The shape of personal things to come

We frequently hear pundits or corporate voice pieces declaring that we are in a post-PC or PC-plus era.  Some want to say that the PC is dead.  Others say the PC is an essential part of a home or business ecosystem.  Part of the argument is that smartphone and tablet sales have dramatically taken off while PC sales are flat or even dipped slightly.  Some say these mobile devices will replace the PC.  Others say they personally will always want a keyboard and a large screen, and therefore the PC must stay.

Strangely, I have a different vision from all of them.  Before getting to it, it is useful to make some basic observations about computing technology.¹

1. Smartphones and tablets are useful because there are servers on the other end. The servers deliver e-mail, maps, videos, backend speech recognition, etc. If you didn't have them, there would be no smart mobile devices.
   
2. Servers are largely a variation of PC technology (although there are significant permutations like blade technology). The CPUs can be the same as used in high end-gaming machines. What makes them different is they are usually headless, and dozens of them sit in a rack. The thousands of racks of servers are what make Google, YouTube, Yahoo, or Amazon AWS what they are. They are also at the heart of the nation's fastest supercomputers. They have an enormous energy footprint, and making a carbon neutral server farm is a major challenge.
   
3. Some smartphones already have HDMI capability in the form of MHL-HDMI (MHL = Mobile High-Definition Link). This allows them to be plugged into some HDTVs. This is already in consumer hands, but a lot of people just might not know they have it.  (Here is an MHL device list.)
   
4. Your vacuum machine or washing machine probably compute.  But not like smartphones and tablets, which are architecturally very similar to PCs and servers. These have at least 32-bit CPUs, demand paged memory, and can host a variety of applications. They also usually come with a fairly powerful graphics accelerator on the same chip as the CPU, which makes sophisticated games and flight simulators possible. No one would do that to a vacuum machine or washing machine because it will add $100 or $200 to the price tag for questionable added functionality.

So what should we expect about personal computers in the home or business? In my estimation, the personal computer has to lose it head. That is, no display. Its function will be to serve up information to mobile or large screen devices on the same network. It might not even have a keyboard, which may become an adjunct to the mobile device. PCs for high-end first-person games may be replaced by large screen TVs that come with powerful graphics accelerators the way PCs and smart mobile devices have them now. Because they will be stationary and plugged into a power outlet, these can be more powerful than the ones currently in PCs. In effect, PCs will be replaced by distributed computing elements including one or more servers, advanced rendering display, and personal smart devices that accept keyboards, joysticks, etc.

I don't know why this hasn't happened yet. There seems to be an aversion to headless home servers.  Possibly some companies can see this coming and want to stop it from happening.  But yet, there is nothing technically impossible about it. When headless home servers and advanced graphics-accelerated HD display happen, the PC will be dead.

Footnotes:

1. I originally wrote these comments in a rougher form in a discussion following an article on whether the PC is dead or not.  In that forum, I go by the name "FoolishDIY".  If these points seem strangely familiar to you and they were posted under that name, it was probably me.

So it begins...

We now live in an age when many do not remember life without digital devices. Personal computers are prevalent in the workplace. MP3 players with earbuds provide daily entertainment. Cellphones frequently replace home telephones with land lines as the primary means of remote communication. Television is now delivered in high-definition.

Roughly fifty ago (circa 1960), the preceding paragraph would not have made sense to most residents of the United States. And if it did make sense, it would largely be considered science fiction. Today, new college graduates and new consumers take it for granted. Interaction with digital devices is taken for granted. (Conversely, most of this group has never seen a typewriter, or have ever heard of a slide rule.)

--o0o--

Actually, I wrote the above two paragraphs over two years ago, in late 2010.  They were part of a set of class notes I was preparing on an introduction to computing and digital technology.  When I looked around at curriculum which introduced computing, it was largely based on personal computers.  In an age of mobile smart devices like iPhone or Google Android devices, the approach of the year 2000 already seemed very obsolete.

It is now 2013.  Smart phones are now taken for granted.  The current battleground is the tablet.  The emerging battleground to come encompasses devices like self-driving cars on city streets and unmanned aerial vehicles integrated into the US National Airspace System (NAS).

This blog is intended as a combination of computing technical content as well as observations and interpretations of what is happening around us.  I get asked frequently how to do something or to assess the impact of technology changes.  I have notes in lots of different places.  I'm hoping to collect them into fewer places, and make the useful to myself and others.

If past experience is any indication, this is going to be a long journey with lots of surprises.  The map in five years will not likely resemble the map of today.  Speed bumps are completely uncharted.

So it begins...