Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64

Joakim dlang at joakim.fea.st
Sun Sep 16 04:47:11 UTC 2018


On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 01:03:27 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 15:25:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick
>>
>> And people don't use PCs for such things? ;)
>
> Sure, but they use them for a bunch of other stuff too. My 
> point was that mobile growth has been in the "such things" but 
> barely made a dent in the other stuff. So when you see 30% pc 
> screen time and 70% mobile, its not a 70% drop in actual time 
> spent in front of a PC. It's more a massive growth in time on 
> mobile doing mostly banal pointless crap.

Sure, mobile has grown the market for digital entertainment and 
communication much more than taking away the time spent doing 
work on a PC, at least so far.

>> I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in 
>> PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad 
>> came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have 
>> switched to tablets and other mobile devices.
>
> Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales 
> have fallen for 3 years in a row.

Eh, these are all mostly mature markets now, so slight quarterly 
dips or gains don't matter much anymore. What does it matter that 
PC sales were up 2-3% last quarter when 7 times as many 
smartphones and mobile devices were sold in that same quarter?

>> More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, 
>> I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :)
>
> Im not laughing at the idea of mobile eating into desktop PC 
> share. What Im saying is that it hasnt done so as much as you 
> think.

I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 years is 
mostly due to the rise of mobile. Not sure what you mean by "it 
hasnt done so as much as you think." You may argue that most 
using PCs aren't using them for entertainment, but this drop 
suggests that at least 30% of them were and have now moved to 
mobile.

> And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years doesnt 
> mean it will continue so inevitably.

Sure, but these trends almost never reverse. ;)

> I actually think most people would prefer a separate desktop 
> and mobile device, whether that desktop is just the size of 
> pack of cigarettes, or a big box with 5 fans in it.

Why? Given how price-sensitive the vast majority of the 
computing-buying public is- that excludes the Apple sheeple who 
actually seem to get a hard-on from rising iPhone prices, all the 
better for them to show how much money they've lucked into by 
brandishing their "gold" iPhone ;) - I don't see most willing to 
spend twice on two devices, that could be replaced by just one. 
Until recently, they didn't have a choice, as you couldn't use 
your mobile device as a desktop, but the just-released devices I 
linked in the first post in this thread are starting to change 
that.

>> You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how 
>> Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone 
>> and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, 
>> while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the 
>> mainstream market would care about such battery life as much 
>> as their early adopters, but they were wrong.
>>
>> But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the 
>> head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got 
>> his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC 
>> and this was his reaction:
>>
>> "Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it 
>> on a table in Olsen’s office.
>>
>> 'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that 
>> it was so puny.  Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor 
>> engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.'
>>
>> Clearly Olsen was wrong."
>> https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/
>>
>> You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ 
>> what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what 
>> it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is 
>> now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to 
>> low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The 
>> x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the 
>> minicomputer decades ago.
>
> Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes 
> predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as 
> guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line 
> though them.

Except none of these examples or my own prediction are based on 
simple extrapolation between data points. Rather, we're analyzing 
the underlying technical details and capabilities and coming to 
different conclusions about whether the status quo is likely to 
remain. So I don't think any of us are "guilty" of your charge.


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