On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 11:57:58 UTC, Tony wrote:
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".
Yes, I was simply noting not "in the paragraph you're quoting
above."
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.
Sure, there are multiple reasons that PC sales are declining and
many homes still keep a residual PC to get their work done. With
the DeX dock and Sentio shell coming out this year, my prediction
is that those residual PCs will get swept out over the coming
5-10 years.
But that established PC userbase shrinking is not what you should
be worried about. I've talked to multiple middle-class consumers
in developing markets- they would be considered poor in the US if
you converted their income to dollars- who tell me that they
recently got their first smartphone for $150-200 and that it is
the first time they ever used the internet, with cheap 3G/4G
plans that are only now springing up. They don't use the web,
only mobile chat or social apps.
Now, do you think these billions of new users of computing and
the internet are more likely to buy a cheap laptop shell or dock
for their smartphone when they someday need to do some "lean
forward" work, as you call it, or spend much more on a Windows
PC? I know where my bet is.
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).
No, they'll bring a Sentio-like laptop shell, which only costs
$150. Your performance or portability arguments for PCs are
losers, that's not affecting this mobile trend at all. The
biggest issue is that productivity apps have historically been
developed for desktop OS's and are only starting to be ported
over to or cloned on mobile, like Office Mobile or Photoshop
Express.
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.
$400 PCs are vastly over-specced for most of their owners, they
won't even use most of the compute headroom on a $200 smartphone,
which is why they're already shifting. The only issues holding
the remaining 75% back are the need for mobile work accessories
like Dex/Sentio and some PC-only apps, both of which are changing
this year.
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
I'm not making theoretical comparisons about RISC versus CISC,
but actual power and battery life measurements where mobile ARM
devices like the iPad Pro come out way ahead of equivalent x86
PCs like the Surface Pro 4 (scroll down to the sections on Energy
Management):
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-iPad-Pro-Tablet-Review.156404.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-iPad-Pro-10-5-Tablet-Review.228714.0.html
Now, I initially said that ARM efficiency is only one factor in
greater battery life, no doubt iOS is much more optimized for
battery life than Windows. But all benchmarks pretty much find
the same results for just ARM chips. I'm not interested in
theories about how CISC x86 could be just as good if Intel just
tried harder, especially since they threw up the white flag and
exited the mobile smartphone/tablet market:
https://www.recode.net/2016/5/2/11634168/intel-10-billion-on-mobile-before-giving-up
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.
I don't know why you're so obsessed with storage when even
midrange smartphones come with 32 GBs nowadays, expandable to
much more with a SD card. My tablet has only 16 GBs of storage,
with only 10-12 actually accessible, but I've never had a problem
building codebases that take up GBs of space with all the object
files, alongside a 64 GB microSD card for many, mostly HD TV
shows and movies.
You're right that taking calls while using the smartphone to get
work done could be a pain for some, I don't see that being a big
issue however. Maybe those people will start carrying around
cheap $10-20 bluetooth handsets to take calls when their
smartphone is tied up doing work, like some rich Chinese
supposedly do with their phablets: ;)
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/25/3915700/htc-mini-tiny-phone-companion-for-your-oversized-smartphone
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.
I think the overlap is much less than you seem to think.
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.
Yeah, I already went over some of this in the other dlang forum
thread about mobile that I linked initially. Most mobile games
would do better if written in D, but we don't yet have the D
mobile libraries needed to make that easy on them.
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.
Yes, of course they're still largely developing mobile games on
PCs, though I'm not sure why you think that matters. But your
original claim was that they're still using PC-focused IDEs, as
opposed to new mobile-focused IDEs like XCode or Android Studio,
which you now highlight.
I don't use any IDEs, so I honestly don't care which ones D
supports, but my point was that mobile game devs don't need to
use outdated PC-focused tools when mobile is a bigger business
and they have their own mobile-focused tools nowadays.
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.
Yes, Windows is dominant, dominant in a niche, internal IT. The
consumer mobile market is much larger nowadays, and Windows has
almost no market share there.
As for Microsoft, Windows is not their only product, they have
moved Office onto the dominant mobile platforms. As long as they
keep supporting mobile, they could eke out an existence. Their
big bet on Azure is going to end badly though.
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.
It seems containerization is taking off more on linux now for
such things, though Windows is trying to get into this too,
following far behind as always.
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.
Sure, are you saying you can't do powerpoint and docs well on an
iPad Pro or smartphone/Sentio though? The iPad Pro aims for the
high end of this PC-replacing mobile market, with its extremely
powerful Apple-designed chip, while a $150 laptop shell combined
with the smartphone you already have aims for the low end. That
basically leaves no space for a PC, once all the software is
ported over.
I'd like to be there when Cook tells all Apple employees they
need to turn in their MacBooks for iPads.
Heh, most would likely rejoice by then. :)
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".
Because their userbase was rebelling? I take it you're not that
familiar with Mac users, but they were genuinely scared that
Apple was leaving them behind, since they weren't refreshing Mac
and Macbooks much anymore and all Apple's focus is on iOS:
"more and more people point to the current Mac Pro’s stagnation
as proof that Apple is abandoning the Mac Pro market."
https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
Apple threw them a bone, because they're long-time users who
likely all buy iPhones and iPads too. Pretty soon, there will be
so few of these Mac laggards, just like iPod users, that they
will stop doing so.
