This would be one of the reasons I haven’t gotten a new laptop in a while. What happened Lenovo?
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Gotta sell them somehow and let’s go with how thin and sexy they are!
Tablets? Fugidaboudit, just get a new one when the battery runs out because they made it so the battery is non user serviceable!
We’ve been sold on the idea they have to be ridiculously thin and that something even two years old is hopelessly outdated (jesus frak I surfed the internet and could even youtube on a 733mhz dell for a time. Now my core 2 duo machine struggles with standard def content because browser bloat.)
We need to stop going ‘must add more cores and ram’ and make things run at x specs.
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Meh.
The price! THE PRICE!!!
…now, where are my eyes so I could pop them back in…
I am tempted to mod the hinges of my laptop to allow an inch between the screen and the keyboard, and just attach a good one on top of the stock crap… Would also require modding the flat cable to the display, which is an inch too short, which could be a bit of a problem to do reliably in a way that’s not a nightmare…
Maybe they got appleosis.
Trading sexiness for performance is generally not good for long-term use.
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That’s great, I just want an option to turn it off, not be restricted in what I do and still have a functional device. That I have to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the OS to do this means that your computer that doesn’t get malware still doesn’t exist.
I don’t want it to be a software option. Something like a jumper behind a panel with a warranty invalidating sticker over it will do nicely.
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These people don’t care about long term use. Long term use means no returning customers. Can’t have that now can we?
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This. I’ve got a core 2duo think pad, and it craps out trying to play mp4 video through vlc. I might put a lighter 'nix on it, but I’m not sure even that’ll help.
One thing that doesn’t seem to be brought up as much is that besides the competition that PCs have (with tablets, phones, and consoles), is that the speed of improvements to PCs has slowed in recent years. It’s not so much that people aren’t owning PCs, but the time where you had to replace a PC every other year in order to run current software (as was the case in the 1990s) is over.
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Apple IIs were considered PCs before IBM trademarked “PC.”
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Packard Bell? No, Tandy!
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We PCihaulics are awaiting WIN X to bundle up in a nice HP and trot off to market. Maybe Septiembre??? Any one born before the birth of this obamanation NEED big screens. Wonder if you can stream cinerama with dolby; ahhh…way gone with the wind. and felling a little winded with this much effort. JR
You beat me to it. Outside of wanting to push the gaming envelope 95% of the machines out there have more horse power than most users needs so it is going to get used till the hardware is well and truly dead (like when the gpu died on my last laptop and I didn’t want to mess with taking it all apart and heating up the chip to remelt the solder, AGAIN), and I can see outside of a dedicated workstation area the laptop form is going to replace the desktop, if it hasn’t already, next to nobody at work as a desktop PC not even the developers have high end laptops.
There are more people dumping PCs for tablets and smart phones as that is pretty much all they need for what they do online and as time goes on I think what we will see is a merging the tablet/laptop where you can plug it into a shell with a big monitor, keyboard, etc when you need it and just have the basic tablet interface when on the go.
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PCs are for people who can’t handle workstations and/or servers!
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Seriously, I just replaced my Lenovo laptop after 7-ish years. That thing was a tank. No wonder they’re the number one seller. In fact, my daughter’s school district hands out Lenovos to every kid enrolled in middle school on up - another possible reason for their market share, I suppose.
But I remember when we were replacing, if not the whole PC, then chunks of it on the regular. Trips to Fry’s for new graphics cards and extra RAM. I had the option when I bought this laptop to have a 1TB hard drive. I was barely using half the 500GB of my old one.
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“PC” simply means “personal computer.” I first heard it applied to Xerox PARC’s desktop systems.
When IBM finally got around to building a personal computer, being the creative geniuses they are, they called it “the IBM Personal Computer.”
Thus “IBM PC” as an abbreviation. Inevitably the clone label of “IBM PC-compatible” got shortened to “PC compatible” and then just to “PC”.
So the term is used for two distinct things, IBM PC/PC-compatible personal computers, or just “personal computers” as a generic class.
Apple Macintoshes have always been PCs in the “personal computer”.sense of the term.
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Outside of wanting to push the gaming envelope 95% of the machines out there have more horse power than most users needs so it is going to get used till the hardware is well and truly dead
The iMac I’m using right now is six years old and I figure if I swap out the old hd for a new ssd I can probably keep it for a while longer. I do have a newer laptop that runs Linux (and is actually becoming my primary PC)–I expect to have that for as long as the hardware holds out.
At work the machines are leased and replaced every three years no matter what. But that is driven more by accounting than technology.
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You cannot join the PC MASTER RACE with a toy.
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… And getting LibreOffice to stop freezing.
Don’t make them too good, pc makers! Rather, insert a seemingly random failure prone component, don’t let capitalism die, please!
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Please remember that Gardner is the group that long predicted Linux’ demise when SCO sued IBM for System V license infringement in their Linux distributions. Gardner is paid to sell FUD and alarmism, little else. Since their business analyses were proven so persistently backward, they’ve gone to tech industry tabloid journalism. Gotta pay the lease on that BMW, knowwuttamean?
And, too, desktop workstations have a large presence in scientific research. If a grant covers a good workstation but institutional supercomputer access is prohibitive, the economics tilt in an obvious way.
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