Its hard to believe that the perpetually kludged X86 has become the processor of choice. How many design revisions of that crap have we seen just to make it tolerable and the systems are still huge resource hogs.
Yes and no. It's not really the processor of choice for mobile devices, like Tablets, smartphones - and in my opinion these are becoming the 'personal computers' of the future. ARM, it looks like, has an early lead as the processor of choice for the next generation of computing. And I think we'll even see more arm based netbooks, as time goes on.
In any event, I don't consider x86 to be all that bad, since around the time AMD released Opteron, and Intel later released core duo. I mean from the perspective of a technology consumer, the market is much more satisfying. I liked the Commodore 64, Atari 800 - I was still a big fan of the Atari ST, Amiga 500 - I made the transition to 16 bit without considering the 'pc' market.
But by the time Amiga 1200 came out - even though I owned one, that AGA graphics was pathetic, and it just wasn't realistic trying to get a graphics card for one, so you started looking at the big box amiga's and they were ridiculous in price. Apple was in love with the high price too. One had to reluctantly consider the PC.
Nowadays that has changed, I'm happy with the Mac market - it may be slightly less competitive than the pc market, but not by much. you can get a nice intel based mac from ebay for 500 bucks - it's not quite the multi-thousand dollar proposition that buying a big box amiga or mac was, back in those days.
