On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 09:16:42 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Why do predictions about the future matter when at the
present Windows dominates the desktop and is also strong in
the server space?
Because that desktop market matters much less than it did
before, see the current mobile dominance, yet the D core team
still focuses only on that dying x86 market. As for the
future, why spend time getting D great Windows IDE support if
you don't think Windows has much of a future?
The concept that you are proposing, that people will get rid
of ALL their desktops and laptops for phones or tablets,
doesn't seem to be happening right now.
To begin with, I never said they'd "ALL" be replaced in the
paragraph you're quoting above, but yes, that's essentially
what will eventually happen.
You said 99% would go away. So "almost all".
And of course it's happening right now, why do you think PC
sales are down 25% over the last six years, after rising for
decades? For many people, a PC was overkill but they didn't
have a choice of another easier form factor and OS. Now they
do.
There are others reasons for PC sales declining beyond someone
just using a phone or a tablet. Some find their current PC fast
enough and see no reason to upgrade as frequently as they did in
the past - only a hard drive failure will trigger a PC upgrade
for them.
Some have cut down from a desktop and a laptop to just a laptop
as the laptops got faster. Or a family replaces some combination
of laptops and desktops with a combination of
laptops/desktops/tablets/phones.
That 25% is not indicative of 25% of homes getting rid of ALL of
their PC/laptops.
At this point, were they do to that, they would end up with a
machine that has less power in most cases (there are Atom and
Celeron laptops), and probably less memory and disk storage.
That solution would be most attractive to Chromebook type
users and very low end laptop users. And while people buy low
spec laptops and desktops, there are still many laptops and
desktops sold with chips that aren't named Atom and Celeron or
arm. If phones and tablets try to get chips as powerful as
those for the desktop and laptops they run into the chip
maker's problem - the more processing power, the more the
electricity the chip uses. Phones and tablets don't plug into
the wall and they are smaller than the batteries in laptops.
And in order to use a phone/tablet as a "lean forward" device
(as opposed to "lean back") and do work, they will have to
spend money on a "laptop shell" that will have a screen and
keyboard and probably an SSD/HD which will cancel most of the
cost savings from not buying a laptop.
You seem wholly ignorant of this market and the various points
I've made in this thread. Do you know what the median Windows
PC sold costs? Around $400. Now shop around, are you finding
great high-spec devices at that price?
You said 99% are going away. You need to talk about a lot more
than median prices. But nevertheless, $400 laptops have better
specs and performance than $400 tablets and phones. And you are
good to go with a laptop. People who want to go down to the
coffee shop and work on their term paper on a laptop just take
the laptop. People who want to go down to the coffee shop and
work on their term paper on a phone or tablet, have to bring a
keyboard and monitor (phone) or a keyboard and tablet stand and
squint at their screen (tablet).
The high-spec market that you focus on is a tiny niche, the
bulk of the PC market is easily eclipsed by mobile performance,
which is why people are already turning in their PCs for mobile.
I don't think that phones/tablets can compete performance-wise
with $400 and up machines, which you claim is over 50% of the
market.
Battery life on mobile is already much better than laptops, for
a variety of reasons including the greater efficiency of mobile
ARM chips.
That is a common belief, but it is referred to as a myth in many
places, including this research paper after performing tests on
different architectures. It ends with:
"An x86 chip can be more power efficient than an ARM processor,
or vice versa, but it’ll be the result of other factors — not
whether it’s x86 or ARM."
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient/3
And the Sentio laptop shell I already linked in this thread has
a screen, keyboard, and battery but no SSD/HD, which is why it
only costs $150, much less than a laptop.
I see that 11.6" screen setup with the small storage of a phone
as competition for $150 Chromebooks, not $400 Windows laptops. I
would prefer to be on my Chromebook and take a call on my cell
phone, rather than having my cellphone plugged into a docking
station and have to unplug it or put it on speaker phone.
In the case of trying to court Android development, I read
that 95% of Android is done on Java (and maybe other JVM
languages like the now "officially supported" Kotlin) and 5%
in C or C++. But that 5% is for applications that have a need
for high performance, which is mostly games. Good luck selling
game developers on using D to develop for Android, when you
can't supply those same game developers a top-notch
development environment for the premier platform for
performance critical games - Windows 64-bit.
I don't think the numbers favor Java quite so much, especially
if you look at the top mobile apps, which are mostly games. I
don't know what connection you think there is between the AAA
Windows gaming market and mobile games, nobody runs Halo on
their mobile device.
I am assuming that game developers work in both spaces, if not
concurrently, they move between the two.
It also may be incorrect to assume that D would be acceptable in
its current incarnation for game development due to the
non-deterministic activity of the garbage collector. In which
case, it would have little rationale for Android development. As
far as iOS, there are two native code languages with a large
lead, and both use Automatic Reference Counting, rather than
garbage collection which would presumably give them give them the
advantage for games. But D could potentially compete for non-game
development.
btw, the mobile gaming market is now larger than the PC gaming
market, so to think that they're sitting around using tools and
IDEs optimized for that outdated PC platform is silly:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/pc-market-grew-in-2016-led-by-mobile-and-pc-gaming/
Are you suggesting they are developing their games for iOS and
Android devices ON those devices? Apple has XCode for developing
iOS apps and it runs on macOS machines only. There is also the
Xamarin IDE or IDE plug-in from Microsoft that allows C# on iOS,
but it runs on macOS or WIndows. For Android, there is Android
Studio - "The Official IDE of Android" - which runs on Windows,
macOS and Linux. There is no Android version.
But regardless of whether Windows is dominant, or just widely
used, you haven't made predictions that Windows servers are
going to die.
I don't think about niche platforms that hardly anybody uses.
It is the dominant internal IT platform. That is not niche and
not something that is "hardly used". But what you could say is
that given your prediction that Windows sales will decline by
99%, Microsoft will go out of business.
Your first link is actually a bad sign for Windows, as it's
likely just because companies are trying to save money by
having their employees run Windows apps off a virtualized
Windows Server, rather than buying a ton more Windows PCs.
I would say that is an unlikely scenario. Companies use
virtual machines for servers because it allows for the email
server and/or http server and/or database server and/or
application server to be on one physical machine, and allow
for the system administrator to reboot the OS or take the
server offline when making an upgrade/bug fix, and not affect
the applications running on the other servers.
I see, so your claim is that process or software isolation is
so weak on Windows Server that they run multiple virtualized
instances of Windows Server just to provide it. Or maybe that
Windows Server needs to be patched for security so often, that
this helps a little with downtime. I doubt they are running
many WinServer instances like you say, given how resource-heavy
each Windows Server instance is going to be. But regardless of
how you slice it, this isn't a good sign for Windows.
They use virtualization for Linux for the same reason I stated -
so the application/http/email/database server can be on an OS
that can be rebooted to complete upgrades or a VM can be used as
an isolated "sandbox" for testing upgrades of a particular server
or some in-house developed software.
And if desktop OSes were going to go away, the MacOS would
go before Windows.
Oh, Apple wants that to happen, one less legacy OS to
support, which is why all the Mac-heads are crying, because
macOS doesn't get much attention nowadays. Do you know the
last time Apple released a standalone desktop computer?
2014, when they last updated the Mac Mini. They haven't
updated the Mac Pro since 2013.
Why do you think it is that they haven't come out with an iOS
Mac Mini or iOS MacBook?
The Mac Mini is easy, they're just winding down that legacy
form factor, like they did with the iPod for years. Their only
entry in that market is Apple TV running tvOS, which is more
iOS than macOS.
As for the iOS Macbook, it's out, it's called the iPad Pro.
Their CEO, Tim Cook, is always boasting about how it's all he
uses these days:
https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/14/tim-cook-ipad-80-90-of-tim-cooks-work-is-on-ipad-work-and-consumption/
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/09/apple-ceo-tim-cook-says-he-travels-with-just-an-ipad-pro-and-iphone
A CEO is a baby user of a PC. What would he do besides email? He
has people to do his powerpoint and documents. Not a good
endorsement. And the iPad Pro is twice the price of what you say
is the average price of a PC laptop. You could buy a Windows
laptop and an Android Zenpad tablet and still have paid less than
an iPad.
I'd like to be there when Cook tells all Apple employees they
need to turn in their MacBooks for iPads.
They see the writing on the wall, which is why they're
lengthening their release cycles for such legacy products.
Do they want them to go away, or do they see the handwriting
on the wall? The fact that they still make them, it appears
that they don't want them to go away. They can stop making
them at any time. And by them, I mean their entire macOS (i.e.
their non-mobile) line. I think that the Mac Mini/Mac Pro pale
in sales to the iMacs as far as Apple desktop sales go.
Simple, they see the writing on the wall, ie much smaller sales
than mobile, so they want the legacy product to go away, which
means they can focus on the much bigger mobile market. The
only reason they still make them is to milk that market and
support their legacy userbase, the same reason they were still
selling the iPod Touch all these years after the iPhone came
out.
Why did they fund development of a new iMac Pro which is coming
this December as well as the new MacBook Pros that came out this
June? That's a contradiction of "milk it like an iPod".
