| | PC BUYER'S GUIDES, 2004 AND 2015:
(Wonder what Dell is thinking?)
Our print colleague Walter S. Mossberg just published his annual spring PC buyer's guide, in which he advises mainstream PC buyers which components are vital and which are overhyped, and recommends what buyers ought to spend to get a machine they'll be happy with.
This spring, Walt's checklist -- which you should read here -- includes these minimums: 256 megabytes of RAM, a 40-gigabyte hard drive, 32 MB of video memory, a built-in CD-RW drive, USB 2.0 connectors, and notes that flat-panel screens keep getting cheaper. His recommendations for digital-music lovers include an upgrade to an 80-gig hard drive, FireWire ports, good speakers and a subwoofer.
Seeking a sense of how far technology has come, we looked back at Walt's first PC buyer's guide, published just after Christmas 1991. His minimum recommendations then: 4 megabytes of RAM, a 100-megabyte hard drive, and floppy-disk drives that could handle not only 5" disks but also the new 3" disks. These days floppy-disk drives are no longer standard fare, 100 megabytes hold less than two albums' worth of MP3s, and many a software patch would fill that hard drive and still need more space.
Just for fun, we thought we'd use the latest buying guide as a springboard for making some predictions about what we'll be looking for in 2004 and 2015.
Clearly, the innovation and excitement of the high-tech life is moving out from the PC to the galaxy of peripherals -- digital cameras, iPods, hand-helds, etc. -- that use it as a hub. At the same time, the PC itself is becoming part of a home network of desktops, laptops and peripherals such as digital video recorders. (This has extended elderly PCs' lives; some live on, bereft of keyboards and monitors, as external storage devices on home networks.)
Given the lack of new "killer apps," we doubt that next spring's PC buyers will need faster processors (though PC makers will try to convince them otherwise) or more RAM or video memory. But we do predict that hard drives will keep getting bigger and that any decent 2004 PC will come with an ammo belt of slots for USB 2.0, FireWire and the flash-memory cards used by digital cameras and other devices. We also bet most PCs will come with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, Bluetooth will be an increasingly common complement to Wi-Fi, and wireless network hubs will be common options for bundling with your new PC. Finally, we predict consumer-electronics devices that can link up with home networks will be hot -- this is a feature TiVo offers now.
As for 2015? Gosh. Will that spring's PCs be as far from today's as today's are from 1991's? If so, they'd have 65 gigabytes of RAM and a 25-terabyte hard drive. That much RAM doesn't seem likely to be used, but you never know: Back in 1991, Jace would have chuckled at fantasies of 512 MB of RAM before going back to bang out a subpar senior thesis on his amber-screened IBM PC Portable. (Which, incredibly, he actually lugged back and forth on planes between Florida and Connecticut.) However, a mammoth hard drive as standard fare wouldn't surprise us. Nor would living in a world in which PCs, consumer electronics, household appliances and even disposable products retrieve and exchange data invisibly and do so anywhere you can make a cellphone call today.
Not that we think the future will be perfect. 2015's Macs will undoubtedly levitate and have holographic displays, while daring Windows PC makers will be tiptoeing into offering boxes that look like stainless steel. We're sure we'll still be hip-deep in spam (probably full-screen video porn), sharing a printer over a PC network will remain as simple as piloting a nuclear attack sub, and rival programs will still be hoarding system resources and seizing file extensions for their exclusive use. But we're looking forward to it nonetheless.
Care to make a prediction for the must-have functions of 2004's PC? How about 2015's? Send them to us at realtime@wsj.com, and we'll post them this Thursday. If you want to share your thoughts but don't want your letter published, please make that clear.
Write to Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry at realtime@wsj.com
Updated April 28, 2003 |
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