the future

[krizrox]

Was kind of curious about something - I was at the local Apple mall store near me a few days ago and noticed something interesting. Where there used to be a wall of Mac Pros and a fair number of laptops I now saw mostly tablets and iPhones. In the entire store, there was a single lonely Mac Pro way in the back almost hidden from view. Got me wondering about the future of desktop computing and recording. Are we on the verge of a crossover to mostly portable devices?

In fact, let me take this one step further. I was at JC Penny the other day buying a pair of jeans. The cashier took my credit card and swiped it through what looked like a smartphone (it was some sort of portable transaction device). I was instructed to sign with my fingertip on the display (ever tried to sign your name with your fingertip on a display? It looked nothing like my signature ha ha).

I'm not suggesting desktop PC's are going away any time soon but I wonder where we'll be ten years from now. Will we be recording on tablets?

[hubird]

My guess is that desktop models will be the pro thing, for those who work -indeed- at a studio- or design desk, and for those who need PCI slots for pro cards.
I'm quite happy with my 8core mac, no tablet for production aims for me

[garyb]

the "plan" is to eliminate personal computers and move to terminals that are all cloud networked. at that point most people won't own software at all, everyone will subscribe to cloud-based services. actually, while i can see the usefullness and efficiency for this kind of arrangement, i am dismayed by the idea of eveyone being clients of central authority, there are too many chances for abuse. also, i don't really think experts know what is best for me and my purposes in life. i'm sure that there will be a use for machines as we know them now at that point, however. making music is still a personal activity and i'm sure people will still use their own instruments. a dedicated music machine might still have advantages to a producer/engineer/musician, even if it's in concert with a net-based reality. in truth, the current systems will do a great job even twenty years later.

[jksuperstar]

I think the first point is Apple's call for sales on items they get the most profit, along woth maintenance on. However, PCs are kust hitting many 2nd and 3rd world countries, where data plans and network access are nonexistant or unaffordable. So laptops and deaktops are still very much prevailent. In 10 years, I still expect to provide my own personal cloud service, but only need network access from someone else.

[siriusbliss]

Desktops, server banks, etc. will be around for a while - especially with Hollywood, video editors, animators, gamers, recording studios, weather modeling, etc. all still requiring high-end computing architectures.

However, the remote access, window-into-the-computer type paradigm will continue to grow.

This 'era' was predicted decades ago.

G

[Mr Arkadin]

This Cloud stuff worries me. As a UK citizen, if my Cloud is in the US, those nice Feds can snoop around - without a warrent or justification:

Independent Article 1

Independent Article 2

"US law allows American agencies to access all private information stored by foreign nationals with firms falling within Washington’s jurisdiction, if the information concerns US interests, without a warrant."

"Amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, allow US government agencies open access to any electronic information stored by non-American citizens by US-based companies. Quietly introduced during the dying days of President George W Bush’s administration in 2008, the amendments were renewed over Christmas 2012."

Yeah, that makes me feel safe.

[garyb]

yes, we are being reintroduced to feudalism through the cloud.
nothing is ours, everything belongs to the owners of the infrastructure.

[kensuguro]

they'll sell whatever they want to sell. Tablet and smartphones selling overall doesn't really affect the need for a desktop since the needs are very explicit. Notebooks are replacing desktops in many cases since sandy, just because of sheer processing power. There's also a lot of server related tasks being replaced by cloud virtual instances being accessed via VPN and RDP. It's difficult for tablets to fill that space... Technically they can, since they can serve as thin clients, but would still be used in a "desktop" fashion, with keyboard, mouse, and a screen. (too hard to code or admin stuff through a tiny client)

The desktop form factor I feel is definitely not a necessity for many tasks tho. Many things can be done on a notebook, tiny notebook, or tossed into cloud (if it's a linux friendly task) if you're comfortable with a "they pull the plug and you're fucked" paradigm.

In reality, I've done complete big data analytics tasks through RDP from home. Since that's the way I would have done it at my office anyway. So all the stuff is set up remotely, and all I need is to be able to ssh into the box. So a lot of back end tasks are being done that way already. But still, doing all that from within a tablet view is just bad UX, so you still need a good amount of screen estate, and keyboard and mouse. Not so much mouse, but I'd need a full keyboard to comfortably write sql and code to do the analytics.

For audio or video, forget about it. RDP tech is like streaming screen shots, so anything realtime like that will be too difficult. The whole premise has to be, text in, text out. After all these years, that's still where internet is at I believe. SSH is text in, text out. SQL is text in, text out. Command line is the same. You go beyond that, the lag and load is too much and your starts to cut away from your workflow.

I see it as more of a TV vs movie thing. Or to go back even further in history, newspaper vs radio vs movie vs tv vs cable vs piratebay vs youtube.. It's not that one thing totally replaces the other. It just increases the pie.

[garyb]

nah, the movies point the way!

a pc was only science fiction when i was in school.

yep, they'll sell what they want.

[krizrox]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/reason ... YT2XzeyHXy

[kensuguro]

For past 2 positions, I've been running Xubuntu on a virtual machine on a Mac, so that's like a double whammy. At home I run win7 tho. After Vista's all been sort of a blur to me. Basically, as long as Windows runs Live, and works with my audio interface, runs all my plugins, then I'm cool with whatever Windows version. I think with Vista, the adoption rate got messed up, forcing application developers to have to support XP and Vista. Then came Win7, still forcing developers to focus on backwards compatibility.. Then Win8.. still having to maintain backwards compatibility (non Win8 still probably is majority share), thus breaking the "all your software is effed if you don't upgrade" proposition.

On the other hand Apple developers quickly shift to the latest OS ver, quickly making the older OS ver obsolete. This is true for iOS and OS X. The same upgrade force that got people to go from win 3.1 to 95, to XP. It's kind of ironic, because in this case, Microsoft applications are doing the more "ethical" thing.