The future of computing
The world of computing is constantly changing as time goes on and now with this being 2017, tablets, Windows 10 and social media are around us and even Windows 7 hanging on to dear life. With all this known, this makes me wonder... what would it be like in the next 5-10 years? By that time, both 7 and 10 will go unsupported even though the latter would become an "OS as a service" which is what I don't get, and I also wonder if macOS and/or Linux would become more popular than before. Also, we might see more gadgets popping up to further make technology itself more advanced and, well, complicated in return. Touch technology would probably become more prevalent too which is one thing I dread the most but, I don't think it would go to that extreme.
Looking back a decade before, things were so simple and better even when XP was pretty much king of the world though OS X managed to shine with the release of Leopard, which itself done a lot better than the crippled Vista when that was new. Though things did take a few steps forward, at least they were done right and the world of technology itself looked bright until 2012, where I personally think it had regressed, starting with the advent of Windows 8 and social media gradually showing its ugly face. Now, look what we have in the present day and to me, with the thoughts of a pessimist, things may get worse but it's a bit absurd to think that way. For all we know, things might go good again but I doubt it.
What's your say on the subject? And, what are your expectations, whether good or bad, for computing itself as time goes on?
Looking back a decade before, things were so simple and better even when XP was pretty much king of the world though OS X managed to shine with the release of Leopard, which itself done a lot better than the crippled Vista when that was new. Though things did take a few steps forward, at least they were done right and the world of technology itself looked bright until 2012, where I personally think it had regressed, starting with the advent of Windows 8 and social media gradually showing its ugly face. Now, look what we have in the present day and to me, with the thoughts of a pessimist, things may get worse but it's a bit absurd to think that way. For all we know, things might go good again but I doubt it.
What's your say on the subject? And, what are your expectations, whether good or bad, for computing itself as time goes on?
Comments
Windows 10 will likely still be around unless Microsoft changes directions on us. You have to keep in mind that what we refer to as Windows 10 is actually the third release of the product.
I seriously doubt it. Looking at the market share for Mac and Linux, they've barely changed over the last two years and that's a trend I would expect to see continue over the next 5-10 years. Though something interesting is that Mac market share is actually going down slightly. It was 5.58% in February 2015 and as of January 2017, it's down to 4.32%. It's probably within margin of error, but it would be interesting to see if that continued over the next 5 years. Linux market share is ever so slightly going up, but still really low. I don't see either one changing significantly in the next 5-10 years unless something major happens and Microsoft completely fucks up...
I think you're seeing things through the eyes of nostalgia. Things were ever so slightly less complex, but definitely not better. Mobile computing was terrible... shitty wireless, crap battery life and performance... Web browsing was comparatively terrible... slow JS performance and browsers that hogged all your memory (sure, browsers still use a lot of memory now, but now there's so much of it we don't have to care anymore). We did get the shiny new core processors and things took a bit of a leap forward, and that was cool. It's been a while since we've had that... I mean yeah, processors are still getting slightly faster with each release, but it doesn't seem to be as much as it used to, but I could be wrong about that. Back then, yes, XP was quite popular... but Vista had come out and all the people bitching about 8.x / 10 now were bitching about Vista. And those same people, just a few years earlier were bitching about XP. So nothing has really changed in that regard.
It's hard to say really. 10 years is a long time. Phones / tablets seem to be in a place the desktop PC was in the late 80s / early 90s, so I expect they'll still be around. Touch is here to stay. Now that we've figured it out, it's only going to get more and more prolific.
Social media is an interesting one... facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram.... there's so many sites now that I feel like people are going to start dumping some of them. I wouldn't be surprised if facebook starts declining and Twitter buys snapchat. There could even be a new player that pops up, but it's hard to tell who it would be and what they would do differently. 10ish years ago, MySpace was the king... now it's dead. I really wouldn't be surprised if Facebook suffered the same fate. Twitter still seems popular enough to keep going as long as they don't fuck up.
It will be interesting to see if we get any new game changing devices over the next 10 years. It kind of seems like all of the obvious ones have been done already. New smartphone releases just seem boring now... wearables were poised to be the next big thing, but I don't really see that happening... it seems the excitement over smartwatches is dwindling now (at least from my perspective).
I fully expect 10 Gbps to become the new standard in homes / businesses. There's also the new 2.5 / 5 Gbps standard, but I really don't want to see that take hold. ASUS has already started upgrading their consumer stuff to 10 Gbps, so I expect more companies to start following suit.
Next 10 years? More cloud. More touch. More faster. More better.
I predict:
Moar Peter Griffin
Moar LolCats
Moar Blue LEDs
Moar Stupid Stuff
Personally, I am waiting for Borg implants. Then people will go "You had to TOUCH and READ a device to get information? That's like a baby's toy! Oh, hold on, there is an unskippable advertisement coming in to my brain.."
Well, I never experienced that during that time as I had Firefox, a decent DSL connection and that my computer at the time performed pretty well (even though it was from late 2003, and it was custom-built by a local computing company). Just as well I didn't say anything about what it was like in 2002 where some of us were stuck with Internet Explorer and such.
Well yes, the desktop is pretty much a thing of the past though there are all-in-one desktops now but that's nothing new. Also, these phones and tablets better not take over laptops or I would be quite pissed off. I don't think they would anyway.
That's something I keep seeing from you for a while now... what's the real problem with them may I ask? I've got speakers that have a blue LED light when they're on but they were from 2009. Is it anything to do with wasting energy or what? I'm interested to know.
The problem is so bad there is an actual commercial product to deal with them: http://www.lightdims.com/store.htm (They sell them at Microcenter)
I don't see why you think Blue LEDs are so damn evil. The ones I've seem are the same brightness as green ones (I have a Thinkvision and a Viewsonic monitor on my desk - one with a green LED and one with blue...) and blue is a much better color than red to be blasted on stuff. In a lot of cases I find red to be tacky as hell.
@pcgeek that will never happen. It's too much to expect to think that computers in the future will able to do absolutely everything. There are limitations to even the most powerful computers, and even though Moore's law seems to have slowed down quite a bit lately, it's still going to be in effect. Instantaneous downloads of images? Well....that's already possible if you live in an area populated enough to have fast enough internet.
Also, I haven't seen lolcats in years.
As far as social media goes, people have always been stupid (And yes, you, the person reading this, are stupid. I'm stupid too. There are no exceptions to this). They just have more ways to express that stupidity nowadays.
To be clear, I'm referring to local network speeds and not internet connectivity. But speaking of internet connectivity, gigabit internet connections are popping up in more and more markets all the time. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't think it at all unreasonable that in 10 years we could see 1 Gbps connections becoming common. Especially given that 10 years ago, I think most people would have been lucky to have 3 Mbps... now a lot of those people have at least 30 (of course, there's a lot of people that are still stuck on barely 1 Mbps connections). 10 years ago, I remember thinking how fast a 100 Mbps connection seemed. It seems pretty slow now that I have a 230 Mbps connection at home and a 1 Gbps connection at work.
Servers already are dirt cheap if you get them used. The cost comes from the bandwidth and power feeding those servers, which is a cost that, unfortunately, is only likely to get higher.
As far as speed goes, sure, computers 10 years from now probably could load everything you do now pretty much instantly... but software will grow more complex to take advantage of the increased resources and comparatively they will be no faster than machines are now.
Firefox was primarily what I was talking about. It loved to suck down memory, especially back in the day and back then, memory was a premium. But the alternatives sucked, so we soldiered on... Eventually memory became abundant and it didn't matter anymore.
They already have. I know more and more average joe users that have dumped their laptops in favor of mobile devices. A few short years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a student to not have a laptop with them... these days? It seems like it's easily 1 in 5... they will definitely have a smartphone and likely have a tablet... but no laptop. They might own one, but it's left sitting at home gathering dust.
Oh I'm fairly sure WinWorld will still exist in 10 years. It's quite possible that it will have gone through another shut down between now and then, but I have no doubt that it will be resurrected. WinWorld, thus far, has proved to be unkillable...
Now as far as the whole blue LED thing goes, they do tend to be a bit more obnoxious than other colors. I'm kind of surprised they haven't died off yet... I used to see blue LEDs on everything, but then I started to see white LED's and I figured that's where we would wind up... but the blue LEDs just came back.
As for the Internet, it depends where. In some places like southeast Asia and Israel with its competition law, it's only a matter of time before extremely high-speed internet reaches the masses. With Europe/AU/NZ it could go a little slower, and maybe Canada will get to its senses some day, but the US will ALWAYS be a big pain in the ass for this type of innovation. ISPs and cell phone providers are all monopolies in agreement, and since they can get away with it, they'll charge as much as physically possible for as little as possible. The only thing that can stop it is either law or people. But the latter is an incompetent bunch so that won't happen. As for local network speeds yeah there's probably going to be wired 10/100 Gbps but we already have 802.11ac so there's that at least.
If my scenario does occur, then that would be great because we can finally work productively without being pissed on by these corporations who will abuse the consumers for money. However, I feel that the more tablets and phones dominate the market, the more likely will it be that certain software will still require the modern $2000 iPhone with 8 GB of storage. I mean jesus fucking christ most computers nowadays basically are focused on the "consumers who kinda want the thin hip and stylish iPad but still need a computer", I mean just look at stuff like the MacBook, there's like one port, how can you say that's useful for productivity? Or with stuff like Locked UEFI, it's just treating people like wild animals. But we do have custom PC building which is a good alternative to all this crap.
My PC, which has a $50 Celeron, is extremely fast and we can expect the Celeron of 2027 to be like a Core i7 6700K in terms of raw speed. As for mo
Look, PCs in their traditional form will not go away for a long time. They may be a small part of the market, with tablets dominating, but there's enough stuff that relies on additional computing power and "traditional" operating systems that they still will exist, although they might be kind of a niche.
By the time PCs in the traditional form go away, everyone except for older people will have migrated to the thing that is out then, as it will be better than what we have now....
Sorry for the kind of poor wording, but hopefully I got my point across. You being worried about your PC being suddenly taken away is irrational and will not happen.
This is true. When we talk about mobile devices taking over, we're mostly talking about Average Joe consumers. Those people dumped desktops a long time ago in favor of laptops and they're now doing the same thing with tablets and smartphones.
Laptops and desktops will still be around for the foreseeable future, it's just that John Q. Consumer won't have one.
Just my 2 cents worth on Linux:
I don't see it gaining much ground, unless Microsoft royally fucks it up with Windows and / or implementing a paid subscription OS. My personal problem, and possibly with many others, is that there is no one "Linux" out there which is creating a compatibility headache across the board. There are just too many distros, sub-distros, and sub-sub-distros (I'm not kidding) to create a consistent platform that is compatible between distributions and drivers.
As far as the future of technology goes, I think it can be summed-up as follows:
Stupid-proof, touchscreens, cloud-based everything (a dangerous move, in my opinion), and invasive. Will the desktop PC and laptop fade away? Probably not. While tablets and smart phones are taking over, these devices can do some basic tasks, such as printing documents, point-of-sales services, photography, but do not have the processing power, at least not yet, as the personal computer; word processing and gaming will likely remain a traditional PC task. Besides this, you can't upgrade a tablet or smart-phone aside from its local storage capacity, although I'm sure cloud-based storage will eliminate that problem altogether. Another problem with smart devices is that they're highly integrated, making the entire device susceptible to complete failure if a single IC is damaged / fails or close to that effect, but I digress. As a side note, the problem I see with these smart devices is that they're becoming cheaper, and cheaper, making them easily disposable and creating inherent waste. I'd rather stick with a desktop where I can use it for some years with simple upgrades.
Boot time for Windows 10 isn't really an accurate assessment of computing power. My 4.3 year old Thinkpad T530 boots Windows 10 in seconds also, but that's more due to the SSD than the HDD. Most likely that Lenovo also had an SSD which was why it was able to boot Windows 10 so quickly, and it also has a relatively stock version of Win10 without a bunch of startup programs and shit on there.
I'm guessing the Asus 2-in-1 just said Intel Inside? That means it has a processor that is a piece of shit, like an Atom or Celeron.
As far as mobile performance goes, they get faster all the time. Like I said, it's more like how PCs were in the late 80s and early 90s. And as their performance increases, their usefulness increases as well. I've posted about this before, but I regularly use my phone to get work done. Having a computer in your pocket all the time is very convenient. Need a VPN set up while I'm at lunch? Sure, I can do that (I probably shouldn't, but I can). Need a server rebooted? Yup, no problem.
A few times, while doing work at the data center, I didn't bother getting out a laptop... I just hopped on my phone to drain a host to perform maintenance on it.
Of course, there are some things that are far easier to do on a laptop, but almost my entire job can be done from my phone in a pinch.
To be honest, your phone sounds more like a glorified remote control.
Well, you can actually connect a full size keyboard to your phone if you wanted to. Either through an OTG adapter or wirelessly through bluetooth.
Also, as far as the touch screen keyboard goes, word prediction / suggestion and swipe make it much easier to use.
Linux will rise and fall a little in market share. Windows XP will slowly move out of the existence, Windows 10 will be the dominating factor in the Microsoft market. Windows will keep merging with Linux, and Linux will get better at running Windows Apps. Solaris will still be in the constant upgrading release system. Bigger and better systems will feel as just like our old desktops. More Bloat ware for every one. Debian will soon start to cut off support for P3's. Off topic predictions: possible impeachment, world war 3, a new broader range attacks by hackers (due to the internet of things), and finally bigger and broader networks. Here, here. Those Led lights are just terrible, especially when a car passes by with their led high beams on.
(only because I like the avatar)