Op-Ed

The Imminent Demise of the Traditional Desktop PC (also, the state of Apple's Corporate Policies)

My Macbook Pro has been an incredible machine for around 3 years now. I am by no means an Apple fanatic or fanboy in any way, but I am more than willing to give credit where it is due, and their exorbitant prices are certainly a result of the unparalleled quality and stability of their products. As a testament to this, their operating system is so well designed that it is essentially invulnerable to malware.

Despite this, I am no longer willing to put up with their business practices, which are ridiculously restricting and controlling. And Yosemite is great looking, but it seems like it pretty much broke every app and functionality of the laptop, and every time I want to do something, it seems I must install drivers and countless other workaround-type operations. Even the hardware of their products is much more deliberately difficult to upgrade and customize. 

What good is a product that I can't even make my own to allow it to do the things that meet my needs? The answer is: their bottomline might be affected if you could upgrade it yourself for cheaper rather than buy the entirely upgraded model for an outrageous price. They are currently attempting to exert their influence over other luxury items that make up the biggest investments in a person's life (i.e. cars, homes, etc.), so look forward to the continued dominance of this corporate juggernaut. And since I mentioned juggernauts.. anyone willing to buy an I, Robot? (couldn't resist mentioning)

All of these things have led me to be in the market for a new PC. Initially, I was curious about the advent of Chromebooks. These are very affordable laptops (about $200-400, depending) which are designed on the idea that you do not physically store anything on the hard drive of the computer itself, but instead, to their cloud storage service (some laptops offer 1TB free cloud storage with purchase). This allows the computer to possess very minimal internal memory, which is expensive, in order to be able to be very fast as well as relatively cheap intended for casual use. They also feature a new OS, Chrome OS, whose fate is as of yet uncertain. They are also very sleek and modern looking, only adding to their appeal.

After looking through Chromebooks, I somehow stumbled upon the announcement of Intel's new NUC kit. This is the future of the traditional desktop PC. Basically, you buy this mini PC, which is about the size of a router. They run about $350-400. This only includes the GPU and CPU, however, and they come standard with very little in the way of internal memory and RAM, so those you upgrade at your own choosing. Also, you need to provide your own computer screen, keyboard, and mouse, but that's fairly straightforward, as you probably already have those things laying around somewhere. They include a multitude of ports for all the connectivity options that you would ever need. So, for about $500 on average, you have a fully functional, very capable, portable, compact, PC and possibly even gaming machine that connects to any TV screen that you desire, or multiple monitors even. While they may not be capable of extremely intensive tasks, for the everyday user, they are capable of doing anything and everything that you would ever need.

The PC market is bracing for the continued downtrend in sales, and I believe that in the next 2-3 years, they will become the archaic and clunky boxes that they were destined to become. A relic of the past, as Moore's law continues to prove itself as valid.