Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64

[Dave Jones]

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.


> 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.


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


> 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.