Market Developments And A Look At What Could Be « The Technology Column

27Apr/10Off

Market Developments And A Look At What Could Be

This is turning into an interesting period in the computing industry. ARM were looking to take over the netbook market by 2012 by providing fast, energy efficient processors for netbook and tablet PCs, but now Apple want to purchase them to screw over other companies. Yes we have the whole capitalism thing but surely this would turn into an near instant monopoly on the ARM RISC processor market?

Are tablet PCs the netbook killer? I believe not. They certainly have their uses, but your simple netbook with basic everyday features is still cheaper and aren't as prone to finger print smudges as a tablet would be. Tablet PCs are trying to merge the netbook and touch screen phone markets together, in my opinion, and it can do well though I don't see that as where the future will be. You can shake and touch a touch screen phone to make it perform certain actions, but I don't see that happening on something bigger like a tablet PC unless you want it to look like you are fighting a high tech version of etch-a-sketch.

The PC market needs a good shake up too. I think the PC as we know needs to shed a few layers. PCs have been carrying nearly three decades of legacy cruft which is stagnating progress. A new PC should be 64-bit only, come with only PCI-express for all secondary adapters, have terrific onboard sound, gigabit ethernet, 802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi, 8GB of RAM, 40GB+ SSD drive and a totally new operating system where several cores are written in assembly for speed, with maybe parts of the user interface written in C. Portability wont be a problem because the operating system will only need to work on that type of machine, but different companies will be able to provide chips for it. Sort of liking combining the Commodore Amiga and the Apple PC, but in a more interoperable way. You could even give it a RISC processor to get away from the weird memory addressing of the Intel processors.

So will Apple buy ARM, will tablet PCs be limited to the niche novelty market they seem to be aiming at or will they become more and will the PC as we know get the total overhaul and re-design that is desperately needed for progress? Who knows, but the next few months will be an interesting time for sure. Stay tuned.