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| The PC is Dead Fairy Tale |
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Tech pundits
routinely post stories that the personal computer is
dead siting manufacture sales figures to prove their
point. Yet I bet 90 percent of computer users have
at least one conventional PC. The reality is you
haven’t purchased a PC in a number of years because
there is no compelling reason to do so. For most
users what you have is good enough. Adding a few new
peripheral devices such a mouse, a larger LCD
monitor or and SSD is often all that is required to
improve your computing experience.
In my
life, I’ve had 3 main TV’s in the living
room. The first two lasted about 15 years
each. By the mid 70’s, the TV had matured to
the point that the manufactures had greatly
reduced the number of parts and the units
life was greatly extended. |
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The third
TV,
which is an LCD, is going on 10 years. Several other
TV’s in the house were replaced with LCD units
because you really don’t like the lower picture
quality once you’ve watched an LCD for a while. In
other words, new purchases were made when the new
technology substantially out preformed the previous
generation. |
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When we went from 8086 computers to 286, to 386,
etc. The speed improvement was 200 to 300
percent. Going from 16bit to 32bit to 64bit improved
operating system and application software
performance. About 2008, most computers sold ran
64bit software, had Sata 3 hard drive interfaces and
could handle 8 gigs of ram. For most people, this
gets the job done.
As before, the number of parts in a computer has
been greatly reduced and thus the life expectancy
extended, just like the TV’s of the previous
generation. |
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My last
round of hardware upgrades was removing
conventional hard drives and replacing them
with SSD’s. If you haven’t done this you
should as the speed difference is like
getting a new computer. I’ve upgraded most
of my keyboards to the Logitech's Illuminated
series as I often use my computers at
night and being able to see the illuminated
keys is much better than turning on another
light source that may compete with the
monitor. |
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I think that for
most people the PC they have is good enough so they
are spending their money on smart phones, tablet
pc’s, video games, or on something else they don’t
have. The next round of large consumer pc spending
will take place when something revolutionary happens
like what the LCD’s did for the TV market. |
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