet are purportedly the norm.

The numbers don't have to be the same for the analogy to work.

In any case, I think you're underestimating the number of people who never cook, or cook very infrequently. In your average family household, one person typically cooks the vast majority of the meals.

To clarify, by cooking I mean real cooking — beginning with raw ingredients, going through numerous stages of preparation requiring some degree of skill, etc.

It’s awesome to do cool, fulfilling things and for some of those things you need a computer. For others you don’t.

I really don’t see why everyone should use a computer, given the wealth of possibilities out there.

Also, I’m pretty sure the death of the PC doesn’t mean any of what you are insinuating. It will be more like the death of horse riding after the advent of the car. (If I want to go horse riding there is a club that offers that not five minutes from where I’m living. Horse riding is dead – but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or even hard to go horse riding today.) Only that PCs will probably be an order of magnitude more relevant than horses are today and, while not always as relevant as in the past in certain contexts (at home), they will still be relevant in others (some work, academia, …).

I’m still pretty confident in the prediction that the PC at home will die. (Which will not mean that no one will have one at home. Just far less people than today.) I’m also pretty sure that the PC at work and in academia will not die.

Sounds like a great thing for job security in two decades when almost nobody but people born during the PC era know how to program.

That stuff is never going away. "Death of PCs" doesn't mean the complete disappearance of them, just their death as a dominant consumer item. Professionals and prosumers will never stop needing PCs, and they're the ones who constitute the groups you mentioned.

You took the cooking analogy too far. Programming a hello world app isn't any better for you than writing the great american novel.

It is if the future of humans on Earth is predominated by computer programming skills, even if basic.

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