Whatever happened to our hobby?

[Daedalus]

The high-end PC gaming market will, I'm sure, keep the desktop / tower form factor going for quite some time yet. That bleeding edge will always be populated by insanely powerful devices requiring bulky heatsinks, fans and power supplies. For normal use, yes, things are moving in the "pocket computer" direction, but no matter how powerful these mobile CPUs and GPUs get, you'll always be able to make them go faster by increasing the clock speed / number of cores / number of buses and adding a massive heatsink. And I'm sure there'll be a market for that for a long time.

[Daedalus]

I think that the comparison with cars in particular is very apt. I use a car every day but I don't care about cars at all, to me they're just a thing to get me from A to B.

But other people I know read car magazines, attend car shows, watch car-related TV shows, participate in car-related online forums - whether vintage or modern. For them, cars are their hobby.

The fact that most people who use cars don't consider it a hobby, doesn't mean that it's not a hobby for some people. Isn't that the same with computers?

EDIT: And I guess the question is, now that computers (including tablets, smartphones etc) are mainstream, are there more or less people for whom computing is a hobby compared to the '80s? My guess is that there are just as many, if not more.

Yep, agree totally here. I actually consider my car a hobby too (and yes, I have too many bloody hobbies!), and the similarities are interesting. I drive the average modern car and think similarly to you - this is fine, it'll get me from A to B, and it doesn't really interest me. What does interest me is repairing my 16 year old car and keeping it running, and just how much better it feels every day to drive to work in a car that's built to be nice to drive, rather than just get the job done!