PC's are a thing of the past

Submitted by Peter on Thu, 2010-01-28 18:07

Every few years there is a big PC's are a thing of the past push. I bumped into one dated 2005 that read almost exactly the same as the marketing statements made back in 1985 when sales people were pushing the Mac. What did happen to PCs?

Mac goes PC

Apple replaced their Apple Mac with the PC Mac because PC hardware costs less and they can make even greater profit from their fashion accessories.

Mobile phones go PC

Mobile phones are going PC. Mobile phones (cell phones in USA) adopted Intel and Intel compatible processors plus the operating systems from PCs including Windows. Apple eventually launched a mobile phone and used their Unix from their PC Mac.

Solid state memory makes phones with full computer operating systems possible. An SDHC card can store 32 gigabyte or eight times more than can be used by a 32 bit operating system. The silicon chip inside an SDHC card is tiny which suggests a phone could easily have twice, four or more times as much memory without stress, giving your PC phone more memory than big expensive servers.

Technically there is nothing to stop you using any full scale operating system you like on a mobile phone. Some operating system suppliers restrict access or fail to include suitable hardware drivers. Some operating systems make stupid assumptions that prevent installation on phones, one example being the Windows 2000 need to use a floppy disk even though floppy disks were totally obsolete many years before the release of Windows 2000.

Netbooks are PCs

Netbooks are PCs with solid state disks. Well, the good netbooks are. There are a lot of small PCs sold as netbooks but with ordinary crashable rotating disks.

Moblin, from moblin.org, is the version of Linux configured to perform on netbooks using Intel Atom processors. AMD has an equivalent processor. Ubuntu has a Moblin distribution ready.

There is little difference between the entry level netbooks and top end mobile phones. Expect Moblin phones soon.

The old PC phone I threw out years ago was effectively an iPhone with a lot more features including an SD card slot. It was one of the phones Apple cloned ideas from when designing the iPhone. Apple left out the best features of the older phones so that Apple could sell a long string of upgrades to iPhone owners. When an iPhone finally arrives with an SD card slot, you will be able to download Ubuntu Moblin to an SD card and boot up Linux on your iPhone. Your iPhone will then be a netbook.

SDHC replaced SD a long time ago. A 16GB SDHC card could contain Ubuntu Linux, every Web development tool you ever need, plus many Web sites. If you had one of those ancient O2 PC phones from almost last century and upgraded the SD slot to a couple of SDHC slots, you could have your desktop computer environment and data on one card plus your Web server on the other card. You could develop and update Web sites from a $100 phone.

SDXC is already ready to replace SDHC and has a maximum size of 2 terabytes, the same size as the largest hard disk you can buy today. There might be a few years gap between the appearance of the 2TB rotating disks and the first of the 2TB SDXC cards but the time difference is becoming less with each generation of chip. You will soon see a seamless range of hardware from phones up through netbooks to notebooks and desktops. The only difference on the pocket size devices will be the range of cards you can plug in

Move up to the smallest netbook to get G3 wireless access when outside plus cheap 802n wireless broadband indoors plus extra speed. You can then edit small videos. You can stream content from your netbook to your Web server. Your Web server could be a simple proxy server to cache the content for delivery to the Web.

Solid State Storage

Solid state storage is the only big difference between devices today and solid state storage is now so cheap that desktop PCs will start using it. 802n wireless is available everywhere. 3G is available everywhere. Some mobile phones use processors that are not PC compatible but the Intel Atom and equivalent are headed down through the netbook and mobile phone price range.

If a phone has token solid state storage then it is a phone with an address book and nothing more, no matter what operating system is loaded on board. When the storage jumps up or you include an SD card slot, you have a PC.

Without the storage you can have games and word processors but you cannot load your own choice of games and word processors, an essential feature of a PC. An ordinary SD card can store up to 4Gb including most games and word processors, giving you what is technically a PC. The Gutenberg library is just over 8 GB and growing. A DVD can be from 4Gb up to 9GB. An SDHC card slot is really the minimum to give you modern PC flexibility.

Get a PC

There used to be a saying in the Apple community of Get a Mac. When someone had a problem with a PC, out would come the Get a Mac quotation. Based on first hand experience in a lot of fields, there were for a long time 100 times more PCs than Macs but only 10 times the problems, giving Macs, on average, 10 times more problems per use. Perhaps the saying should be Get a PC?

Of course Apple did get a PC. They changed to PC hardware and one of the PC operating systems.

Get a PC is even more important in the mobile phone area because the biggest limitations on phones are the contact list and the applications. Once you jump your phone hardware from weird chip to PC chip and add a touch more solid state storage, you can use the same contact lists and communications software you use everywhere else. You do not have to buy an exotic expensive specialised map application because you can view Google maps in Firefox the same as you do on every other device. You can use the same Abiword, Apache, Gimp, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Thunderbird as you use on your desktops, your servers, and Web sites.