

Over time, nearly all "essential PC components" become obsolete. - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/06/26/the-race-for-unplanned-obsolescence/

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bemmu
Yes, hard disks offer more capacity than solid state drives, but I don't think
that this continuing to be so will necessarily mean that people will always
prefer hard disks. Almost everything is now on the net, and hard disks are
becoming more like a cache. I play games from Steam, stream music and videos
and hardly ever keep local copies. It only takes about 15 minutes to download
one full CD-ROM of content.

Therefore I would currently prefer 80G of space on a solid-state drive if it
was a lot faster, more quiet and reliable if it cost the same as a 1TB hard
disk. For a laptop it would be a no-brainer if it also used the battery less.
Right now we are not quite there yet, as 80G on a good SSD costs the same as a
4T traditional disk, but I think it won't be long until the sweet spot is
reached.

Of course there are people with legitimate needs for a lot of space, for
example editing video. But for most casual users, SSDs will likely start
making more sense quite soon. Oh yeah, I would like to also clarify about my
previous comment which commented about Joel's SSD purchase. I wrote that maybe
he can next get his employees SSDs based on RAM modules. Some people seemed to
think that I was being disrespectful and making fun of Joel, but I hope from
this comment you can see that I just really like the idea of SSDs.

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cperciva
Other PC components which are mostly obsolete: Disk controller card, network
card, video card.

Sure, there are rare situations where you want more disk/network/video
performance than you can get via the support built in to motherboards -- but
I'd guess that the vast majority of new computers bought these days have none
of the above as separate components.

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amalcon
I agree with most of these, with the big exception being webcams. Not that I
see them going away by any means, but I doubt the author's prediction that
they will become universal. There will probably always be plenty of places
worth bringing your computer where cameras are not allowed.

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froo
See, I don't think you're correct about webcams.

Most of these other technologies have been supersceded by something superior -
the Webcam is a simple video input device.

Unless someone figures a superior method to get your image digitised into a
machine (for example, 3D imaging, sort of like how Microsoft is trying to
commoditize the 3D camera with project natal) - I really don't see these going
anywhere anytime soon.

I suspect the author's predictions will ring true in this regard, with webcams
becoming more advanced and being included in more devices.

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forinti
Now that it makes sense to plug the computer into the TV again, we could go
back to the old 8/16bit format for computers, with keyboard and CPU in one
case.

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whughes
Our TVs are a lot bigger now, though. It's much more practical to have a
wireless keyboard than a wireless display interface.

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jsz0
Yet despite all this progress we're still somehow stuck with BIOS.

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Zev
There are advancements here, such as EFI. All Intel Mac's use EFI now.

