The need for "Modern PCs"

[commodorejohn]

Your optimism for the creative potential of humanity is refreshing, but I think a little too overarching.  Look at television, or radio, or video games, or even books.  Mass market and profit = lowest common denominator.  The people who want to create still can, and joe six-pack can twitter about his huge BM.  There's room in there for everyone in their hierarchy.

See, frankly, I just don't accept this classist bullcrap. A lot of people in the tech world like to think of themselves as some sort of higher order apart from the Masses, as if the ability to think and work in a creative capacity is a difference in kind between themselves and the "Joe Sixpack" cattle. It's not. It's a fundamental human capacity, and the only reason it's languishing in a lot of the masses is because it hasn't been given any encouragement to grow, thanks to an increasingly consumption-oriented economy that only needs creators as a source for content (and they replace creative individuals with formula processes at every opportunity, because formula processes are much more predictable and they've been steadily training the masses not to know the difference, anyway.)

The idea that "Joe Sixpack" is fundamentally lacking in a capacity that the creative elite possess, and therefore he can't make use of complex creative facilities, shouldn't be encouraged to try or given the tools to do so because his simple peasant brain wouldn't understand them, and wouldn't be happy doing any of that anyway, is false. Completely false. It is a lie; it started as a lie that creative people told themselves to make themselves feel special, and it's a lie that's been increasingly propagated by companies and organizations that like to use it as a rationalization for stifling the nascent creative urges of the masses to make them into good little consumers.

Is it harder and riskier to make good movies than crap movies? Well, train moviegoers to not expect good movies, and that's not a problem anymore! Want to cripple a computer into a glorified content-consumption device? Just tell people that that's all they ever wanted anyway, over and over, until they start believing it! And all the tech journalists and all the futurist writers will gladly help you spread this lie, because it feeds their ego.

But you know what? Repetition can make a lie seem true; it can never make it true. People still have the capability to be more than passive consumers, even if it's never been given any nurture; they still have creative urges, even if they're deeply sublimated. All the mantra repetition of "ordinary users don't want or need this" in the world will not change that. The question isn't whether these people can be more than the lowest common denominator; the question is whether anybody will come along and help them wake up from dead-eyed consumer slumber.

[dammy]

And what about the hobbyist? I for one want a desktop, and certainly not a tablet.

I don't think there really are that many "hobbyist" out there that would be significant enough sales to keep desktop sales in the 1/3 of total market, which is the going rate that the business and gamers are currently purchasing desktops.  Back in the 1980s and maybe 1990s, sure.  Today, computer is simply a tool and while you do have OCers out there via for titles of who can out OC whom, it's not enough to maintain the current desktop sales rates.  Even more so that most folk's phones are more powerful then what desktops were ten or so years ago.  Now you may have a hardware hacker here and there that needs direct access to the desktop mobo for whatever reason, but it's not a significant number that would affect desktop sales.  Even more so when you have such fast data links for external hardware to talk to a given computer, be it desktop or smartphone.

[commodorejohn]

You can't compare computer users of the '80s with users of today.  Back in the '80s computer users were a self selected minority, maybe 10% of the population of Australia or the US.  Out of those a minority, maybe 10% of those, were doing creative things, but even if you say half of them that's still only 5% of the total populace.  Creative use of computers was never the norm and never will be the norm.

I'm not talking about the '80s; I'm talking about the mid-'90s, when the Internet was exploding, computers were more accessible than ever, and even ordinary people were getting in on this. I watched it happen; I watched my parents, who have never been technical people, take up playing around with MIDI sequencing and other such stuff on our old Mac. I saw people I knew dabble with programming at the same time I was. And I was the only techie I knew anywhere except on the Internet. People were branching out and trying new things, and the software to do it was becoming increasingly varied and more available. This continued for quite a while; it wasn't until the not-at-all-coincidental rise of "social networking" in the mid-2000s that it began to collapse.

Add to that the fact that you can do creative video, pictures and music on a mobile phone or tablet.  Creativity is an innate ability, I've seen gorgeous photos taken and edited only on an iPhone and I've seen absolute cr@p photos taken with a USD 1000 DSLR and photoshopped.  There are professional photographers out there who only use an iPhone.  The tool is less important than the person wielding the tool.

You can, yes, but it's not designed for it (as tablet advocates will loudly proclaim any time you criticize the tablet's poor suitability for productivity applications.) It's entirely true that you can create in an environment that's unconducive or openly hostile to creation. Political prisoners have written on prison walls using their own feces; that doesn't make poop a good medium to work in.

[TheBilgeRat]

See, frankly, I just don't accept this classist bullcrap. A lot of people in the tech world like to think of themselves as some sort of higher order apart from the Masses, as if the ability to think and work in a creative capacity is a difference in kind between themselves and the "Joe Sixpack" cattle. It's not. It's a fundamental human capacity, and the only reason it's languishing in a lot of the masses is because it hasn't been given any encouragement to grow, thanks to an increasingly consumption-oriented economy that only needs creators as a source for content (and they replace creative individuals with formula processes at every opportunity, because formula processes are much more predictable and they've been steadily training the masses not to know the difference, anyway.)

The idea that "Joe Sixpack" is fundamentally lacking in a capacity that the creative elite possess, and therefore he can't make use of complex creative facilities, shouldn't be encouraged to try or given the tools to do so because his simple peasant brain wouldn't understand them, and wouldn't be happy doing any of that anyway, is false. Completely false. It is a lie; it started as a lie that creative people told themselves to make themselves feel special, and it's a lie that's been increasingly propagated by companies and organizations that like to use it as a rationalization for stifling the nascent creative urges of the masses to make them into good little consumers.

Is it harder and riskier to make good movies than crap movies? Well, train moviegoers to not expect good movies, and that's not a problem anymore! Want to cripple a computer into a glorified content-consumption device? Just tell people that that's all they ever wanted anyway, over and over, until they start believing it! And all the tech journalists and all the futurist writers will gladly help you spread this lie, because it feeds their ego.

But you know what? Repetition can make a lie seem true; it can never make it true. People still have the capability to be more than passive consumers, even if it's never been given any nurture; they still have creative urges, even if they're deeply sublimated. All the mantra repetition of "ordinary users don't want or need this" in the world will not change that. The question isn't whether these people can be more than the lowest common denominator; the question is whether anybody will come along and help them wake up from dead-eyed consumer slumber.

I think people would say the market decides these things.  Take the classist line out, and what you get is that sales of tablets and smartphones are spiking while desktops are flatlining or declining somewhat.  Its not just opinion its fact.

What it sounds like you are saying is that there is some sort of conspiracy to dumb down the creative people with modern software and tablets.  I disagree.  I think it comes down to simple marketing and focus groups and what is actually selling on the ground.  If I didn't like graphically intense games and didn't code for a living, a smartphone is all I really need for modern internet usage.  This doesn't discount or render invalid my ability to enjoy amigas or the linux command line.  Heck, with my droid I can even write apps using this:

http://androidandme.com/2012/03/applications/mit-launches-android-app-inventor-to-all-with-a-google-account/

Its awesome, and visual, and accessible.  In fact, I believe the bar for accessibility to be creative is far lower than it ever has been.  I love hand coding python with vim and running my progs from the command line, but I also love having IDEs that makes sharing and collaboration so easy, as well as on the fly compiling and error checking.

My Galaxy S3 is damn near a tricorder!  Portables are freaking awesome!

Last edit, and it sucks but is true:  Some people are honestly stupid.  Some people are smart.  It is what it is.

[commodorejohn]

I think people would say the market decides these things.  Take the classist line out, and what you get is that sales of tablets and smartphones are spiking while desktops are flatlining or declining somewhat.  Its not just opinion its fact.

What it sounds like you are saying is that there is some sort of  conspiracy to dumb down the creative people with modern software and  tablets.  I disagree.  I think it comes down to simple marketing and  focus groups and what is actually selling on the ground.

Saying that "the market decides this stuff" is like saying that plate tectonics decides when and where there will be earthquakes. It's true, in a strictly observational sense, but it says nothing whatsoever about whether or not that's a good thing. And anyway, it's overlooking the fact that market forces are not the only factor in what sells. If the industry hadn't spent the last couple years in a mad push for tablets, and spent billions on marketing to tell people that tablets are the New Hotness that they really really need to have, tablets wouldn't be selling like they are. It's not just some passive reaction; the industry wants this to happen. Tablets are cheap to make but sell for a bundle, are inherently disposable because they can't be upgraded, and the app-store model brings in a steady post-purchase revenue stream; of course the industry likes that. Of course they're going to push for it.

Last edit, and it sucks but is true:  Some people are honestly stupid.  Some people are smart.  It is what it is.

The more I observe people, the less I buy that - at least not in the sense that you're meaning here. Plenty of people are mentally lazy and/or have not had their faculties nurtured (*cough*crapeducationsystem*cough*) and of course any given person doesn't necessarily have the same aptitude for X as the next guy might, but I've never met a person who was inherently stupid, and certainly not someone who was inherently geared towards being the kind of brainless Facebook cattle that tablet advocates seem to think average users are. Hell, I know mentally handicapped people (and we're talking serious developmental handicaps, not Rain Man socially-awkward savantism) who show more spark and creative inclination than you're ascribing to the healthy, un-handicapped common man.

"Some people are just naturally better than other people" is a nice thing for people to tell themselves when they want to feel special. It's a philosophy that lets technologists and futurists feel Very Benevolent when they push for platforms that will let the poor witless Normals have a taste of what it's like to be Enlightened without taxing their poor little brains. But it's something that I just don't see borne out in real life.

[TheBilgeRat]

Saying that "the market decides this stuff" is like saying that plate tectonics decides when and where there will be earthquakes. It's true, in a strictly observational sense, but it says nothing whatsoever about whether or not that's a good thing. And anyway, it's overlooking the fact that market forces are not the only factor in what sells. If the industry hadn't spent the last couple years in a mad push for tablets, and spent billions on marketing to tell people that tablets are the New Hotness that they really really need to have, tablets wouldn't be selling like they are. It's not just some passive reaction; the industry wants this to happen. Tablets are cheap to make but sell for a bundle, are inherently disposable because they can't be upgraded, and the app-store model brings in a steady post-purchase revenue stream; of course the industry likes that. Of course they're going to push for it.

I think your desire to see this discrepancy colors your analysis of it.  There is no "Them".  If there was no inherent value in a 300 dollar tablet or smartphone, there are a gazillion alternatives, to include NOT BUYING ONE.  You vote with your dollar/yuan/euro.  No one puts a gun to your head to buy.

The more I observe people, the less I buy that - at least not in the sense that you're meaning here. Plenty of people are mentally lazy and/or have not had their faculties nurtured (*cough*crapeducationsystem*cough*) and of course any given person doesn't necessarily have the same aptitude for X as the next guy might, but I've never met a person who was inherently stupid, and certainly not someone who was inherently geared towards being the kind of brainless Facebook cattle that tablet advocates seem to think average users are. Hell, I know mentally handicapped people (and we're talking serious developmental handicaps, not Rain Man socially-awkward savantism) who show more spark and creative inclination than you're ascribing to the healthy, un-handicapped common man.

"Some people are just naturally better than other people" is a nice thing for people to tell themselves when they want to feel special. It's a philosophy that lets technologists and futurists feel Very Benevolent when they push for platforms that will let the poor witless Normals have a taste of what it's like to be Enlightened without taxing their poor little brains. But it's something that I just don't see borne out in real life.

The sense I am meaning is exactly what I said.  Some people are stupid and slow and retarded and unable of abstract thought.  Some people aren't.  Not everyone is Picasso or even have the capacity to be if only we could reach them somehow, and to suggest otherwise is sweet, but untrue.  It isn't philosophy, its straight up biology, medicine, and genetics.  Spend some time in the Army and your youthful naivete concerning the goodness of all will be permanently fixed.  I have met plenty of people who were inherently stupid.  At some stage of your life you will as well.  I have met people who are mental giants.  Equality is a cute philosophy.  The mistake is equating being in the middle or tail end of the bell curve with societal worth.  I am not suggesting that, but that your argument is actually the one bordering on elitist by suggesting that the tablet apps are for morons, where I see the explosion of those devices as well thought out design and not some illuminati conspiracy.

[JimS]

ou can't compare computer users of the '80s with users of today.  Back in the '80s computer users were a self selected minority, maybe 10% of the population of Australia or the US.  Out of those a minority, maybe 10% of those, were doing creative things, but even if you say half of them that's still only 5% of the total populace.  Creative use of computers was never the norm and never will be the norm.

I have to agree... back in the 80's and for some of us, the 70's, owning a home computer was an end in itself. The ability to do something useful was unimportant or an excuse to justify it to the significant other. ;-)

As for the original question.... if you discount things that have microprocessors in them... cars,microwaves,tvs... well just about anything electronic now... the only things I use outside of the desktop are an MP3 player and Kobo ebook. But I still need the desktop to manage those. My TV is also in my desktop pc, so i guess that makes my VCR on it as well. And then there's digital cameras... unless you plan to keep a whole pile of flash cards around, some time you need a desktop machine to store your pictures long term. I suppose someone could build some kind of stand alone or networked device for that, but it's handy to have them on a desktop for editing.

[TheBilgeRat]

I have to agree... back in the 80's and for some of us, the 70's, owning a home computer was an end in itself. The ability to do something useful was unimportant or an excuse to justify it to the significant other. ;-)

As for the original question.... if you discount things that have microprocessors in them... cars,microwaves,tvs... well just about anything electronic now... the only things I use outside of the desktop are an MP3 player and Kobo ebook. But I still need the desktop to manage those. My TV is also in my desktop pc, so i guess that makes my VCR on it as well.

Oh, man!  I totally forgot about my kindle.  That thing is awesome.

[kedawa]

I use my PC for pretty much everything that involves data.
The only exceptions are phone calls and text messages.
I don't have or need a smartphone, a tablet, or a television.
Sure, I could use a collection of gadgets and CE devices to accomplish most of what my PC does, but why replace one all-powerful box with several that, combined, can only do a fraction of the work?

[zylesea]

that doesn't make poop a good medium to work in.

Dooh! Not? Well, I'll go to a stationary store tomorrow and buy a pencil then...

[commodorejohn]

You vote with your dollar/yuan/euro.  No one puts a gun to your head to buy.

No, but they do everything they damn well can to talk you into buying.

Some people are stupid and slow and retarded and unable of abstract thought.

Provided we're not talking about actual mental handicaps, I'm going to have to say that's bullshít. People can be less apt at something than most, don't get me wrong, and they can certainly never have developed their ability for something, but they are not inherently cattle.

Not everyone is Picasso or even have the capacity to be if only we could reach them somehow, and to suggest otherwise is sweet, but untrue.

Don't mistake me: I'm not saying that natural talent doesn't exist and everybody is capable of being as good as everybody else at everything. All I'm saying is that this idea that the masses are just inherently incapable of complex thought or even the fundamental human creative urge is a crock.

Spend some time in the Army and your youthful naivete concerning the goodness of all will be permanently fixed.

Goodness? Who said anything about goodness? I was talking about creative drive, not morality.

The mistake is equating being in the middle or tail end of the bell curve with societal worth.

I'm glad to hear that that's not where you're coming from; certainly it isn't what I was implying. But all the same, there's an awfully uncomfortable egoist bent to a lot of these arguments; and even when they're made in sincere benevolence, they're still predicated on the false assumption that "the masses" are lacking in the fundamental capacity to be more than the lowest common denominator, or even to want to.

but that your argument is actually the one bordering on elitist by suggesting that the tablet apps are for morons

Well what am I supposed to think? Everything I'm told by tablet advocates says that "it's not meant for productivity, it's meant for passively consuming content!" and "it's dumbed down because normal people just can't understand computers!" and "the most important thing is to protect users from themselves!" Is it or isn't it designed on the assumption that users are stupid?

not some illuminati conspiracy.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think that Dr. Claw is sitting in a darkened room somewhere and stroking his cat as he plans the destruction of general-purpose computing. I do, however, see this as the industry quite transparently pushing models that put overall financial gain ahead of a healthy mutually-beneficial relationship with customers, and then justifying it by telling them, via billions of dollars' worth of marketing, that they probably don't really need or want what's being taken away, and wouldn't they rather just sit around on sites where their communications are dredged for advertising potential like good little consumers? Honestly I'd prefer a Legion of Doom behind this, because then people might be less unwisely trusting and unquestioning of the motives behind this.

[persia]

Most people who buy cars don't work on them, don't modify them, don't do anything with them except drive them.  It's a utilitarian relationship.  Same with tablets.  Technology ever advances.

Also the App store Apple created has inspired a whole generation of programmers.

[commodorejohn]

Most people who buy cars don't work on them, don't modify them, don't do anything with them except drive them.  It's a utilitarian relationship.  Same with tablets.  Technology ever advances.

We're not just talking about programming, though.

[persia]

[youtube]l-d-rRkV4fo[/youtube]

[Digiman]

Is this a thread championing things like the low power SAM boards? Or older  Macs and MOS? Or just some thread about how tablets and smartphones will replace a powerful multi-gigahertz i7 PC/Mac?

Well firstly all those little games on iOS or Android devices are pretty crap, if I want to play a game it will be of the minimum quality achievable via 360 or PS3 for a start if not better via a top end gaming PC. I have no interest in all this flash game rubbish shoved in front of me as some sort of replacement for things like even Battlefield 2 from 2005 *puke*  If I want to play simple games there are 100,000 FREE games to play on emulators, and these games written in the 80s and 90s on various Commodore branded machines are better than crap like Angry Birds FACT.

So you can watch HD video on an iPad....so what? It's like saying you can get a BMW 1 series with the super powerful M engine and specification. Just because it is possible doesn't mean it's not full of FAIL. If I want to watch HD it will be via a 17" laptop screen/TV/projector via the PC. The bitrate for HD movies on these new devices is atrocious....only a hobo would think it looked OK on a 42" TV even when you can connect these devices in such a way.

Downloading....do I want to download the entire CD32 TOSEC via some ass raping contract on a crappy 3G connection OR dump it all straight onto a 5TB drive on a PC connected to a 120mb broadband connection hmmm. Also if you have ever tried to download a torrent with 1000s of files onto SD media you will know how full of fail this is too.

Anything creative, editing photos or even making a simple 2002 flavour website is not possible on such devices. And the tools are not available anyway even if you did want to code up a website on a tablet.

Whilst you can certainly use an iPhone/Android device to bid on a Ferrari on ebay using the net on such small devices is awkward clumsy and hamfisted thing again only idiots would argue is as good as using even a basic 1280x720 14" laptop. Convenient on the go sure, use it exclusively on such devices? Erm no.

The list goes on, it will be a long time before Microsoft suffer huge drops in sales due to tablets/phones making PCs obsolete. We had all this crap before when everyone was saying netbooks are the second coming, maybe a few idiots came in their pants over them but the reality was netbooks were barely useable hunks of s.hit to be honest. What's the screen size on the latest Macbook slimline model...oh yes exactly the same as slim and light laptops from last decade like the Toshiba Portege models with their 1.8" IDE drives.

So yes if I want to play oldskool games I have a C64 and Amiga (and 20 other machine formats) to play them on, if I want to watch videos I do it on a 150" screen powered by a laptop to feed it A/V data and if I want to make a phone call I have something called a phone. I could have played Doom on my phone in 2003....but why would I want to do that? If I was that desperate to play Doom on the train I would have purchased a Libretto 120CT 6" laptop the size of a Nintendo DS Lite

Obviously though there are plenty of fashionistas buying these things and conning themselves into believing this is the second coming, as radical and life changing as the Atari 2600 or Commodore 64. Whatever....marketing dept wet dream is all this stuff is.

[Fairdinkem]

If I could edit video as powerfully and quickly as I can on my iMac, and do the type of multitrack simultaneous audio editing as powerfully and quickly as I do on my iMac, also if I could Skype call and listen to spotify music and so many other things I take for granted on my iMac, and do them all without compromise on AmigaOS4.1 or MorphOS machine, then I would make that my daily use machine and not my iMac, but sadly this is not the case.