My mother’s laptop started having power issues a few weeks back. I told her I suspected it was the battery as I’d had similar issues with a previous laptop. She took the advice of the Fry’s man that in fact she just needed to buy his new power adapter and all would be well. It seemed so for a little while but it’s seriously malfunctioning now. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that she was sold a power adapter at the wrong power with the wrong current, but it’s been a long time since I did any Electronic and Electrical Engineering at university, so what would I know?
The point isn’t the mis-selling by Fry’s, taking advantage of a customer who didn’t know any better than what she was told by the self-professed in-store expert, who turned out to be little more than a charlatan. It’s Fry’s after all. The point that I took from this was a reminder of how many PCs we’ve been through as a family this last few years. The failure rate of these drastically cheaper laptop PCs we’ve had flooding the market in recent years is staggering. In fact the whole PC experience is increasingly dissatisfying when you compare it to alternative ways of accessing the same media and enjoying the same (or often better) services.
The general purpose PC - even through the general purpose interface of the browser - is going the way of the standalone at-home PC, which went the way of the mainframe-terminal in the workplace, and so on. A couple of posts ago, I wrote about entering a fourth wave of consumer computing. I described it as the normalization of the technologies we’ve grown to love - the elimination of the explicit “computer” (a general purpose work-horse machine), in people’s home and mobile experience of Internet content and services.
A couple of things have brought home to me the nearness of that transition and just how rapidly I believe it is going to come. The first is this set of issues with my mother’s PC laptop, which I’ll come back around to in a moment. The second was my receipt of a 3-D Internet-app-enabled Blu-ray player from the good folks at Samsung (thanks fellas!), my subsequent testing of that and my poke around in the SDK. I’ll review this and post that, shortly. Until then suffice it to say that, while it’s clearly early days in apps-on-tv, it is great to see that such a big player has got so much right already, and that it’s investing heavily in a big bet on the future of this technology.
The other half of the equation - the demand side - looks increasingly solid too. Are people really going to put up with all of the hassles of PCs with their complexity, lack of reliability, their jack-of-all-trades master of none nature, in the next replacement cycle? Or are they going to realise that with things like the iPad, or the iPhone, or pretty soon apps-on-tv, or some combination thereof, they can do at least 80% of what they want before even considering owning a PC? When one includes in the equation the emotional engagement that can come from apps that people truly love - for example the personal apps of family or friends - one quickly overcomes the desire to get that last few percent of functionality a PC might give them. At the very least, I feel confident in arguing that that is the case for a plurality of PC users today.
Indeed, my mother already owns an iPad. The PC is used for occasional Skype use and Facebook games. It’s only a matter of time before these are on her TV without the intervening computer. In the interim she can rely on other laptops in the house for Skyping the UK. Why fork out for another unreliable, overly-complex laptop PC?
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