About 8 months ago our home PC went kaput. At the time getting it fixed wasn’t in the budget. I Googled the error messages and they were consistent with the hard drive failing.
I kept saying I was going to open it up and replace it. Its been a few years, but ive done it before. But I just never got around to it.
So tonight I was just sitting around and the urge hit me. I started cleaning and disconnecting and pretty soon I was dragging the 15 year old particle board computer desk to the road. And now its all packed up and sitting in a closet. I dont know what I’m going to do with it. But its not sitting in my den collecting dust anymore…
I found over the last few months that I didnt really miss the PC, and I could do everything I need to do on my phone. The one thing I cant really do is play with Photoshop. But really I wasted way too much time playing with that anyway.
So good bye personal computer lifestyle and hello smart phone culture.
You know what. I never use a computer at home. Just at work. And I pretty much just use the databases at work and excel spread sheet. But I agree I do everything on my phone. I don’t miss a computer at all to be honest.
Developers will continue to use desktops … mostly to try things out locally before they run big jobs on “The Cloud.”
End Users will probably continue to drift away from this use case. Land lines have already almost completely yielded to wireless phones; cable TV will continue to erode in favor of on-demand video streams, and desktops will likely continue to give ground to mobile devices.
I’m not quite there yet, though I do no longer use any desktops. That was initially difficult, since I had grown up building my own computers every few years. I was well versed in the technology and loved doing it.
Though, my last desktop was not something I built myself. It was a Dell Precision workstation with dual Xeons. Eventually I used it less and less, not enjoying being shut away to use the computer.
It was then I bought my first laptop, and I am on my second now. Though I do a ton on my phone, I still need the PC for some things. (Playing Civilization IV, and then control interfaces for websites and HTML stuff. Also, any photoshop type stuff). My work computer is a laptop now as well.
I imagine the next thing I use for personal use will be some sort of hybrid tablet PC with a touchscreen and detachable keyboard. I am not sure how well I would ever deal with not using a mouse.
My biggest thing is I am a much faster typist on a keyboard… I went to school for computers and can type around 110 words per minute. Granted I am fast texting on my phone but not even close to what I can type on a keyboard. Granted with today’s modern generation I think most of these kids now are faster on their phone than they are on the keyboard.