Thursday, May 2, 2013

Tomorrow's PC is... a PC. Wait, what?

I know all the technology Illuminati claim that the PC is basically dead. Sure, they acknowlege that it might be barely holding on to life, but it's bound to croak soon, right? I mean, we've already ordered the flowers and notified the caterer.


But here's the thing
- what really, I mean REALLY, takes the place of the PC? Sure, mobile devices have changed the way people compute. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say that mobile devices have changed the way some people work some of the time? And I'm not knocking mobile computing. It's great. I love it. I had a PalmPilot back in the late 90's. I had a Blackberry in the mid-2000's. Now I use an iPhone and an iPad. Mobile computing has allowed me to have the information I need when I need it (which is good) and to blur the lines between when I'm working and when I'm not (which may or may not be good).

I even have a story about using my Blackberry to telnet into a Linux server and write a shell script to ping some wireless equipment and email me the results every 10 minutes so I didn't have to miss my niece's gymnastics competition to monitor an equipment outage. Come to think of it, that's pretty much the whole story. Anyway...

However, and this is the key to my point of view, there are still tasks that I perform way more effectively from my desktop computer. Lots of times, actually. Mobile is fine for a ton of things, but software development, graphics design, research, and a lot of other things that I do on a regular basis, I want to do on my desktop. Why? I can put my email up on one screen, a browser window on another an my development IDE on another screen. In the background I'm streaming Pandora, have a handful of extra browser windows open (each with a few tabs open), I'll also probably have a database tool open in the same window as my browser, so I can choose to look at my IDE and browser, or IDE and database. I must press ALT+TAB a thousand times a day while I'm flipping between apps. I use CNTRL+TAB and CNTRL+SHIFT+TAB constantly to flip between browser tabs.

I've yet to imagine a mobile device that will give me the kind of horsepower and flexibility to work productively. Sure, I can struggle through with a laptop or iPad, and sometimes those devices can be a pure joy to use, but when I'm really working hard, I need my desktop.

What about you? Can you really see a world without desktop PCs?

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