So "the death of the PC" - how does that translate for custom rigs?

rudy said:
No I am making the assessment that is most likely right that the price of phones will come down so far they will be cheaper to produce than desktop components.
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This is the problem with your entire argument, while phone prices get lower, so will hardware prices, and both will get more powerful. The fact is, the larger components will always be more powerful and cheaper.
 
You did not read my post because I already addressed that. Your assumption is false. How can a desktop which is several kg of materials cost less than a phone? How can it cost the same amount to ship? It cant that is why LCDs quickly destroyed CRTs even long before LCDs were any good at all. That is why tablet prices fell so much faster than desktop or laptop prices ever did.
 
rudy said:
You did not read my post because I already addressed that. Your assumption is false. How can a desktop which is several kg of materials cost less than a phone? How can it cost the same amount to ship? It cant that is why LCDs quickly destroyed CRTs even long before LCDs were any good at all. That is why tablet prices fell so much faster than desktop or laptop prices ever did.
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If you really believe weight is the determining factor in the costs of electronics, I don't think you are capable of understanding why a computer that costs the same as a smartphone is 1000x's of times more powerful.
 
This "phones will kill PCs!" thing is just ignorant of history. New kinds of computers don't tend to kill old ones. They become more prevalent, but that isn't the same as killing. For example mainframes are alive and well, the IBM Z-Series being the most popular. There are more mainframes now than when mainframes were the only kind of computers. That's still not very many, there are far more desktops, but desktops didn't kill mainframes, just eclipsed them.

Heck I always tell people to look at their kitchen. This argument sounds to me like "Microwaves and toaster ovens will kill stoves, nobody will want those big things anymore!" Well turns out not the case. I have a microwave, and a toaster, and a stove/oven, and a kettle, and a pizza cooker and so on. All devices designed to make food warm, yet it I haven't gone only with the smallest, most specalized, one out there.
 
I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D with a keyboard and mouse 20 years ago. Still use the same basic interface for all my computing activities except on my phone. Pretty sure I'll be saying the same thing in 20 more years.
 
darkstarcow said:
If you really believe weight is the determining factor in the costs of electronics, I don't think you are capable of understanding why a computer that costs the same as a smartphone is 1000x's of times more powerful.
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Once again you didnt even bother to read my post. Go find me a desktop made in the last 2 years for $50, now go do it with a tablet or phone.

Why is it you can find many such tablets and phones in the $50 - 100 range on ebay etc but no modern desktops? The answer is raw materials and resources. Simply put to ship a desktop computer with PSU and all costs alot more when the PSU itself weights more than a tablet. That sets a lower limit to the price of a device. In fact by your very own statement you are already wrong, because you cant find a desktop at all in that price range so SOCs have already surpassed desktops in the price / performance range at the low end.
 
The only way I see the PC dying is when your TV can do everything your PC can, with a keyboard, and mouse hook up, as well as peripherals like printers, scanners, and so on. For now, my computer is just fine, tablet is fine for a gimmick, phones won't ever take the place of my PC.
 
You connect to your TV via your phone, you can even do it wirelessly, you can connect your phone to a keyboard and mouse through blue tooth, already doable. We are not far off, all we need is a standard for all phones like mhl or widi, too bad thats the only piece really missing since apple is trying to force their own solution and the same with various android makers. printing from a phone, also doable and I cant see any reason why scanning is not doable too.
 
The 'post PC era' is a laughable term coined by people wanting to push tablet/phone sales. When I can do my job on a tablet, I will agree that we are in the post pc era. My job consists of taking lidar/survey data and producing complex 3d surface models to use for engineering highways and airports. I would never even dream of using a shitty tablet for this. Tablets have too many limitations to even count.
 
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DeathPrincess said:
Theres about 100x more PC players now than there was in the "golder age" in the late 90s. Not exactly sure how it's dying.
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End of story. Consoles are the platform that is getting worn down. PC's have so many other uses outside of gaming that I don't see them "going away" anytime soon.
 
rudy said:
Once again you didnt even bother to read my post. Go find me a desktop made in the last 2 years for $50, now go do it with a tablet or phone.

Why is it you can find many such tablets and phones in the $50 - 100 range on ebay etc but no modern desktops? The answer is raw materials and resources. Simply put to ship a desktop computer with PSU and all costs alot more when the PSU itself weights more than a tablet. That sets a lower limit to the price of a device. In fact by your very own statement you are already wrong, because you cant find a desktop at all in that price range so SOCs have already surpassed desktops in the price / performance range at the low end.
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What phones are going for $50-100 on ebay?

Lets not forget those phones were $600-800 new (unsubsidized), and yet people are now selling the for 1/8th there original price less then two years after they were bought. How many $800 computers sell for $50 after just a year or two?
 
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=android+tablet&rt=nc&LH_ItemCondition=3

Yes the rapid price drop in phones is more evidence they are capable of hitting far lower price points. Also your evidence to desktops retaining value is even more proof of exactly what I said. It cost just about $50 to ship a desktop, throw in eBay fees etc.. That's how the more expensive device from a raw materials standpoint comes in at a disadvantage.

So what is your point? Everything you say is simply pointing out exactly where the trend is going, small electronics that are capable keep growing in capability and displacing more larger devices, eventually it comes to a tipping point and manufacturers stop producing the larger product when the market shrinks to small to sustain itself. Then the larger product becomes a niche and therefore expensive item.
 
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Because phones are for making calls. Not gaming, thus the $50 price point. Playing angry birds on a 4 " screen doesn't make you a gamer it might classify one as a douche though.
 
The Death of the Desktop is a fallacy.

The Desktop Computer is a modularized platform of Personal Computing products. The argument about it being replaced, fails to take into consideration that while Personal Computing products become more efficient, more powerful, cheaper and smaller so will the Desktop Platform. Essentially, as television, mobile and other products become more powerful, they will closer emulate the abilities of the Desktop Platform. Similiarly, the Desktop Platform will change in form factor to closer emulate the abilities of the television and mobile platforms (portability etc.). So no product will "replace" or "kill" another product. Rather, they will reach a convergence point.

Conceivably, one day, we will have a TV with the modularity of a Desktop Personal Computer. In which case, the TV will become the equivalent of the Desktop Personal Computer. It won't have "killed it," rather the form factor of the Desktop Personal Computer will have changed to that of a more TV like appearance. The two platforms will have converged. The same can be said for mobile platforms.

There is nothing to fear about the "death" of the desktop PC. It is an invalid argument.
 
dnottis said:
Because phones are for making calls. Not gaming, thus the $50 price point. Playing angry birds on a 4 " screen doesn't make you a gamer it might classify one as a douche though.
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Read the rest of the post, phones can hook up to monitors, just like desktop computers, they can take blue tooth connections and even USB, so you can hook up mice and keyboards. All arguements about user interface are becoming mute, google doesnt have a desktop OS, apples is moving toward IOS integration and microsoft will be there this month with windows 8. As soon as people become aware that they can dock phones into desk environments they are going to start asking questions about why they own that laptop or desktop. Sure the more tech savvy users like use will be holding out, but we cant save an entire industry.
 
rudy said:
Read the rest of the post, phones can hook up to monitors, just like desktop computers, they can take blue tooth connections and even USB, so you can hook up mice and keyboards. All arguements about user interface are becoming mute, google doesnt have a desktop OS, apples is moving toward IOS integration and microsoft will be there this month with windows 8. As soon as people become aware that they can dock phones into desk environments they are going to start asking questions about why they own that laptop or desktop. Sure the more tech savvy users like use will be holding out, but we cant save an entire industry.
Click to expand...

Mute = Silent; Inability to make noise; inability to speak.

Moot = 1.open to discussion or debate; debatable; doubtful: a moot point.
2. of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic.
3. Chiefly Law . not actual; theoretical; hypothetical.

Also, Google Chrome OS.

Also, mobile OS /= Desktop OS. While mobile OS users are very intent, most also recognize that mobile apps do not afford the same functionality of desktop applications. These limitations are largely based on platform hardware and software, but some are due to the mobile OS.

That being said, I think as mobile OS' evolve and grow there will be less delineation between mobile and desktop OS' providing more of a convergence point. Again, I don't think one will replace the other, more so there will be a convergence of technologies.
 
rudy said:
Read the rest of the post, phones can hook up to monitors, just like desktop computers, they can take blue tooth connections and even USB, so you can hook up mice and keyboards. All arguements about user interface are becoming mute, google doesnt have a desktop OS, apples is moving toward IOS integration and microsoft will be there this month with windows 8. As soon as people become aware that they can dock phones into desk environments they are going to start asking questions about why they own that laptop or desktop. Sure the more tech savvy users like use will be holding out, but we cant save an entire industry.
Click to expand...

Actually, google does have a desktop OS. And gaming will never be the same on a phone. No matter how hard they try, the Desktop GPU/CPU will always be better they are bigger, much bigger. So, quad core phones are very expensive and just coming out, quad cores in a PC have been around for 4+ years! And 6 cores 2 years, and 8 cores just coming out! And servers! Good luck getting to get all that linux and stuff on a phone, plus sites will be bigger which means more bandwith, sites will be bigger which means more bandwith which means more RAM. Good luck getting that much RAM on a phone. Today, the highest amount I have seenin a NEXT GEN phone is 2 Gb. A server could easily use/need 64GB.
 
byteninja2 said:
Actually, google does have a desktop OS. And gaming will never be the same on a phone. No matter how hard they try, the Desktop GPU/CPU will always be better they are bigger, much bigger. So, quad core phones are very expensive and just coming out, quad cores in a PC have been around for 4+ years! And 6 cores 2 years, and 8 cores just coming out! And servers! Good luck getting to get all that linux and stuff on a phone, plus sites will be bigger which means more bandwith, sites will be bigger which means more bandwith which means more RAM. Good luck getting that much RAM on a phone. Today, the highest amount I have seenin a NEXT GEN phone is 2 Gb. A server could easily use/need 64GB.
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Google does not have a desktop OS, its a joke that is less useful than their phones and actually more evidence that they think people wont need anything more than phones. Nothing you say is false except that all that power and advantage didnt stop consoles from taking over and doing a ton of damage to the PC gaming ecosystem, not just think about that and keep extrapolating that trend. This is a thread about the future not now, at one point someone might have argued that consoles suck cause they cannot go online, but now they can and in another 5 to 10 years phones are going to be plenty powerful enough to run games like BF3. And when that happens, sure a desktop might be able to do 8K at 120hz but the mass market isn't caring.

Certain things come to a tipping point where having more just doesnt do you any more good, in fact ram is a pretty good example of that. Any computer can easily have 16GB of ram now days but most users work loads wont use more than 8, maybe not more than 4. The old days or ram limitations are over. The old days of CPU limitations on everything but advanced gaming are pretty much over. Now phones just need to move up that pole.

You guys can argue till your blue in the face,its not about right and wrong and what you think its about the mass market and their trends. it affects us regardless of what we like, that's a hard pill to swallow which is why there is so much resistance in this thread and I would love to be wrong since I love building desktops. But basic laws of economics do not break.
 
rudy said:
in another 5 to 10 years phones are going to be plenty powerful enough to run games like BF3. And when that happens, sure a desktop might be able to do 8K at 120hz but the mass market isn't caring.
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And it's still going to have shitty touchscreen controls that are counter-intuitive.

There's no wonder half the smartphone stuff is free; it's because it controls like ass.
Please, try and play Dead Trigger on the same level that you can play Call of Duty with a KB+M (or even a controller). It's impossible.

rudy said:
But basic laws of economics do not break.
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And basic principles of control schemes that work do not break either.

Waggle has somewhat removed the controller limitation, however I would argue that most people who consider themselves anything but a casual gamer still prefer KB+M or a controller - not a touchscreen or a stick with a bunch of sensors inside. They can make all the chintzy little toilet time free games they want to because I don't see any point where a physical controller is going to be made obsolete by a device that utilizes a touchscreen. It's because of this that I think that PC's will always have a place, and I'm glad they do. Microsoft can try to turn the Xbox into the home media hub all they want - I'll still have my PC's and my KB+M and games on the platform to play. There's money to be made there still...it's not like the well's done and dried up and despite all the BS by Ubisoft about "piracy killing the sales", the fact is, PC has a place in gaming....always has, always will. It does other things. Not halfassed hackneyed things...lots of valuable things that people rely on every day.

I could care less about the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets because there are still plenty of tasks that a keyboard makes easier. I'd like to see anyone try to write a multi-page term paper or a 30 slide presentation on a tablet without damn near killing themselves in frustration and sliding over to the computer. I laugh at people who think they can replace a laptop with a tablet and get any work done. Unless their entire day consists of Angry Birds, Facebook, and Youtube - they're not getting anything done on a tablet without taking more time and running crippled compared to a desktop user.

rudy said:
Read the rest of the post, phones can hook up to monitors, just like desktop computers, they can take blue tooth connections and even USB, so you can hook up mice and keyboards.
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Ahh, you mean like a desktop system, right? At what resolution though?
What's the biggest microSD card nowadays? Oh and surely you can upgrade the RAM though on those things, right?
No, you can't. That's the problem. :rolleyes:

Game companies struggled to put anything other than a halfassed effort on 95% of the Wii library, and that's a full-fledged system with 1 specification.
What makes you think that those same companies are going to actively develop and publish anything decent on a mobile platform of several manufacturers and dozens of product lines of varying specifications? :rolleyes:
 
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No such thing as the "death of the PC", they have been saying it for decades and it hasn't happened. If anything, PC gaming and hardware has gotten better and better with each passing year, and the technology is going to be here in our lifetime to play with holograms, which will still be computer based, so the only thing that will really happen is that the hardware will evolve, but the heart of any digital interaction as far as gaming goes will be via computer.
 
zero2dash said:
And it's still going to have shitty touchscreen controls that are counter-intuitive.

There's no wonder half the smartphone stuff is free; it's because it controls like ass.
Please, try and play Dead Trigger on the same level that you can play Call of Duty with a KB+M (or even a controller). It's impossible.



And basic principles of control schemes that work do not break either.

Waggle has somewhat removed the controller limitation, however I would argue that most people who consider themselves anything but a casual gamer still prefer KB+M or a controller - not a touchscreen or a stick with a bunch of sensors inside. They can make all the chintzy little toilet time free games they want to because I don't see any point where a physical controller is going to be made obsolete by a device that utilizes a touchscreen. It's because of this that I think that PC's will always have a place, and I'm glad they do. Microsoft can try to turn the Xbox into the home media hub all they want - I'll still have my PC's and my KB+M and games on the platform to play. There's money to be made there still...it's not like the well's done and dried up and despite all the BS by Ubisoft about "piracy killing the sales", the fact is, PC has a place in gaming....always has, always will. It does other things. Not halfassed hackneyed things...lots of valuable things that people rely on every day.

I could care less about the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets because there are still plenty of tasks that a keyboard makes easier. I'd like to see anyone try to write a multi-page term paper or a 30 slide presentation on a tablet without damn near killing themselves in frustration and sliding over to the computer. I laugh at people who think they can replace a laptop with a tablet and get any work done. Unless their entire day consists of Angry Birds, Facebook, and Youtube - they're not getting anything done on a tablet without taking more time and running crippled compared to a desktop user.



Ahh, you mean like a desktop system, right? At what resolution though?
What's the biggest microSD card nowadays? Oh and surely you can upgrade the RAM though on those things, right?
No, you can't. That's the problem. :rolleyes:

Game companies struggled to put anything other than a halfassed effort on 95% of the Wii library, and that's a full-fledged system with 1 specification.
What makes you think that those same companies are going to actively develop and publish anything decent on a mobile platform of several manufacturers and dozens of product lines of varying specifications? :rolleyes:
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How many times do I have to point out that you can control phones ./ tablets with mice and keyboards and hook them to big screens?

Here maybe this will be more understandable to this crowd, in the future desktops will be as small as phones, have batteries and be portable.
 
rudy said:
How many times do I have to point out that you can control phones ./ tablets with mice and keyboards and hook them to big screens?

Here maybe this will be more understandable to this crowd, in the future desktops will be as small as phones, have batteries and be portable.
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You mean like a mac mini?

You also once more run into the fact that more powerful components will be larger, a.k.a. Desktop.
 
Mobile devices won't challenge the PC space until they can shrink the Occular Rift into stylish VR glasses or into a contact lens. When that happens and we can game in HD and 3D on the go with 120 degrees fov while bluetoothed to a phone then I'll start to take mobile gaming seriously.

However even with this a dedicated gaming PC will be able to do it better. PC gaming will not die.
 
rudy said:
How many times do I have to point out that you can control phones ./ tablets with mice and keyboards and hook them to big screens?
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And they're not upgradable and tied into whatever hardware they ship with.

So what's the incentive over getting one of those over building a tower again?? :rolleyes:

rudy said:
Here maybe this will be more understandable to this crowd, in the future desktops will be as small as phones, have batteries and be portable.
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Sure, except:

darkstarcow said:
You also once more run into the fact that more powerful components will be larger, a.k.a. Desktop.
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This.

But certainly a smart phone will eventually run Crysis. Probably around the time a desktop is running Crysis 4+.
 
The industry doesn't care if you can upgrade it.
 
Wasn't PC Gaming supposed to die 10 years ago? It still seems to be doing alright...
 
Ah this takes me back. I remember the first time I ever heard PC gaming was dying. I remember being really concerned since I just got a Commodore 64 for Christmas. 1983 and they were already predicting the demise of PC gaming. Who would want a big bulky computer and disc drive when you can have Intellivision?
 
The PC is farm from dead. What died is the constant need of hardware upgrades.
 
Mobile and tablet are getting way faster for sure, but the physical limitations on a mobile device is more to do with getting rid of heat and supplying enough power. Look at the PC space, components get more efficient because transistor size drops but a great deal of the additional performance also comes from increasing the power usage and needing more cooling.

Look at the TDP of some video cards these days, back in early days of 3D accelerators you didn't even need additional power connectors for the card.

While the technology in the mobile chips will get better there's no good indication that battery life and cooling solutions in the mobile space are increasing enough to keep up, that's where the bottleneck will come in and stop mobile devices running Crysis-like games in a few years.
 
Granted I can't speak for everybody but the retail computer store I work at has been building more custom rigs the last few years not less. I think that tablets are replacing laptops more than custom desktops.
 
rudy said:
No I am making the assessment that is most likely right that the price of phones will come down so far they will be cheaper to produce than desktop components. And they will get powerful at a steady rate and most people will say hey thats good enough for me. A decade ago most people bought desktops because laptops were much more expensive. Now even to this day a desktop is more powerful than a laptop, but most people are now buying laptops or smaller (netbooks, slates etc..) And saying thats good enough for me and the price difference has closed down to the point that you can pick up some laptops as cheap as any desktop. The mass market does not care as much about power as you think. They dropped CRTs for LCDs that were horrible without a problem and the price of LCDs went down below CRTs. Most of them are buying laptops now with integrated graphics, and most of them buy consoles. Most of them are choosing lighter laptops over more powerful ones, making the price of the powerful laptops a niche extremely expensive product, anyone who tried to game on laptops knows how true this is. The major holdout for desktops is not power as you contend but rather price. To this day if you want alot of power you can only get that at reasonable prices in desktops. But if the price advantage goes down then the whole game will change.

The thing you have to look at is this. Any product has a potential price decrease associated with the raw materials that go into it. Sure due to IP and the novelty phones are currently very pricey for what they can do, but it wont be that many years before the raw materials advantage of SOCs and compact devices like phones and tablets starts to show its cost savings. And while full sized desktops might still be way more powerful the focus in development will shift to the larger market, it becomes a feedback mechanism. What happens when companies like Intel decide that phones are more profitable than servers / desktops and they shift their latest state of the art fabs from producing the premium desktop chips to producing the phone SOCs. Everything we see in the desktop market is part of the desktop legacy and past market conditions. Look at atom for Intel when they first made it and moved forwarding the soon admitted not focusing on atom on and putting it on the latest process was a mistake. Intel will put the most profitable or highest volume chips in the best fabs. And desktops may soon be removed from that position.
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And yet the exact opposite is what happens. They make the phone a little lighter, a little bigger, give it a couple more widgets and charge $100 more for it. There is no reason on planet earth to think that the hardware development arc of the mobile phone and desktop PC are going to suddenly change. Phone makers will continue to try and find ways to charge more, regardless of the cost to build. As it is Apple's profit margin is 30%. People are used to paying hundreds of dollars for these things, the only thing that is really going to change is Apple's profit.

And don't for a second think porting cell phone OS and GUI to a desktop PC is going to work. Windows 8 could be the most spectacular failure in the history of MS. I have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever, I doubt many true PC users do, and I've already seen a couple other replies in this thread to the same effect.
 
1) First consoles how everybody announce death of custom PC
2) Laptops start selling = everybody announce death of custom PC
3) phones/tablets/ultrabooks appear = everybody announce death of custom PC

So far nothing killed custom PC gaming. In future, with faster and better broadband, things like OnLive might be important part of gaming, but until everyone gets such broadband network as there is in South Korea / Singapore, then I doubt any of those streaming concepts will work.
 
rudy said:
Read the rest of the post, phones can hook up to monitors, just like desktop computers, they can take blue tooth connections and even USB, so you can hook up mice and keyboards.
Click to expand...

So what is your point here ? That the guts of a smartphone that are basically the functional equivalent of a PC some 5-10 years old could be connected to a monitor and keyboard like that same PC was 5-10 years ago ? That isn't how a phone KILLS the PC. That's how a phone emulates a PC that is 5-10 years old.

The "death of the PC" comes when nobody wants to connect to a monitor or keyboard any longer and works strictly from their phone or tablet. And considering you still basically NEED a PC to make tablets work in the first place, I fail to see how one would "kill" the PC.

The tablet / phone is nothing more than a very slick interface on a mobile device approximating a PC. I have a tablet. It is not a replacement for a PC. If all I wanted to do was go on Facebook and Youtube, great. But that still doesn't touch a sizable portion of PC users and it never will.

And when the guts of a PC start being routinely put into TVs, that doesn't "kill" the PC, it simply merges the function and operation of the TV and PC into one.
 
MorgothPl said:
1) First consoles how everybody announce death of custom PC
2) Laptops start selling = everybody announce death of custom PC
3) phones/tablets/ultrabooks appear = everybody announce death of custom PC

So far nothing killed custom PC gaming. In future, with faster and better broadband, things like OnLive might be important part of gaming, but until everyone gets such broadband network as there is in South Korea / Singapore, then I doubt any of those streaming concepts will work.
Click to expand...

Based on the red tape involved in creating a truly fast optical/wireless network/cloud farm that provides 1ms pings to tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people will not be possible for at least a few decades so services like OnLive will never truly take off , they will remain a curiosity at best.

Custom PC gaming will remain where it is , happily secure for years to come.
 
deadrody said:
So what is your point here ? That the guts of a smartphone that are basically the functional equivalent of a PC some 5-10 years old could be connected to a monitor and keyboard like that same PC was 5-10 years ago ? That isn't how a phone KILLS the PC. That's how a phone emulates a PC that is 5-10 years old.

The "death of the PC" comes when nobody wants to connect to a monitor or keyboard any longer and works strictly from their phone or tablet. And considering you still basically NEED a PC to make tablets work in the first place, I fail to see how one would "kill" the PC.

The tablet / phone is nothing more than a very slick interface on a mobile device approximating a PC. I have a tablet. It is not a replacement for a PC. If all I wanted to do was go on Facebook and Youtube, great. But that still doesn't touch a sizable portion of PC users and it never will.

And when the guts of a PC start being routinely put into TVs, that doesn't "kill" the PC, it simply merges the function and operation of the TV and PC into one.
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My point is that for many users many of which have already dumped desktops in favor of laptops the interface on a phone connected to a monitor or TV is going to be good enough. You can argue whatever you want, its not like I do not agree, I agree that these devices will not be as powerful as desktops, nor will they be quite as productive. But that wont matter to the mass market. It will be good enough for them.

Does this make sense to you? Laptops will never replace desktops, their interface is not good, a trackpad, or KBC is never going to be as good as a mouse. They dont have big enough monitors or long enough battery life. Sound familar? It is also wrong, plenty of people buy laptops, attach mice and extra monitors and have no desktops in their home. Put that into the 20 year time frame of the OP. Look at the trends. Open your mind.

And your final point kills the PC in the context of custom rigs which was the point of the OP. If you turn a PC into an SOC and solder it onto a tuner controlling a TV, well then the custom modular PC is dead just like custom modular laptops are barely breathing.
 
deadrody said:
And yet the exact opposite is what happens. They make the phone a little lighter, a little bigger, give it a couple more widgets and charge $100 more for it. There is no reason on planet earth to think that the hardware development arc of the mobile phone and desktop PC are going to suddenly change. Phone makers will continue to try and find ways to charge more, regardless of the cost to build. As it is Apple's profit margin is 30%. People are used to paying hundreds of dollars for these things, the only thing that is really going to change is Apple's profit.

And don't for a second think porting cell phone OS and GUI to a desktop PC is going to work. Windows 8 could be the most spectacular failure in the history of MS. I have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever, I doubt many true PC users do, and I've already seen a couple other replies in this thread to the same effect.
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The OP is talking about a 20 year cycle not the tiny sliver of time we have to assess smartphones. You could have said the same thing about laptops earlier in their presense and LCDs as well but look now how 27 inch IPS monitors are coming down to $300. Same thing will happen to phones. Sure there will always be a premium for the latest hardware but in another 5 - 10 years you will see $100 phones that have 200+ PPI, and run the OS and any productivity software flawlessly the only higher priced product, just like desktops will be for running very demanding loads like gaming.
 
Fail said:
No such thing as the "death of the PC", they have been saying it for decades and it hasn't happened. If anything, PC gaming and hardware has gotten better and better with each passing year, and the technology is going to be here in our lifetime to play with holograms, which will still be computer based, so the only thing that will really happen is that the hardware will evolve, but the heart of any digital interaction as far as gaming goes will be via computer.
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PC hardware has gotten much better but PC Gaming as a whole has taken a back seat in general when it comes down to the quality of games and it being the main platform for games.

Amazing titles that had budgets of the millions such as Red Dead Redemption, MGS4, Uncharted, and a ton of other amazing games that blow away pretty much any PC game are console only.

The consoles have games such as The Last of Us and a bunch of other amazing console exclusives while the PC only has 1-2 that I can think of on the top of my head thats PC exclusive.
 
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