this is sad

this is sad

>As I've said years ago: Linux distros are on borrowed time and clocks are tickling.

Your timetable is wrong because your assumption is wrong. What's happening isn't an entire market shifting, but a fragmentation of a market that was serving participants poorly. The prior market we all lived under is that computing resources came in one generic variety (desktop/laptop) that could do everything. What we are moving to is fragmenting out the content consumption users into a separate hardware/software paradigm targeted specifically to consumption which does other things very poorly. Consumers of content don't need mice and keyboards. They don't need much input capability at all.

There is certainly a portion of the residential consumer market that doesn't need general purpose computing and will be quite happy only with a device targeted at consumption. Personally I expect a least a 50% decline in PC sales that will remain permanent. There is also a secondary issue in that computing power has now exceeded most people's needs (This may or may not change with a killer app like VR). The result being that those people who still need the large general processing of a computer/laptop are refreshing their hardware at a much slower rate, moving from 3-5 years to 5-8 years. This is mostly because PC's have stopped improving, for the most part you can't tell a computer built yesterday from computer built 5 years ago just by using it.

I believe the idea that PC/Laptops are going away is an overestimation of these two effects. There are far too many computing uses that need general PC's and mice/keyboards that are not going away. Most of the people with phones/tablets and even chromebooks still have general PC's they use, they just don't use them for the tasks the other is good for, such as content consumption. This is one of the benefits of fragmentation, as you end up with more total sales overall, but the bigger problem for PC's has been the stagnation in processing power and the lack of software that needs it. Unless this changes the PC refresh cycle is going to keep stretching out and will result in real harm to the computer market. We've already seen a significant price increase at the high end PC due to this.