What do you think the 20-50 year future of the home computer will be?

[xrunner]

the God of Heaven is truth to them that love him. as for the atheist, science is your only hope without any guarantee. 

Here we go!!!

[jonovid]

the God of Heaven is truth to them that love him. as for the atheist, science is your only hope without any guarantee. 

Here we go!!!

you ask about the future of the home computer.   so I did say what I know to be true .  the convergence of many unrelated technology & science.
along with the many desires of the human heart.      what started with dolly the sheep continues to this day now add neural implants in a human body.
the interface between electronics and biological science.   were there are no ethics.  everything is for sale. 

[james_s]

Trying to predict the future of technology is mostly a fool's errand, if you look historically most predictions of the future turn out to be wildly wrong, often comically so. Sure they get it right a few times, but that is only a matter of throwing so much at the wall that a few things manage to stick. There is always some unforeseen factor that comes up and changes the course of all sorts of things.

Already computers have become so powerful that most people have no need for one that is anywhere close to state of the art. I suspect that cheap low power devices similar to the Raspberry Pi will satisfy the computing needs of most people as I would expect them to keep getting more powerful while the computing power the average person needs is not likely to increase much. This again could be altered by some completely new application that nobody has thought of yet.

As far as social media and such, who knows if anyone will even care about that 20 or 30 years from now. I quit using it years ago and haven't missed it at all, I've been surprised that the popularity has lasted this long. Once the generation that grew up sharing their whole lives social media has seen enough of their friends and acquaintances face the wrath of the mob over things they said or did 40 years ago that are no longer socially acceptable they might start to realize that maybe posting everything is a bad idea.

[Cerebus]

Trying to predict the future of technology is mostly a fool's errand, if you look historically most predictions of the future turn out to be wildly wrong, often comically so. Sure they get it right a few times, but that is only a matter of throwing so much at the wall that a few things manage to stick. There is always some unforeseen factor that comes up and changes the course of all sorts of things.

There are some however who have a much higher hit rate than others, Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind, and an interesting question is "Why them?". If one can extract the commonalities between people who make better predictions, then one can use those to select who to listen to now about current predictions of the future of technology.

[james_s]

There are some however who have a much higher hit rate than others, Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind, and an interesting question is "Why them?". If one can extract the commonalities between people who make better predictions, then one can use those to select who to listen to now about current predictions of the future of technology.

Well there are always going to be people who are more knowledgeable about a topic than others, or who have a stronger interest in it. There is also I suspect some confirmation bias, Arthur C Clarke made a large number of predictions so it is not surprising that he had a relatively large number of hits. I would bet he had quite a few misses too.

[MK14]

[David Hess]

until we find a way to enter information into a computer that doesn't require a keyboard, not much else will change. If you are a die-hard console terminal person then the world really hasn't changed that much in 60+ years and we are coming full circle on using remote terminals.

Over the past 10 years I have been going back to older technology.  I finally got fed up with wireless mice and keyboards so now I have wired ones.  I swapped my "modern" keyboard for an old style mechanical one.  I am using more external storage rather than less.  I also have more open terminal windows, active serial connections, and do more command line interaction because improvements in modern GUIs have made them less functional.

If you consider the Smartphone, it's basically a very, very fast wireless telegraph...

Most people never needed the functionality of a personal computer so a smartphone or tablet computer is sufficient for them but I also do not consider smartphones or tablet computers to be replacements for personal computers when a personal computer is what is really needed despite all of the advertising saying otherwise.

[james_s]

until we find a way to enter information into a computer that doesn't require a keyboard, not much else will change. If you are a die-hard console terminal person then the world really hasn't changed that much in 60+ years and we are coming full circle on using remote terminals.

Over the past 10 years I have been going back to older technology.  I finally got fed up with wireless mice and keyboards so now I have wired ones.  I swapped my "modern" keyboard for an old style mechanical one.  I am using more external storage rather than less.  I also have more open terminal windows, active serial connections, and do more command line interaction because improvements in modern GUIs have made them less functional.

If you consider the Smartphone, it's basically a very, very fast wireless telegraph...

Most people never needed the functionality of a personal computer so a smartphone or tablet computer is sufficient for them but I also do not consider smartphones or tablet computers to be replacements for personal computers when a personal computer is what is really needed despite all of the advertising saying otherwise.

I have tried a few wireless mice and never found them to be worth the trouble. I'm going to be in front of my computer any time I'm using the mouse anyway so I don't get the point of wireless, it isn't something I need to carry around with me. My favorite keyboard is still my IBM Model M mechanical keyboard that I acquired around 1991 and used on a 386sx-16 and today I use it on my main i7 desktop.

I've been saying the same thing about smartphones replacing computers ever since I first heard of the "post-PC" nonsense. Mobile devices have replaced computers for people that never really needed a computer, they just wanted a way to use the web and a PC was the only way to do that. The people who actually made use of their PC for more than content consumption and casual communication still need a PC and will into the foreseeable future.

[rs20]

I'm actually not that worried about the future of the home computer -- extrapolating the trends in CPUs, and especially GPUs, over the past decade or so seems encouraging.

• In CPUs, AMD is really blurring the lines between enterprise/server CPUs and personal/consumer CPUs; there's going to be a need for corporate workstations for a long while yet, and those a great for doing "real computing" (really not that bad for gaming either, especially if you slap a good GPU in there)
• GPUs used to be fairly gamer-focused devices, but they've grown in generality to the point that they are basically enormously powerful parallel processors that happen to be well tuned for doing graphics, but can do all sorts of stuff

I would be going too deep into speculation-land to try and figure out what the economic drivers for these trends are, but I think anyone who wants to naysay the future of home computers should at least provide one? Compared to the trend of Apple serializing iPhone batteries to prevent user repair, these are incredibly encouraging signs to me. In fact, the only threat I really see is that sort of anti-consumer sentiment seeping over to the PC world (in fact, Intel has toyed with it a fair bit.)

...I doubt that many of us will really understand the multi-core, super doomiflex desktop computers of the future.  Nor can an individual write the software to employ such machines....

I can't disagree with a sentiment of these statements more. For any given problem, it is significantly easier to write software today that it was decades ago, despite the underlying hardware becoming much more complex. Individuals can, and routinely do, write low-level software that runs on modern CPUs, some efficiently exploiting multithreading, and some using the massively parallel computing power of GPUs. It's not that hard.

You might think that programming modern computers is more complex because modern pieces of software are more complex and written by huge teams. But those are solutions to much more ambitious problems that were intractable 40 years ago. It's the problems that are harder, not the CPU-wrangling. If you want to solve Sudoku, automate your accounting, do some scientific simulation (I dunno, the sort of things you might do on a computer 40 years ago), it has never been easier to do so.  The one exception to all this might be for an individual who absolutely demands an in-depth understanding of how a CPU works in order to program it -- I will admit that an ability for abstract thought it possible more necessary than it was 40 years ago.

PS/ What I write above might be BS, mainly because I'm 35 years old.

[EasyGoing1]

the days are gone where you have to up grade because your computer is too slow to run the newest software. Firm/software updates are really all thats needed year to year.

And THANK THE GODS FOR THAT!

Until I got my 2013 MacBook Pro, upgrading annually was almost a necessity for me because before that MBP, no computer I owned could keep up with the way that I use them. That MBP finally gave up the ghost this last December so I had to get a 16" 2019 model ... and I was thinking about the fact that it has 32 gigs of RAM, and back when I was only 12 years old, my Commodore had an extravagant 64k of ram ... my computer today has 500,000 times more ram than my computer did when I was 12. That's truly phenomenal to me. Also, the there was a time when I would have laughed if you told me that my main computer would be a laptop. Now I can't see ever going back to a larger footprint. Laptops are plenty fast enough these days to keep up, no question about it!

Quantum home computers? never say never of course ... surely, if it's in the stars I hope I get to see it happen before I exit stage left. When I read about how they can guarantee a secure wireless connection using quantum entanglement - because any tampering with the link would immediately be revealed because of the nature of quantum entanglement ... it was MIND BLOWN for me ... and the bandwidth in such links is almost at a level of being unbelievable.

No doubt, our grandchildren will get to participate in some amazing advancements in technology. I feel lucky to have grown up just before the Internet was made public and all of the radical technological discoveries that have happened in my lifetime, but I truly believe that what I got to witness will pale in comparison for whats to come...

[David Hess]

the days are gone where you have to up grade because your computer is too slow to run the newest software. Firm/software updates are really all thats needed year to year.

And THANK THE GODS FOR THAT!

You may not have to upgrade your computer because of lack of processor speed, but lack of enough memory and lack of support for older hardware means that you still need to upgrade.

[gnuarm]

the days are gone where you have to up grade because your computer is too slow to run the newest software. Firm/software updates are really all thats needed year to year.

And THANK THE GODS FOR THAT!

You may not have to upgrade your computer because of lack of processor speed, but lack of enough memory and lack of support for older hardware means that you still need to upgrade.

Most of the lack of support issues seem to be related to OS upgrades.  Now that Windows 10 seems to be the permanent face on Windows I guess that is behind us. 

I'm using a used computer that was built with Win 7 installed but upgraded to 10 when recycled.  It was a top of the line machine at the time and is still very fast.  CPU speeds no longer increase dramatically year to year and this machine has 32 GB of RAM, so still ahead of most machines.  I've had it two or three years.  My main concern is that it is a HOT box!  Sometimes I can't keep it in my lap where I like to use it. 

Can't find anything new I want to use because they've compromised on the keyboards now making the arrow keys toy size and often hiding the home, end, pgup and pgdn keys.  I've seen some that even shrink the width of keys in the entire numeric keypad.  What are they thinking?  I'm guessing it's a combination of wanting to keep the keyboard to a rectangle for aesthetic reasons and use the same keyboard in both 15 inch and 17 inch machines (I use a 17" for visibility, old age is a biach).  So I'll keep using this thing until it turns back to beach sand.