You can have my mouse and keyboard when you pry them from my cold, dead hands! (Or alternatively: When you invent input devices that are genuinely better for the purposes of inputting huge amounts of text and indicating intent on a large display mounted in an ergonomically suitable position)
I think that our current idea of what a PC is in in its twilight, however. A co-worker bought a brand new Macbook which proceeded to self-destruct (it quite literally melted) 2 weeks after they purchased it. The Apple store turned around a new one in minutes, obviously, but I couldn't help think - in a year or two from now, all his apps would be storing their data through Apple's cloud. The hardware would be completely fungible in that case, and failure would be an almost non-event compared to how much hassle it is currently.
Yeah, I am really interested in this question: how do mobile computers become capable of much faster data input and more fine-grained control than the current point-and-grunt interfaces.
I can actually get quite close to the world record for typing a text message on a Motorola Droid, to the point where I have (in a pinch) done some emergency programming / server configuration on it. With a little more work I can see me getting up to 40WPM on a mini keyboard... but that's never going to replace the 100WPM I can hit on a full-sized one!
For me the big issue is screen ___location and ergonomics. Touch screens are fundementally incompatible with good ergonomic practices.
I'm not sure i'm convinced by the argument that the cloud is a good thing because the hardware failures will have less consequence.
Apple sold a laptop that melted two weeks after it was bought. They could, instead, have made a laptop that WOULD NOT melt two weeks after it was bought.
I see the cloud as the biggest threat to individual online freedom and privacy. I will continue to buy big Thikpads, and avoid the cloud and tablets and the likes, at all costs.
You'd have to be very narrow in your online usage to guarantee your privacy. I wouldn't say privacy is dead but complete privacy is impossible. One could argue as well that the cloud was the major force behind the Arab Spring so it isn't all bad.
Regarding the laptop, I haven't heard this being a widespread problem with the Air. Once in a while, everyone comes across a device that has problems regardless of the manufacturer. What I take out of the story is the quality customer service. Good support almost guarantees that they will be a returning customer.
No, I don't think it's great that his laptop melted after two weeks, quite the opposite. I do think it is a good idea to plan for failure though. One thing I like about Windows (from Vista onwards) is that it is really fault-tolerant. I've been using OS X for about 9 months now, and while programs lock up less frequently, when they do they do sometimes manage to lock up the entire O/S.
Windows used to do this, but programs on Windows go catastrophically wrong that it is now expected and planned for - it's rare that a user space program impacts performance to the point where I cannot kill it.
Whole system? No. X? Yes. And when X crashes so does every other program I am using, so other than the shorter recovery time that isn't a lot better than crashing the whole system (ok, I have to admit there is much less chance of catastrophic disk corruption, as all the higher level processes will continue unimpeeded).
While I do absolutely love being able to ctrl+alt+F(x) no matter how bad things are and regain control, the fact that Windows has been able to recover from the window manager, graphics card driver, or even graphics card crashing without my music even skipping a beat for years now makes the reliance on X (by far the least stable component at least on my install) feel wholly unnecessary.
> by far the least stable component at least on my install
This is often the result of bad graphics drivers. Would you like to share your setup?
My laptop has that ACPI bug (in that the BIOS enables ACPI on peripherals and reports they don't support it back to the OS which then makes terrible decisions). I had to change my screensaver to a non-3D one to prevent the machine from seizing when entering low-power mode.
I think that our current idea of what a PC is in in its twilight, however. A co-worker bought a brand new Macbook which proceeded to self-destruct (it quite literally melted) 2 weeks after they purchased it. The Apple store turned around a new one in minutes, obviously, but I couldn't help think - in a year or two from now, all his apps would be storing their data through Apple's cloud. The hardware would be completely fungible in that case, and failure would be an almost non-event compared to how much hassle it is currently.