The motherboards for PCs built 5 years ago are completely different from those built today, and the CPU sockets have changed every other year. New processors from Intel will be soldered on.

The performance of a PC from five years ago is probably adequate for web browsing and office tasks. For anything more demanding, the advances in power consumption, execution efficiency and process node are huge leaps from five years ago.

The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound for my setup. However, when it was initially released, Planetside 2 ran like a three-legged dog even on some higher end rigs. It's much better after a few rounds of optimizations by the developers, with more scheduled for the next month or two.

I dual boot Linux boot on the same machine for my day job, 5 days a week all year. For this purpose it has actually been getting faster with time as the environment I run matures and gets optimized.

As good as it is now, I remember struggling to keep up with a two year old machine in 2003.

Back in Q1 2010 I got an Intel Core i7 980X which benchmarked at 8911 according to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+X+980+...

Now in Q2 2013 (3 years later) the very top of the line processor available, an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2, is only twice as fast at 16164: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2690+v...

It used to be that things got faster at a much faster rate. And until this new E5-2690 v2 was released, the fastest CPU was only 14000 or so, which is less than 2x as fast.

The limiting factor is if your computer's feedback loop is tighter than your brain's perception loop. If you can type a letter and the letter appears, your computer is fast enough for word processing. But, if you can run a data analysis job and it's done before you release the "enter" key, it just means you should really be doing better analyses over more data. Certain use cases grow like goldfish to the limits of their environment.

It's that when tablets hit the scene, people realized they don't need their PC for 90% of what they do on a "computer". Email, social networking, shopping, music, video etc.

Us old geeks who swap hardware, play PC games, tweak OS settings and generally use yesterday's general purpose PC will be the ones remaining who keep buying new hardware and complete machines.

The general public meanwhile will only buy a PC if their tablet/smartphone/phablet needs expand beyond those platforms.

The market will shrink but it will turn more "pro". The quicker MS evolves into a modern IBM the better.

A lot of people don't want to cook, so are happy with smartphones and tablets.

Why buy a desktop or laptop when an iPad will do everything you need for a fraction of the price? That's what people mean when they sound the death knell for the PC.

The Post-PC devices[1] (tablets / smartphones) are it for the majority of folks from here on out. They are easier to own since the upgrade path is heading to buy new device and type in my password to have all my stuff load on it. If I want to watch something on the big screen, I just put a device on my TV. Need to type, add a keyboard.

The scary part of all this is that some of the culture of the post-PC devices are infecting the PCs. We see the restrictions on Windows 8.x with the RT framework (both x86/ARM), all ARM machine requirements, and secure boot. We see the OS X 10.8+ with gatekeeper, sandboxing, and app store requirements with iCloud.

The PC culture was defined by hobbyists before the consumers came. The post-PC world is defined by security over flexibility. Honestly, 99% of the folks are happier this way. They want their stuff to work and not be a worry, and if getting rid of the hobbyist does that then fine. PC security is still a joke and viruses are still a daily part of life even if switching the OS would mitigate some of the problems.

I truly wish someone was set to keep building something for the hobbyist[2], but I am a bit scared at the prospects.

1) Yes, I'm one of those that mark the post-PC devices as starting with the iPhone in 2007. It brought the parts we see together: tactile UI, communications, PC-like web browsing, and ecosystem (having inherited the iPods).

2) I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the HP-16c had kept evolving.

This is the number one reason why I love the PC above any other kind of computing machine. Need more disk space? Sure, go get a new disk, you may not even need to remove any of the others. Want a better graphics card for that new game? Easy as pie. Your processor died because the fan was malfunctioning? Too bad, but luckily those two are the only things you'll have to pay for. The list goes on.

I bought my current PC on 2009. The previous one still had some components from 2002.

My dad went to Walmart and bought a computer (why he didn't just ask me to either advise him, or ask if he could have one of my spare/old ones I don't know) and monitor for $399.

It's an HP powered by a AMD E1-1500. It's awfully slow. Chokes on YouTube half the time. My dad is new to the online experience, so he basically uses it for watching streaming content.

I could have grabbed him a $99 Athlon X4 or C2D on craigslist and it would better than this thing. I'm not sure if he'll ever experience a faster computer so I don't think he'll ever get frustrated with this machine, but it's amazing that they sell an utter piece of shit like this as a new machine.

Just because it doesn't sit in a big box doesn't mean it's a different class of system. The difference is really the openness of the platform, comparing something like iOS to Win 8 pro.

That said, many tablets are basically what we would have thought of as PCs before. Consider something like the Samsung 500T or similar, or thinkpad helix. Components are small and cheap enough that they can be packed behind the LCD, and you have essentially a laptop that doesn't need it's keyboard.

Will iPads take over PCs? No. They are too limited, not because of hardware, but because of OS limitations. Will tablets take their place though? Quite possibly. The portability is quite handy. That I can dock a tablet with a keyboard and have a normal PC experience, but have it portable when I need it is a selling feature.

The obvious cavaet is that a limited OS is fine as long as the majority of data is cloud based. In that case even development can be done on a closed platform, and the tablet becomes something more akin to a monitor or keyboard. More of a peripheral than a computing device. We might get to that point, but that's not the cause of the current trend.

I'm still running fine with my 2007 Macbook, but I think my iPhone has extended its life because now my laptop almost never leaves the house and sometimes doesn't even get used in a day, whereas pre-smartphone I used to cart my laptop around rather frequently and use it every day.

When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.

I think I can pinpoint when this happened - It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed.

~~~

Above that, PCs aren't necessary for a lot of people, because people do not need $2000 Facebook and email machines. For the median person, if you bought a PC in 2006, then got an iPad (as a gift or for yourself) and started using it a lot, you might find that you stopped turning on your PC. How could you justify the price of a new one then?

Yet if there was a major cultural shift to just tablets (which are great devices in their own right), I would be very worried. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.

I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?"

I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?

Tablets are knocking the sales off of low-end PCs, but we as a society need the cheap PC to remain viable, if we want to turn as many children as possible into creators, engineers, tinkerers, and hackers.

Games can always use more resources. AFAIK there is still a lot of progress being made with GPUs. 60fps on a 4K display will be a good benchmark. The funny thing is that GPU makers have taken to literally just renaming and repackaging their old GPUs, e.g. the R9.[1] As for the game itself, there is a looming revolution in gaming when Carmack (or someone equally genius-y) really figures out how to coordinate multiple cores for gaming.[2]

But yeah, most everything else runs fine on machines from 2006 and on, including most development tasks. That's why Intel in particular has been focused more on efficiency than power.

[1] Tom's Hardware R9 review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-280x-r9-270x-r...

[2] Carmack at QuakeCon talking about functional programming (Haskell!) for games and multi-core issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A&feature=youtu.be...

i agree that the increased (functional) life of pcs is a contributing factor to slowing unit sales, but its laughable to attribute it to the idea that people who once would have bought a new pc are now just buying more ram and upgrading internals.

the percentage of people who would have any idea how to do that, or even consider it as a viable option, is far to small to have any real impact on demand..

In high school I recall lusting after a $4,500 486DX2 66Mhz machine with an astounding 16MB (not GB) of RAM, and a 250MB hard drive. A few months ago I spent a little less than that on a laptop with 2,000X that amount of RAM, 8,000X that amount of hard drive space, and a processor that would have not so long ago been considered a supercomputer.

I for one am glad that we have continued to innovate, even when things were good enough.

The CPU is slow by current standards, but a Core2Duo isn't slower than the low-clock CPUs in many Ultrabooks. The 3 hour battery life could be better, but I can swap batteries and many new laptops can't. The GPU sucks, but I don't play many games anyway. DDR2 is pricey these days, but I already have my 8gb. SATA2 is slower than SATA3, but I'm still regularly amazed at how much faster my SSD is than spinning rust. It's a little heavy, but really, I can lift six pounds with one finger.

So the bad parts aren't so bad, but nothing new matches the good parts. The screen is IPS, matte, 15" and 1600x1200. Aside from huge monster gaming laptops, nothing has a screen this tall (in inches, not pixels) anymore. I can have two normal-width source files or other text content side by side comfortably. The keyboard is the classic Thinkpad keyboard with 7 rows and what many people find to be the best feel on a laptop. The trackpoint has physical buttons, which are missing from the latest generation of Thinkpads. There's an LED in the screen bezel so I can view papers, credit cards and such that I might copy information from in the dark, also missing from the latest Thinkpads.

I will use my 2011 smart phone until it physically breaks. If a 1.2GHz device with a 300MHz GPU, 1280x720 screen, and 1GB of RAM can't make calls and do a decent job of browsing the web, that's a problem with today's software engineering, not with the hardware.

And if Google decides to doom my perfectly good device to planned obsolence, fuck them, I will put Ubuntu Touch of Firefox OS on it. The day of disposable mobiles is over, we have alternatives now just like we do on PCs.

They bought a windows machine for what to them is a lot of money (more than a iPad), it didn't last long before it slow and it's got extra toolbars and all sorts of rubbish. What's worse is that this happened last time they bought a PC and the time before and the time before that. They are not going to add a SSD because that's not how they think + they don't how + it's throwing good money after bad + they are dubious of the benefits.

The iPad in contrast exceeded expectations and in the year or two they've had it they had a better experience. They can't get excited about a another windows machine because it's expensive, more of the same and not worth it really.

Anecdotally, my machine is approaching four years old and I can still run just about every new game on the highest settings. At just under $1,000 at the time, this isn't a luxury yacht type rig, either.

In 2000, a three-year-old PC couldn't run modern games. Today, a three-year-old PC simply forces you to switch to lower graphical settings. The race for hogging all the hardware resources did slow down in the past years, which is a good thing for consumers.

AAA games mostly target the console. Look at GTA5, which isn't even out on the PC. Most AAA games will run on a PS3, which came out in 2006, and has 512MB of RAM (combined system / graphics).

That said, there's a point of diminishing returns - making games look much more realistic will take obscene amounts of resources.

In fact the only thing I really want a faster machine for is some of the latest emulation techniques (Higan) and a vague desire to play around with some virtualization odds and ends.

Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session.

But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.

I have water cooled 2600k at 5GHz running 24/7. Bigger GPU and more cores brings additional complexity and more heat. No other CPU can handle this without blowing up.

For them the choice is between keeping an old computer, on which they already know how to send emails and compose documents, and buying a new tablet on which they will need to learn a whole new set of UI idioms. In addition, physical keyboards and larger screens (and no "ipad neck") make laptops and desktop computers more attractive.

Depending on what you're doing with CPUs there have been improvements, even at the high end between Nehalem and Haswell (on the Intel side). Anandtech's data shows a nearly 2x improvement between those generations for certain tasks.

But the reality is that for other tasks (e.g. the winrar compression benchmark) the speedup is minimal compared to previous years (see Haswell vs Prescott). In many cases where there is a speedup, performance is already so good that you wouldn't notice.

It's pretty crazy to see that in the consumer world, not even games are demanding so much performance from our CPUs.

The PC market has relied on end users - consumers and business users - for it's growth engine for decades, and that appears to be drying up. One of the reasons for that is outlined in the article, for most use cases we don't need faster.

In the emerging post-PC world you just sell your old device and get a new one, not unlike how cars are treated. I doubt anyone has trouble unloading their old iPad 3, they probably get a decent amount of money for it if it's in good condition. This just does not happen with homebrew systems, the risk is too high.

People who cheerfully proclaim that PCs are dead forger that PCs aren't just devices, they also attained a certain level of cultural significance. IF the death of PCs also means the death of PC culture (which involves things like game modding, hobby website making and so on), then the death of PCs is a really, really bad thing.

That's exactly what I see everywhere. People still need a PC for the 10% of the tasks they can't do on a tablet. So, they'll keep a good enough PC around all the times.

What is a different situation from a few years ago, when people were buying a PC for each family member. Now, it's a tablet for each person, a PC for each home, and spare space at the desks.

I fit into a lot of the special cases here: Developer, gamer, amateur photographer with many gigabytes of RAW files and even I don't feel the need to upgrade systems like I used to. Now it is about an every 3-4 year thing whereas previously it was yearly or more.

I really don't understand your concern.

Hobbists have a wider selection of computing tools than ever before (altough, that statement was true at any time since the 50's). We have the entire arduino ecosystem for hardware hobbists, throwaway PCs like the Raspberry Pi for embebbing real computers everywhere, several different standards of desktop-capable parts for more powerfull systems, and the server ecosystem for the real beefy ones.

Most of those computer types aren't even able to run Windows or OSX. iCloud and Secureboot won't make them go away.

Dell, Lenovo Toshiba and HP all report sales of laptops are increasing; 3.5% in the last quarter.

Death doesn't sound too bad.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/10/technology/mac-pc-sales/

Having a 1.5 or 2 pound laptop, with a 12 hour battery life that you can detach the keyboard from for $300 is a much better form factor than the current typical laptop. Many of these tablets also come with wacom pen digitizers or touch, allowing a creative input that is missing in many laptop form factors.

Also you can still create web-apps and other such things with things like node.js and so on android tablets today. Javascript really is the BASIC of this generation.

I won't be surprised to see full IDEs that could be viable in creating general purpose apps in near future. I really think Android & iOS will eventually become the next 'desktop' OS with a full suite of apps as powerful as the current desktop set of applications. Concerns about tablets as consumption only devices will go away probably within the next decade as the world transitions to these 'mobile' OSes.

The way forward isn't to try and keep cheap PCs viable for creativity's sake, but to ensure that creative desires are being met on the newer devices. Would I have learned memory management and dual booting if I'd had a tablet instead of a 386? Probably not. But now that same money buys a high end tablet and a pile of hours for an EC2 micro instance.

Would I still be me? No, I would be even better. All those weeks wasted fighting with modem racks for my BBS I'd gladly trade for weeks spent on a Nexus 10 and a linode.

That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.

Thank goodness for tablets with full XWindows support to my desktop and the university supercomputer. I like broken metaphors.