[OT] Windows dying

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 11:12:19 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the 
>> performance.
>>
>
> I don't agree. Consumers would welcome more performance - and 
> many of us 'need' it too.

There is an easy test of this: are they running out to upgrade to 
the latest higher performance x86 CPUs?  No, as Tony noted 
earlier, "Some find their current PC fast enough and see no 
reason to upgrade as frequently as they did in the past," though 
I'd modify that "some" to most.

> But cpu's have hit the heat barrier, and so manufacturers tend 
> to focus on more cores, better caching algorithms, and such...
>
> but I am sure that consumers would find a 10GHz quad core 
> processor far more useful than a 4Ghz 24 core one.

Right before it melted down. :)

> Then you have the challenges of redesigning programming 
> languages and software development methodologies to take better 
> advantage of the multi-core thing...

Since you have tons of background processes or apps running these 
days, even on Android, you don't really need multi-threaded apps 
to make good use of multi-core.

> There is also the problem of no real competition against Intel, 
> so real innovation is not occuring as rapidly as it once did.
>
> What we really need, is to get rid of that heat barrier - which 
> means lots and lots  of money (potentially billions) into new 
> research... and without competition, why should Intel bother? 
> They can just do a few minor tweaks here and there, increment a 
> number, and call the tweaked i7 ..the i9.

Rikki answered all this: the real competition is from below from 
ARM and the performance gains now come from scaling out 
horizontally with multi-core, not vertically with faster clock 
speeds.

More importantly, the market has settled on cheap, power-sipping 
chips in mobile devices as the dominant platform.  x86 has failed 
miserably at fitting into that, which is why even MS is moving 
towards ARM:

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/134434/arm-based-always-connected-windows-10-pcs-approach-finish-line

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 11:40:21 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you 
>> can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager 
>> until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so 
>> there are significant differences.
>
> Yes, there are differences for the end user, such as the the 
> sandboxing, but that also applies to applications in OS-X 
> appstore though. I don't expect iOS to change much in that 
> department, I think Apple will continue to get people into 
> their iCloud…
>
> On the API level iOS is mostly a subset, and features that was 
> only in iOS has been made available on OS-X. The main 
> difference is in some UI classes, but they both use the same 
> tooling and UI design strategies.
>
> So in terms of XCode they are kinda similar.

I've never programmed for Apple devices and never would- I got my 
first and last Apple device more than a decade ago, a Powerbook 
laptop, don't buy any of their stuff since because of their 
ridiculous patent stance- so I can't speak to the similarity of 
APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there are significant 
developer and IDE differences in targeting a mobile OS versus a 
desktop OS, even if iOS was initially forked from macOS.

>> I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a 
>> much bigger market which many more write for.
>
> Yes, there are more Apple developers in general. Not sure if 
> the number of people doing OS-X development has shrunk, maybe 
> it has.

Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS developers 
now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.

>> The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no 
>> signs of letting up.
>
> They probably will hold that market for a while as non-techies 
> don't want to deal with a new unfamiliar UI.
>
>> Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or 
>> laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they 
>> replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd 
>> to stay on the upgrade cycle.
>
> That is probably true, e.g. low light conditions.
>
>> While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you 
>> could just bundle most of the needed functionality into an 
>> iPhone
>
> My point was that it is easier to commoditize the iPhone than 
> the Mac. There is a very limited set of apps that end users 
> must have on a phone.

Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep 
those users around.  I'd say the Mac is actually easier to 
commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that you 
can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can drive a 
multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a monitor or 
13" Sentio-like laptop shell.

I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they 
aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result.  Hopefully that 
means we'll see more competition in mobile than just android/iOS 
in the future.

>> they've already significantly cut the team working on it.
>
> Ok, didn't know that. I've only noticed that they stopped 
> providing competitive products after Jobs died.
>
>> No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the 
>> performance.
>
> I don't think this is the case. It is because of the monopoly 
> they have in the top segment. Intel was slow at progress until 
> Athlon bit them too. If they felt the pressure they would put 
> their assets into R&D. Remember that new products have to pay 
> off R&D before making a profit, so by pushing the same old they 
> get better ROI. Of course, they also have trouble with heat and 
> developing a new technological platform is very expensive. But 
> if they faced stiff competition, then they certainly would push 
> that harder.
>
> In general the software market has managed to gobble up any 
> performance improvements for decades. As long as developers 
> spend time optimizing their code then there is a market for 
> faster hardware (which saves development costs).
>
> The Intel i9-7900X sells at $1000 for just the chip. That's 
> pretty steep, I'm sure they have nice profit margins on that 
> one.

Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, but 
as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the 
performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, with 
their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest 
semiconductor vendor:

http://fortune.com/2017/07/27/samsung-intel-chip-semiconductor/

>> You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic 
>> topics and industry projections for actual production, which 
>> is what I was talking about.
>
> What do you mean by industry projections? It was quite obvious 
> by early 2000s that most people with cellphones (which 
> basically was everyone in Scandinavia) would switch to smart 
> phones. It wasn't a surprise.

Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050?  Would people who never 
had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market even 
larger, as is happening today in developing markets?

My point is that vague tech chatter about the potential next big 
thing is irrelevant, what matters is who was actually projecting 
hard numbers like a billion smartphones sold in 2013:

https://mobile.twitter.com/lukew/status/842397687420923904

Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was.  If there were a few 
making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they 
actually bet on it, as Jobs did?  Nobody else did that, which 
shows you how much they believed it.

>> confident in them that you bet your company on them.  Nobody 
>> other than Apple did that, which is why they're still reaping 
>> the rewards today.
>
> Only Microsoft had a comparable starting point. iOS is closely 
> related to OS-X. Not sure if Nokia could have succeed with 
> scaling up Symbian. Maybe, dunno.

I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded 
Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.  
But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just gave 
it away for free for others to build on, which is why they never 
made as much money as Apple either.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 13:59:26 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even 
>> Jobs by all indications.  Mobile has really been a tidal wave 
>> over the last decade.  Funny how all you hear is bitching and 
>> whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they 
>> missed the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's 
>> nothing fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the 
>> biggest boom of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew 
>> right in front of their faces. :D
>
> Well, I was there in the early nineties when the Microsoft 
> WinPad was being talked about. This was almost 20 years before 
> the iPad came out. I remember going through the 90's with 
> Window CE interations, which eventually evolved into Window 
> Mobile 2003 - which is when I purchased my first 'smart phone', 
> and learnt how to write apps for it ( actually my current phone 
> still runs Windows Mobile 6.1 ;-).
>
> I tried getting people around me interested in mobile devices, 
> including the business I worked in. Nobody was really 
> interested. They were all happy with their little push button 
> nokias.
>
> Microsoft had the vision though, and they had it earlier than 
> perhaps anyone else. But the vision was too far ahead of its 
> time, and, around the early 2000's they refused to lose any 
> more money, put it on the back burner, and competitors came in 
> a took over - at a time when 'consumers' were just beginning to 
> share the vision too....

Yes, that is the impression I have too: MS got in too early, got 
discouraged that consumers didn't want their bulky hardware and 
weird software, and backed off right when the mobile market took 
off.

> But I think what really made it take off so fast and 
> unexpectadly, was the convergence of mobile devices, mobile 
> communication technology (i.e wifi, gps and stuff), and of 
> course the internet... as well as the ability to find cheap 
> labour overseas to build the produces on mass.
>
> I doubt anyone could have envisioned that convergence...but 
> some companies were in a better position (more agile) than 
> others, at the time, to capitalise on it.
>
> But the vision of being mobile was certainly there, back in the 
> early nineties - and Microsoft were leading it.

Right, a significant minority of techies saw mobile coming, but 
I'm talking about forecasting the giant scope and scale and 
timing of the actual sales chart above.  There was nothing 
special about the minority who thought mobile could be big, the 
Nokia 7710 shipped with a touchscreen years before the iPhone:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

The N800 shipped before the iPhone:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800

Intel had been talking about their MID platform around the same 
time:

https://gizmodo.com/253189/intel-ultra-mobile-platform-2007-officially-announced-mids-and-menlow-to-follow

Which of them saw that giant tidal wave coming, sunk every penny 
on a surfboard, and swam out to ride it?  Almost no one, other 
than Apple to some extent, add even they seem to have 
underestimated its size.