Let's praise Surface, not bury it Yes, I know the new Surface kit unveiled by Microsoft (hands-on and roundup) is both lavishly over-engineered and ludicrously expensive. You know that. We all know that. But that's not the point. The Surface extravaganza is a good thing. Faced with a mortal threat, Microsoft is doing something it should have done years ago – …
The market for selling PC kit might be slowing down, but market usage of PC's is not. The fact of the matter is that anyone in the developed world who wants a computer has one. The market has reached saturation, and it has been at that point for a while. In the past, despite market saturation, people regularly upgraded because new programs required better hardware to run. However, that is not the case anymore. The latest AAA games can all be played on 3-5 year old Hardware (unless you absolutely needed every graphical setting on max). So the Need to upgrade is gone, and now the replacement cycle is much slower. The market is not going away it is merely recalibrating to the new reality where new Hardware does not offer the significant increases of previous generations.
Comparing this to Smartphone and tablets is not a like for like comparison of where the market stands now. Every new generation of tablet brings significant gains in usage, power and abilities. As such, the upgrade cycle is fast and it is selling well, eventually it too will hit the same saturation and Performance drop off curve but it hasnt yet.
Smartphone sales are dropping back (just look at Apple's recent sales show) and the reason is that they have now hit that saturation point, each new generation of smartphone doesnt really bring any huge benfits, the phone is only slightly faster, with slightly more memory, slightly less weight. And its safe to say everyone who wants a smart phone by now, has one already. The upgrade cycle is now getting longer, new phones are only purchased when old ones die rather then on the previous regular basis. This is just the new reality.
The current market realities were always going to occur, market saturation was inevitable, we should be congratulating the PC firms for getting a PC in almost every household, but they should never have expected to continue to sell us a new PC every year, if they werent able to maintain the massive Speed increases that fueled those yearly PC sales...
You know you can tell Tech Journalists that till you are blue in the face but they never learn.
They seem to think that all the PCs bought in 2015 will be thrown out a year later and so on.
I don't know where they get such odd ideas.
I do a roaring trade selling refurb 2012 kit to small businesses. Not many people need powerful or 2016 spec kit to work on Excel and send emails.
"They seem to think that all the PCs bought in 2015 will be thrown out a year later and so on."
"Have an upvote! You are so totally right!"
Have yet another upvote!
I have argued this same thing for years.
To point: I now use an Sun Ultra 24 with an Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 with 8Gb RAM, the NVidia Quadro FX370 that camer with it + 4*72Gb SAS1 drives with a LSI 1068E PCI-E controller. It's an 'ancient' 7+ year old rig and I'm quite happy with it.
If it wasn't for Sun users being hostage (no supoport, no BIOS files available, etc.) to Oracle things wolud be just perfect.
Runs Mint 18 64bit with anything I need.
And this only because the Linux kernel dropped support for all my older hardware, which worked just fine but now I can have VirtualBox 5 for the specific stuff I need XP for.
Cheers.
Have an upvote! You are so totally right!
A long time ago, when I was a wee tyke, new car models were a BIG DEAL. People got excited about the new car models coming out each year. Very many people (including my father) bought a new car every three years. Why? Because back then cars wore out faster than today, and the new cars were often significantly better (as well as being styled differently - a bit of planned obsolescence there) than the older cars.
It was an upgrade cycle, the same thing that drove PC buying in the 90's, what with upgrades from 286 to 386 to 486, etc., each of which was a significant improvement over what went before. (And driven also by MS's tendency to bloat their software to the point it barely ran -- until you upgraded. I well remember successive versions of MS Office bogging down until the hardware upgrade.) That's not the case with cars or PCs anymore, hence the "knee" in the growth curve where it flattens out.
Yeah it was crazy time from 1993 to around 2005. You could upgrade every 3-4 months and still not have enough power to do what you wanted. I remember one year I upgraded my CPU 5 times! Then the 64bit dual cores arrived and it just nosedived from there. It's now 3-4 years between CPU upgrades.
In fact had SSD's been mainstream back in 2002 say a lot of those CPU upgrades may not have been required as a slow PC wasn't always the CPU.
Inclined to agree with the posters here, we have i3 desktops at work, and they don't need a massive upgrade, they could do with a bit more ram (they came with min ram config), because we use a lot of web apps like google docs and multiple tabs eats memory but that's it really the only other thing that would be nice would be larger screens.
Home PC, that's been ticking over nicely on an i5, geforce 560 and SSD for ages (I agree jason the SSD is definitely a game changer) , and it runs anything up to xcom2 and elite not fussed enough about ultra HD settings to need to upgrade they are more than good enough, possibly if I bought some of the latest AA titles it might but doubt it (and not enough of a gamer to care), only upgrade that had recently was a shiny new screen.
Only real PC purchase I have made this year was a new laptop because I needed one, even then I did not shop for an i7, a decent i5 with SSD has been fine, in fact it boots ridiculously quick, quicker than my phone.
I remember the constant upgrade cycle, comparing which chip was better between AMD and intel, flip flopping between radeons and geforce to get that last bit of grunt out of a PC to make it usable for a new title or to keep up with the latest software, it's just not needed anymore, office has been fine since office 2010, CAD I do not use the hardcore enough end of it to need to care beyond CAD running 2013 model, and I suspect the average photoshop user is probably quite comfortable with a version a few years back for everything they do.
Barring the average reg reader or hardcore gamer, I am probably more demanding of a decent PC than 90% of users out there.
I don't miss the upgrade cycle, my bank balance certainly doesn't.
Invariably I've found the best upgrades for old work PCs are simply SSDs, breaths new life into them as most these days have a reasonably dual core (or better) CPU and 4GB of RAM.
£60 upgrade, no need to replace the PC until it's beyond economic repair. 4 year replacement cycles in work will gradually disappear I think as more things are done on web portals etc and SSDs boost performance on local applications.
No, that's not why your dad replaced his car every three years.
Your dad replaced his car every three years because that was the inflection point at which the depreciation reality crossed the maintenance needs plot and produced "good money after bad" syndrome.
The same economics are in place today. Cars don't last longer today. Indeed, they often are more expensive to make last longer because so many of the parts are tear-out-and-replace instead of repair items.
I'll pick two examples out of thin air:
Alternators cost about 700 bux to replace, but the bit that has usually failed is in the so-called rectifier pack and would cost about 10 cents to replace if the rectifier packs were not now heat/chemically welded plastic modules riveted to the alternator casing. This I have done.
The instrument cluster and dashboard lighting assemblies are now typically a two-foot wide single electronic board, massively integrated. Used to be if the speedo light went out you could, with the loss of a weekend and some class four Words of Power, fix it for under five bux. Now you are looking at a garage job and a few hundred bux in parts and labor.
About the only thing that could kill a car in The Old Days was rust. Eventually your mini could not get through the MOT because the lugs that held the subframes to the floorpan would be rotted through and there was not enough good steel left to make new ones.
These days the electronics become obsolete and that's all she wrote. My car recently stopped turning off its headlights when I removed the ignition key because a relay gave out after 13 years of sterling service. The fix? Replace the fuse box (the relay is, like that alternator rectifier pack, part of the fusebox assembly rather than bolted to it). The problem? The fusebox is no longer a stocked part because the design changed 12 years ago. No, they still have a molded-in integral relay, they just changed the shape of the fusebox.
So a bit less sneering at the Old Man if you please.
I tend to *invent* new Words of Power when I'm trying to resurrect failed equipment, usually because the CIO (or worse, the entire company) is beating down my door wondering why their email isn't going through... :)
Mine's the one with the journal with black covers titled 'An Incomplete Dictionary of the Obscene and Profane' in the front pocket
I think you're confusing reliability with repairability.
Back in the day, my dad could repair his Ford Prefect with a hammer and a spare part, and spare parts were cheap. But he was repairing it monthly, and parts were cheap because of volume sales to all the other dads with a hammer. Eminently repairable, but not reliable. We kept a toolkit (and a few of the more common spares) in the boot for that reason.
These days - no chance. Spares cost serious money, and it takes a full workshop to access some parts. But they don't fail as often (even if you hate yourself and buy a land rover). Eminently reliable, but not easily repairable. I only have a jack in my boot, for that reason.
(Also, if you're finding it hard to get parts for a 12 year old car, blame the lawyers - manufacturers only have to support old models for 10 years. There are scrap yards though).
Yah, no I'm not.
Anyone wanting a quick lesson in this need only study the Haines manual for any car in the late 70s with a similar car in the 1990s, and give a relative count of the "no user serviceable parts" pages.
I was fully prepared to swap out or repair the gearbox on my old but great-in-the-snow Excel until I discovered that there were no consumer-mechanic manuals that would explain how to go about the task.
And I have a couple of colleagues who would like to dispute the reliability and repairability of their Ford Explorers, both of which lost the electronic dashboards inside a year of purchase to intermittent faults in the illumination gubbins that the dealers wouldn't touch because of the sheer costs involved - until the Lemon Law was waved at each.
The accountant's wisdom is still that you change out your fleets every three years, electronic sensors, space-age ignition systems and digital dashboards and all. Just like they did thirty years ago. For the same financial reasons.
Because for all that vaunted reliability you cite, the cars depreciate at the same rate they used to.
Not so fast: it might be the 'looking' that's being possessed, as in 'your shirt'. In this case use of 'your' is transformed from a crime against grammar to a stylistic flourish: A brave evolution of an ever changing language.
But apart from that pedantry, a concise summary of the article would be: nice hardware, shame about the cruft that runs on it.
"The market for selling PC kit might be slowing down, but market usage of PC's is not."
And the choir said, *AMEN*!!!
/me has been saying that for a while.
The PC market is a DERIVATIVE, not an INTEGRAL, of PC usage.
Looking at new PC sales to represent "the PC market" is like falling from a building and reaching terminal velocity, and THEN saying "Oh, we're not FALLING any more" because your velocity is not increasing.
Unfortunately, Micro-shaft derives their REVENUE from NEW SALES, which is why they panic and release things like Windows "Ape" and Win-10-nic, and virtually ABANDON 7 and earlier. It doesn't make THEM money. What they fail to realize is that THEIR OWN ACTIONS help to KILL the 'new PC' sales.
It's 5 years since I last bought a PC for home use. And things have changed over that period almost beyond recognition.
When we bought it, it lived in the living room, and it spent hours in use every day. We used it for any internet streaming, TV catchup, or internet music / radio stations, playing music at parties, for reading websites, news, social media, for blogging, for electronics / firmware hobby stuff, and for video editing.
Now it lives in the study, and although the electronics and video editing still need a real PC, the rest are done with phones, a tablet, various chromecast devices etc.
In short, the actual tasks for which it is used have been cut by probably 80%, leaving only the heavy lifting tasks that other, more convenient devices (which we didn't have when we bought it) can't do.
On top of that, it still does all those tasks fine. So there is no pressing need to upgrade it, unlike phones which are still rapidly improving (and getting dropped).
We will replace it if/when it stops working, but before that there is probably no need.
Not just the current "older generation" but the also current generations who will get older.
Every reading of the runes I have done results in the conclusion that there will HAVE to be changes which allow people to continue using their iShinys with older eyes, fingers and ears.
Which is great news for the less able amongst us too.
I think it's going to depend on the demographics of iShiny developers. If the majority of developers continue to be in their 30s or younger we might run into a problem. At that age you haven't yet encountered presbyopia.
But the problem isn't just on small devices. It's computing in general. I'm going to be 50 next year and am already running into grief because I have to run my desktop and laptop screens at 125%. I would like to increase font size on Chrome but it breaks a lot of web sites. Barclays is particularly bad and becomes practically unusable. Tesco isn't much better as I can now only see one item at a time in the basket on my laptop.
I'm not worried that I won't be able to read the screen at all but it's getting to the point where I'm forever having to scroll around to see all the content. Something about modern web design is making it worse. I don't know if it's Bootstrap or attempts to cater for fat fingers on touch screens but so much screen space is now wasted. When you're forced to magnify the content there's no way it can all fit on without scrolling or risking layout issues. It's all becoming a bit tedious :-/
Victor Meldrew - you are my hero :)
May I suggest you do as the gamers are doing now for your desktop: buy an HDTV? Preferably a 4K, the cheap and cheerful ones are nicely non-pixelated at desktop distances. And typically come with HDMI and VGA ports, not to mention the integrated speakers.
Mine's the one with a 40" Vizio playing Fallout 4.
There's someone on eBay doing 10x credit-card fresnel lenses for a quid:
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271919028603
...as so many people I know are old gits too, I'm buying a tenner's worth; carrying a few around all the time and giving most of them away....trying to remember that THIS TIME not to give the last one away because you can guarantee you'll need one a few minutes later. Handy and good PR.
Sales are down simply because buying a new PC is no longer something you need to do every couple of years just in order to run the latest software (let's ignore gaming as serious PC gaming tends to be a niche).
My desktop PC at its core is 8 years old. All I've upgraded since the original build is storage (SSD + larger HDDs) and the graphics card (the original was cheap and basic). But at its core, everything I need to run still runs and generally very well. The only exception being audio and video rendering, where it is starting to show its age.
My laptop is two years old and as fast as the day I bought it. It should last me several years
I still use both over and above any other tech. Tablets are no good to me - I like to (properly) multitask. My phone gets slower by design (forced OS upgrades) and thus I MUST update it every couple of years (just like the olden days of desktops) else face more and more frustration.
I don't believe the PC is anywhere close to a death spiral even in the home environment. Consumers just don't need to be spending their money on it as often, so the stats are skewed.
Developments like the Surface are just designed to find a new niche or reason to part people with cash. Just like the iPad finally got the tablet right, MS are looking for the next revolution/evolution.
PC gaming is a niche now, but is still part of the calculus in the timescales used to elaborate what is happening to the PC sales of today by the Gartner Geniuses.
The advent of the console caused people to finally understand that the game software companies were having a big joke at our expense. Every new game release would mean a trip to the PC store to see if your machine could be upgraded to run it. Not so any more.
The move of the gaming community to specialized hardware was a big ding in PC sales, and that market should have been properly identified and separated from the business and home office figures years ago.
The PC is dying. The vast majority of consumers don't need Windows, and all the security nightmares that comes with that. They can use a cheap tablet, or a Chromebook, most of the things they do are cloud based (web, office, email)
A very large proportion of businesses users don't need Windows or a PC for the same reason.
I only touch a PC at work (developer for industrial equipment using PC tech), but at a guess, over 50% of our business is not using PC's All the work stuff is now web based, and mobile.
I'd agree. If I look outside of professional use / gaming I see very little PC use these days.
I'm not sure that anyone in my family has a PC in weekly use at home any more. Tablets seem to do everything they need. Or the have an aging (because, yes, the year on year gains are not needed for most people) PC / laptop for those times when a tablet isn't enough.
But then what do a majority of non-geeks do with a 'computer' these days? Surd the net, facebook, twitter, book vacations and shop. Even email isn't used that much anymore - instant message on your platform of choice seems to be the first choice of many - though I'd much rather use email!
I have a laptop for coding and making VideoScribes. Most of my photo blog posts are written on my phone. Most shopping is done on my phone. It's always to hand and is simply easier (as long as the site is well designed and responsive...) This reply has been written on my phone. PCs are simply not as needed as previously.
Well said. What has really happened is that PCs aren't being upgraded as much as they used to; my 8 year old desktop PC is still good for most home-related things, and my 4 year old laptop is still good enough for even heavy work. Playing resource-intensive games is the only thing I can't do, but that is less of an issue for me.
I'm pretty sure this is the same case for most people.
Sales of PCs, phones and tablets isn't really the right indicator. The notebook PC I'm typing this on is four or five years old and I have no plans to replace it.
Since I've had this PC I've bought three smartphones and three Android tablets, but the PC is in full-time use. The newest smartphone is still used, but not its predecessors - and the tablets get powered up no more than weekly.
So let's not compare sales, let's compare use. The stats are available.
They should have made the ARM version of Windows a first class version of Windows (i.e. the same features and as open as the x86 version) but instead came up with Windows RT.
The Windows 7 UI is fine for desktops. Instead of destroying it, they should have kept it and come up with a separate tablet/mobile UI for Windows for mobiles/tablets.
Both versions of Windows should have been able to run both types of apps (Win32 fat binary/UWP).
More devices everywhere, but MS' OS would have been everywhere too. They'd have stayed on top of the diversification of devices and that would have created the software which drives hardware sales. Instead they're just reduced to making toys for execs to put alongside their Newtons' Cradle.
There was, before Windows 8, Windows 7 and Visual Studio builds running on ARM in some MS skunkworks lab. Office for RT runs on a locked-down Windows desktop. People have hacked ARM exes into RT. There aren't any hurdles except those artificial ones MS placed themselves.
"There was, before Windows 8, Windows 7 and Visual Studio builds running on ARM in some MS skunkworks lab."
As far as the toolchain goes (Visual Studio), the ARM product wasn't just a skunkworks operation. It was *the* development environment for about a decade's worth of versions of Windows CE. It was a real product and targetted both x86 and ARM (and a number of other architectures) with no more than a drop-down list in a settings dialog.
There were and are no technical problems with releasing Windows on ARM and (given the woeful level of testing within the software industry anyway) no reason for third parties not to offer native ARM versions of their products from the day of the launch, just as so many managed to ship Win10-ready products on that launch date.
It's all commercial.
And it would have put MS at the forefront of ARM servers too. Instead it looks dead certain that they'd miss that too if ARM servers take off in a big way. Linux is already there of course.
To be moderately fair on MS, when they started all this ARMs were pretty feeble compared to x86 and to where they are today. MS's mistake was to think that ARM would always be too small for a full desktop. Oh how wrong they were.
There's also OpenPower that's looking very promising. They should be thinking about that too in my opinion. Superfat binaries anyone?!?!
"To be moderately fair on MS, when they started all this ARMs were pretty feeble compared to x86 and to where they are today. MS's mistake was to think that ARM would always be too small for a full desktop. Oh how wrong they were."
It's not the first time that relying on Intel to keep ahead of the game isn't wise.
Until AMD came along with 64 bit processors for the desktop, Intel was quite happy to restrict 64 bit capability to expensive servers <cough>Itanium</cough>.
...........some of our fellow members of our little congregation here at El Reg are unwilling to admit.
"So Surface is an attempt to revive interest in the very idea of personal computing. It's had a hugely positive impact on the quality of the established PC players. Lenovo, Dell and HP have all gone back to the drawing board and returned with their best products for years."
Microsoft has in fact as far as hardware is concerned given the entire paradigm a genuine kick in the arse. The effect on the OEMs has been considerable. Just consider HPs Spectre x360 for the private retail market. The latest iteration has excellent battery life, terrific design and one of the best keyboards and touchpads available out there as well as a gorgeous screen. Andrew's point is well taken. Regardless of our concerns regarding the privacy issues with Win10 it is not possible to argue that MS under "SatNav" does not innovate. Better late than never we might say but "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth" etc. etc.
It's only Microsoft (4:3) and Apple (16:10) making laptops with displays other than 16:9 , as I've been observing in these forums for quite a while now.
If anyone knows of any exceptions, please let me know!
Yes, the PC is dying... sales are down. Tablets, the devices that are supposed to replace PCs, are down even more, but that's different... somehow.
The original Mac had a 9 inch screen. PCs of the era typically had a 13-inch display. By 1990, 14 inch VGA had become normal, and when I worked for a PC shop in 1996, we probably sold as many 15 inches as 17 inches (all CRTs).
When the LCD came on-scene, my first was a 17-inch, which was replaced in a few years with a 19-inch, both with 5:4 aspect ratios. I kept that well into the "widescreen" era, and when it quit working, there were no more 5:4s or 4:3s to be found, so I had little choice; I ended up with a 23 inch 16:9.
Now, a 23 inch is entry-level, and screens so large that they have to be curved around the user now exist.
And I am supposed to believe this trend for bigger displays is all for nought, because we're going to replace it all with a five inch phone with as much local storage as a PC from ten years ago had?
Sorry, but I don't buy that. The relentless progression of memory capacity, local storage capacity, graphics rendering speed, CPU speed, external bus speed, etc., didn't just cease to matter one day, when we all supposedly decided to forget all of that and use tiny phones instead for everything.
Some very good points.
I have a 27in 4K screen on my Desk. Wonderful for Photo and Video editing. The colours are calibrated as well.
My laptop gets used for pretty well everything else at home.
The phone surfs the internet while on the move.
The right tool for the right job perhaps?
I use the laptop for watching TV while I play on the xbox, or watch TV on the TV while I play or work on the laptop.
The phone gets used for actual calls and some "quickie" games that require little thought but are fun. The console gets used for more action/rpg games, and the laptop for strategy games. As far as I can see, a tablet is a mobile phone you can't make calls on, but can watch TV with. The laptop is the most important, and I could cope without the others - not just on the gaming side, but also neither the console, tablet or phone could handle my work.
I can tell you why I haven't bought a new laptop to replace this aging and limping Dell Inspiron, Messrs Gartner and Co:
a) The drive to make everything hew to the Jobs "Thin Is All" aesthetic has robbed me of the integral optical drive, something that I need and use *ALL THE FUCKING TIME YOU IDIOT DESIGNERS*!
If I want to build out a modern laptop to the same levels of usefulness of the one I have I must use a USB external drive. 2016, working on a train like it was 1998. And to the some snot-nosed foetus whining at me about "The Cloud"; I don't have a persistent internet connection when I work while I commute, you blithering young idiot.
2) Windows 10. The single biggest disincentive to buy a new PC for me is that awful, eyeturd UI Microsoft "designed" wedded to the "24x365" internet-upgrade assumption built into the fucking bug-ugly mess.
And to that same foetus who will whine at me about Linux: If I could buy an off-the-shelf machine with the features I want and Linux installed I would have done so twelve months ago. Off-the-shelf Linux machine vendors talk big, deliver little, and I *don't* want to be buying parts and rolling my own like it was 1993. Been there, done that, thought we were going to be way beyond that by now.
I try not to feed the trolls, but what in God's name are you doing that requires a CD?
I literally can't recall the last time I used one.
Oops, sorry. I used our USB CD drive once last year to install Office 2003 on the SO's new Win10 laptop.
Previous to that?
Maybe digging through backups looking for a 10 year old file.
A $5 USB stick just does things better.
I actually agree with the original poster, and for one reason. The assumption you make is that the optical drive is for CDs. In our household the TV belongs to the wife and I watch my DVD box sets on my laptop. For that I want an optical drive.
Yes, DVDs. The tech and media companies want them dead so they can rent us the movies we previously owned, but although I use Netflix and Prime I'm not getting rid of mine until playback is physically impossible.
Of course, I agree that I don't need an optical drive when out and about.
@ Barry Rueger: Who said anything about CDs? I said I needed an integral optical drive.
Bully for you that you don't use CDs. Why that has any bearing on *my* requirement is not immediately apparent to me.
====================================================================
@ TangoDelta72: I'm sure you will spot the gaping hole in your suggestion yourself, but I'll elucidate it for the masses.
On what shall I rip it, dear TangoDelta72, dear TangoDelta72
On what shall I rip it dear TangoDelta72
On what?
On your laptop dear Stevie, dear Stevie, Dear Stevie
On your laptop dear Stevie, dear Stevie,
Try your laptop.
(Audience) Heh heh heh
The laptop is aging dear TangoDelta72, dear TangoDelta72
The laptop is aging dear TangoDelta72
And I need a new one
====================================================================
@ Doctor Syntax: What part of " I *don't* want to be buying parts and rolling my own like it was 1993" was unclear? I enjoy living vicariously through others' experience of installing Linux on laptops. I don't enjoy the litany of all the things that won't work properly without hours of fucking about under the bonnet.
I need a computer as a tool for helping me do other things, interesting things, not as an end in itself.
====================================================================
There are still laptops out there with optical drives, in fact I was looking at some when I bought my new laptop, I can still see the point of an optical for a lot of uses, and even if not some of those the optical drive can be taken out and you can slot an extra SSD in for a nice cheap upgrade.
I'll agree with you though Win10 is amazingly shit.
MS seems to think they own my laptop and the choices I make on it, having to unistall things through powershell because MS thinks I want Bing News, or the X Box app running, because they have greyed out the options in "add/remove programs", and it giving app ads on the start menu peeved me immensley, it's a bit like buying a dell and having to remove the crap freeware expcept thats now part of the OS experience, never had to nuke so much of an OS before.
Funnily enough the younger users in my office are just like meh I live with it, or it doesn't bother me this makes me sad since they are supposed to be far techier than me.
Had to buy a new win10 laptop, as getting the same spec with Win7 was out of my pricerange. 2 days of editing interface and systematically going through all options, plus the godsend of Spybot Anti-beacon seem to have cured a lot of the ills. Marking your internet connection as metered stopped other problems.
"Had to buy a new win10 laptop, as getting the same spec with Win7 was out of my pricerange. 2 days of editing interface and systematically going through all options, plus the godsend of Spybot Anti-beacon seem to have cured a lot of the ills. Marking your internet connection as metered stopped other problems."
Might as well go Linux with all that buggering about.
A few years ago I knew that the next laptop I'd buy wouldn't have an integrated optical drive, so I bought an external USB one along with it. I rip when a new disc comes along then put the drive back on the shelf. Nice to know it's there when I need it. I guess you'd do the same when/if the time comes. But by and large, as with the floppy drive days, I'm done with that particular medium.
"I rip when a new disc comes along then put the drive back on the shelf."
So you missed the bit where I need to bugger about with optical media on a moving train full of people at rush hour then?
And the part where I specifically likened the USB optical drive experience to that pertaining 18 years ago?
Your requirement has been answered by going back in time. Bully for you. I need more.
But by all means continue telling me how my requirement is wrong. It's the standard mantra the IT brigade use when they cannot actually solve the problem someone has.
"I enjoy living vicariously through others' experience of installing Linux on laptops."
So, here's my little MSI laptop, bought a few years ago for the express use of doing things, namely being taken into libraries and archives for doing research. Download Mint, burn onto disk. Plug USB disk drive into said laptop, insert disk into drive. Start computer, press function key for boot menu and select boot from USB. Mint disk fires up. Select options appropriate to language and time zone. Wait for installer to do its thing. Remove USB drive and reboot.
I hope you enjoyed that vicarious experience.
"I don't enjoy the litany of all the things that won't work properly without hours of fucking about under the bonnet."
Neither do I which is a good reason for not doing them as in the above.
"I need a computer as a tool for helping me do other things, interesting things, not as an end in itself."
And so do I. That little device is still doing exactly that research recording task. It's also a nice little laptop to take when going on holiday - although it works better when I don't do what I did this week: forget to pack the charger!
"Plug USB disk drive into said laptop"
See my comments to TangoDelta72, or just read my original posting for why this "solution" isn't one.
Two desks over someone is discussing how well their Linux install is playing with their laptop. They are into the part where they list the stuff that "isn't quite there yet". Like hibernation. And coming back from it once you've persuaded the laptop to hibernate.
I'm an old hand when it comes to Alternative Software Solutions. My motto: "Sixty Eight times bitten, let someone else get it working on the hardware". Like I did with windows since 1995.
"Plug USB disk drive into said laptop"
See my comments to TangoDelta72, or just read my original posting for why this "solution" isn't one.
See also my comment that I agreed with your points 1 & 2. OTOH my particular requirement was for a compact piece of kit to be used in libraries and archives where excess consumption of desk space would be an issue. That doesn't leave room for an optical drive, a large screen or even a full-sized keyboard. It's not a piece of kit you'd choose for your application. You'd want something more like the HP laptop I'm typing on now but which was a bit of a pain when trying to share a small library desk with other stuff.
There is - or should be - room for a variety of specifications for different purposes.
Try System76.com or any of the other Linux boutique system sources. They offer prebuilt & customizable laptops of various designs, speeds, capacity, & everything from the "thin & light" crap I loathe to full blown "mobile workstations" with I7, 32GiB RAM, NVIDIA uber cards with gigs of VRAM, NVMe SSD's or plain spinning rust HDD, & all the ports you could ever need, including models with a DVD DL RW drive. Most are reasonable, some are expensive, & I'm not sure what the shipping would be to get it to you, but the cost may prove more than worth it to get a laptop with Ubuntu installed, configured, & "Just Working Out Of The Box". You can always Nuke&Pave it to give it a different flavor of *nix, but the fact it already works with Ubuntu 16+ means you should have little to no trouble doing that.
HTH.
I don't understand the down votes. Have an up vote
CD/DVD drives were indispensable when most people got music and movies on shiny discs, and bandwidth was too slow to distribute apps and data.
Those BLOODY IDIOT DESIGNERS obviously realized that most people rarely use them any more, and those people would prefer a smaller/lighter/cheaper laptop, or fill the space with battery cells, extra drives etc.
I have a single external usb dvd drive that I use (very rarely) across 5 machines
-1/+1 to you
1) Unless you're using dozens of optical disks, why not simply rip them to an ISO, keep them stored locally, and mount one to a drive letter when needed? It's faster, too. No more lugging an external optical drive and less power consumption for when you're truly off the grid. Laptop HD space should be adequate. The loss of the optical drive was initially a downer, like the loss of the floppy. There are usually solutions to be found. Honestly, I find that I inadvertently hit the *open* button when I lift/move/grapple my laptop more often than I need to insert or remove a disc.
and...
b) I agree with you that Win10's innate assumption of Internet access is a plain PITA. That, and the constant reminder that "I don't have the latest version of MS XXXX" is a daily annoyance.
"And to that same foetus who will whine at me about Linux: If I could buy an off-the-shelf machine with the features I want and Linux installed I would have done so twelve months ago."
You youngsters* seem to need someone to wipe your noses all the time.
Buy your favoured drive-less laptop. Download an install image of a Linux distro and copy it to a USB thumb-drive Plug thumb-drive into laptop, blow away the eyeturd (you will find no disagreement from me on your points 1 & 2) and install Linux for yourself. Unless you consider a laptop and a USB stick to be "parts" (you bought such parts in 1993?) no buying of parts is required.
*You claim to be still commuting. That implies you're of working age therefore you're a youngster from my PoV.
Not even at their eulegy.
They've been shooting themselves in the foot so often it's amazing they still have a leg to stand upon. They've made so many design/UI blunders it's way past time to take away their crayons & give the child a spanking for having coloured on the walls. They've rendered security updates for Win7, 8, & 8.1 into essentially a pointless endeavor because now it's all delivered in a single "rollup" that doesn't allow us to block the updates that might cripple our system. Win10 is a private citizen's security & privacy nightmare, leaving us entirely at the mercy of a company repeatedly shown to break things & take forever to repair them. And we're supposed to PRAISE this?
Fuck no. Fuck Microsoft. I won't even say anything nice at their funeral, I'll be too busy queing up to piss on the grave with all the others whom have been burned by MS in the past.
And this attitude is from someone who used to evangelize FOR them, but after having been made the fool for my dedication I now have no compunction to shouting even louder for their demise. Word of mouth does wonders: the people whom you've treated well will happily praise you for it, but the people you've given the shaft will do our utmost to make sure that's heard just as clearly.
MS wants praise? Fine. I'll praise them for having finally convinced me to get off their treadmill & upgrade to Linux. How's that for praise?
"The PC is dying, but better, richer apps might just save it"
Translation:
PCs are failing to die at anything like the required rate so we're not able to sell as many replacements as we used to. We need some massively inefficiently coded applications that can't be run on existing kit to force users to upgrade.
I have some great ideas for games that could be made that would ensure updated hardware is required, unfortunately, I don't have the budget to hire the thousands of developers, modellers etc it takes to make a game capable of stressing a modern PC.
I think this goes for most applications in general. Unless you have written completely unusable garbage that just eats all resources, how does a single developer, or even a small team, write projects big enough to use more resources than are at their disposal in the current PC market?
You can do plenty of "content creation" on a Samsung Galaxy phone
But how many DO i wonder? Time will tell whether productivity (ok so not much Nobel prize winning content maybe) has dropped as a result of personal computers being superseded by devices centred around consumption? You consume Friendface and the like, and 'they' consume you(r data)
In fact the broadcast and film industries have only just stopped using its most highly evolved form, the HDCAM-SR.
We've still got two of the decks in a rack for when we have to playback stuff that hasn't be digitised yet. Sony knocked it out of the park with their video tape format.
Funnily enough and on-topic, film and TV will probably be one of the last bastions of desktop workstations.
It's the software which is at fault, If the computing device software is user friendly then the hardware sells regardless of its shape or size. Small phones to tablets are user friendly whereas the laptop PC etc are not so user friendly now. The giant US software organization found that out when they tried to introduce an unpopular OS onto phones etc. It cost them a bundle and an awful lot of people their jobs.
..keep gluing them together if you must, but make a little hatch for the battery, hard drive, and memory. You shouldn't have to peel one like a crappy laminated banana just to get your data back or upgrade/repair the most common failures, cloud services be damned. And maybe include the fan as one of the replaceable parts too. Oh, and either include at least one more USB port or a decent USB 3.0 hub that includes Ethernet with each one sold, not some chickenshit USB-C dongle like Dell is including these days with their slimmer machines.
And as a final afterthought, how about getting the hardware drivers right BEFORE launching the product for a change? Is there an excuse for Microsoft not getting this right when they are BOTH the hardware and OS vendor?? I used to watch the Surface I had as a tester at work blue-screen out of the corner of my eye every so often just on the login screen in between randomly waking up and going to sleep if you breathed in its vicinity.
CPU speed has been a non-issue on PCs for more than a decade now. A year or two ago I gave a couple of old HP workstations to a friend. I had purchased these around 2007-2008 secondhand, and they had been a current model around 2006 (XW9300s for anyone interested). They're now around 10 years old, and he's playing heavily modded skyrim on them, albeit with a newer gaming card fitted. I don't think he has any short-term plans to replace his one.
I only bothered to replace the machines myself because I needed a laptop and bought a thinkpad that could do the job (fitted with a big ssd at vast expense at the time). If I hadn't been working out of town at the time I might well not have bothered to replace them.
There's really no need in the mass market for new kit. 4 or 5 years old. bung ssd in. 4gb ram. WIN 7. Will do just about any day to day office / home user task imaginable. Hp elite 8000 sff for instance. 50 quid. 128gb 850 pro 70 quid. Heck, chuck in an nvidia 210 1gb card for 18 quid if you want. Outperforms most new win 10 desktops and a shit load more reliable and no win 10 bullshit. My suppliers constantly run out of c2d ...they sell boat loads of them as do I.
I could see the market eventually splitting into consumer devices descended from tablets and high-end workstations with the 'midrange' PC substantially dying out, except perhaps as a legacy system (with the caveat that legacy applications have a habit of lingering on for many years).
Android certainly has a critical mass of application support, and could (at least in principle) support office productivity or trad business application style software if keyboards, mice and overlapping window managers became first class citizens on the platform. Think something along the lines of a laptop dock for tablets and mobile tech that looks something like a MS surface. It's certainly technically feasible.
From this perspective it's not hard to see a trend where the 'midrange' PC splits into mobile devices at the bottom end, with PCs trending towards becoming workstations sitting in niche markets at the high-end. The 'midrange' corporate or consumer PC is essentially a legacy system at this point.
This dichotomy can be seen in the consumer market already. Consumer PC sales have been substantially displaced by mobile devices. Corporate I.T. has much more inertia due to their incumbent application portfolio, but there are plenty of I.T. departments rolling out mobile devices and mobile business apps are definitely a thing.
Traditionally Microsoft was hard to shift from the desktop because you couldn't easily intermediate yourself between a desktop system and the users in the way you could use terminal emulation software to front mainframe applications on a PC. However, thin client architectures such as Citrix or virtual desktops have made it possible to get a shim inbetween Windows and its punters. The tech certainly exists now to treat Windows as a legacy system if you feel that way inclined.
I could see this trend playing out at some point in the next decade. In practice, it is more likely to be some sort of inflection point where the tech quickly becomes perceived as a viable option by mainstream purchasers.
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