My home PC recently celebrated it’s sixth birthday it is starting to show it’s age. When it was new a P4 2.8 processor with 1GB ram was regarded as quite a respectable spec but times have changed. Contrary to the experiences of many it has run XP all that time, without a rebuild or any hardware trouble*. A bad upgrade experience led me to dump the Norton AV it arrived with, in favour of ZoneAlarm, but apart from that the only need to open the case has been dust removal. It goes ok, if slowly, and will live on in a secondary role but the time had come to update.
My next PC, what will that be?
I thought it would be a notebook but CAD/BIM capable spec machines are still expensive, heavy to carry and not really justifiable for occasional home CAD use. A Tablet PC appealed but they are as expensive, less powerful and still struggle with heavy graphics apps. Maybe it was a compromise I could live with because i needed a portable solution but then…
Something little got a whole lot smarter.
A bunch of applications I would normally run on the PC (or notebook) became available on another device. That’s what led me to get an iPhone which I use constantly, even occasionally as a phone! It deals with basic email, social media, browsing, blogging and much of what I need a laptop for!
When mobile I don’t need to run heavy CAD/BIM apps but at home it’s different. The lack of a decent machine meant lugging the work laptop home or putting up with really poor performance with demanding applications. When you’re playing with big data sets (CAD, photo editing, video, blogging or whatever) a slow machine certainly saps any joy of discovery!
Hello, I’m a [desktop] PC
That’s how this post came to be written on a nice, affordable, Windows 7 PC. A mid range Notebook budget will buy a very respectable desktop box (i5, 8GB ram, 1GB Nvidia card and Windows 7 64 Professional). The desktop is only viable thanks to my mobile computing needs being handled by the iPhone. Desktop performance, storage etc leaves a price comparable laptop in it’s dust and it will act as my network/media hub when not being used for “real computing”. Given a phone sorts my mobile computing, a PC in the box the rest of my home needs what is left?
I’m the Tablet fan, who doesn’t need one?
As we are on the eve of the next big, if you believe the iHype, great leap forward for Tablet/Slate devices I wonder will they have a role in your life? I thought my next PC would be a tablet (or laptop) but the need, if not desire, was killed by a smart little phone. Don’t get me wrong; tablets are awesome and have a very real role but I wonder how big the market is? Still, what do I know? I didn’t want an iPhone when they arrived...
Your phone, my phone - any smartphone - will become our primary portable computers long before these two products catch on in the mainstream
Buyer's Guide: 33 things you don't need if you have an iPhone
Every time I walk through Warehouse Stationery (New Zealand's equivalent to Office Depot) or Dick Smith's Electronics (pretty much Best Buy), I'm struck by how probably half the products in each store are pretty much useless to me since I've got an iPhone…
I’m hoping Apple’s miracle announcement tomorrow will be:
“iTunes that works!”
The iPhone is great but my iTunes experience reminds me of Sony’s Sonicstage. It was the application which accompanied their Net-MD players and that comparison is not a compliment! Awesome, for it’s time, hardware was crippled by clunky obstructive software trying to prevent legal use of content by it’s owner in the hope of preventing illegal users.
To pre-empt “it’s because you have iTunes on a PC” comments the Apple forums I’ve visited in search of iTunes fixes have just as many problem Macs with similar hassles. Mine have been mostly to do with device recognition, file cache and sync errors. The most annoying being iTunes randomly deciding I have TWO iPhones and that the one being connected is “another one”. I don’t have “another one” and more than half the time iTunes is happy to accept the one I do have as the one! If Apple just announced a fix for that it would make my day.
* Lets hope I can saw the same about the new machine in 2017!
