{"id":2085,"date":"2010-06-22T21:22:09","date_gmt":"2010-06-23T02:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2085"},"modified":"2011-01-10T09:52:42","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T14:52:42","slug":"reports-of-pcs-impending-death-greatly-exagerated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2085","title":{"rendered":"Reports of PC&#8217;s Impending Death Greatly Exaggerated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One Farhad Manjoo has attracted some attention by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2257495\">projecting in an article written for <cite>Slate<\/cite><\/a> that desktop PCs are headed for extinction,  outcompeted by laptops and netbooks.<\/p>\n<p>I have seen the future and I say &#8220;Balderdash!&#8221; It is undoubtedly true that computers will continue to get smaller and lighter and more portable.  Indeed, I&#8217;m expecting that for most people, descendants of smartphones will become their primary computing devices. I am, however also certain that this does <em>not<\/em> imply the demise of &#8220;desktop&#8221; systems.<\/p>\n<p>Manjoo, and other enthusiasts for the imminent death of the desktop PC, are missing a basic ergonomic point.  Computers themselves could shrink to the size of a matchbox without inconveniencing anyone &#8211; but some of the things attached to them are scaled to humans and don&#8217;t shrink so easily. Of these, the two most significant are display screens and keyboards.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The kind of tiny display that will fit on a smartphone is just barely usable for browsing the Web, provided you&#8217;re willing to accept some inconveniences like not having an actual mouse. Tiny keyboards are OK for tiny amounts of text.  We accept these inconveniences in a smartphone because it has to fit in a pocket.<\/p>\n<p>But, for steady use, there are no good substitutes for having at least 1K by 1K pixels on a display large enough to mostly fill your visual field, and a full-size\/full-travel keyboard.  Furthermore, being able to adjust the position of your keyboard and monitor separately can be pretty important if you want to avoid a stiff neck and other posture-related aches and pains.  <\/p>\n<p>These ergonomic constraints can&#8217;t be satisfied by anything in a smartphone, netbook, or laptop package. Instead, I expect that human-sized peripherals will begin to decouple from ever-tinier computers.  As I&#8217;ve previously projected, there will be a growing  market for human-scale peripherals meant to be slaved to a computing core that you walk up to them, using a USB docking cradle or some analogous technology. <\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a conceptual error in projections like Manjoo&#8217;s, that of thinking of a &#8220;computer&#8221; as an indissoluble lump that has to bundle together all of the hardware capabilities we associate with a PC. But human needs are more various than that. In the future, the  hardware to meet them will be too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One Farhad Manjoo has attracted some attention by projecting in an article written for Slate that desktop PCs are headed for extinction, outcompeted by laptops and netbooks. I have seen the future and I say &#8220;Balderdash!&#8221; It is undoubtedly true that computers will continue to get smaller and lighter and more portable. Indeed, I&#8217;m expecting&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2085\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Reports of PC&#8217;s Impending Death Greatly Exaggerated<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2085"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2863,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions\/2863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}