Robert Pogson

The last argument of those who cling to the ideal of the Wintel desktop is that gaming office documents content-creation requires Wintel. They deny the current assault by */Linux on ARM or x86/amd64 as incapable of replacing Wintel in any manner. That’s clearly wrong on many fronts.
“Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pegged 2014 as the year when such devices become reality. "In 2014 there will be broad adoption of new processor technologies from Intel and AMD, for that matter from ARM," said Moorhead of his prediction that chip makers will have silicon by then that not only sips power at tablet-appropriate rates but has the horsepower necessary for content creation. "This is going to happen. And that means there won’t be a robust, premium 10-in. tablet-only market."¹
The modern ARM processors² have greater throughput than the processors Intel was shipping just a few years ago and they were good enough then. Certainly Intel’s latest stuff can do the job but at much greater cost, weight and power-consumption.

Do we need an x86 desktop/notebook to do content-creation? No, if the real world is any judge. Facebook, YouTube and other sites are crammed with stuff generated by millions of smart phones. All kinds of real people are generating still images, audio and video using nothing more than a smart phone³. I know. My “little woman” is one who does. She has a good camera but leaves it at home these days. Would a smart phone be the first choice of a professional? No. Is every user of a PC a professional? Not by a long shot. Only a small percentage of PC-users are professionals. Professionals may use smart phones as necessary.⁴

Technically, one does not need to choose any particular client machine for content-generation if there is a network-connection to some powerful machine. It is trivial to control the behaviour of some server from an ARMed computer. That’s what thin clients do all the time. That’s what web-browsers do. There are kinds of content-creation that won’t work well that way but even Hollywood makes motion pictures using similar technology, selecting clips with a client machine and sending stuff to a server-farm for rendering. You can see people editing videos with their smart phones.⁵ Typing and cameras and microphones work with smart phones and tablets very well thanks to the Linux core which knows about such devices. We have had networked operating systems for decades. It’s the third option for content-generation and many millions don’t even care about the technology. It just works.

So, you can use any kind of personal computer for any kind of task if you do it the right way. Wintel certainly is no longer necessary if it ever was. */Linux works for millions. Why not you? There never really was a good reason to exclude other technologies. That was M$’s idea to make them rich⁶, not you. No doubt the trolls will shout that “Wintel works so why not use it?” but then we would have to look at re-re-reboots, malware, price,… There are plenty of reasons to exclude Wintel from IT.

References

• 1 If the PC dies, Windows 8 will be its killer, says analyst | ITworld.
• 2 ARM Cortex-A15 vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3 vs. Intel x86
• 3 Making & Posting a You Tube video with a Droid
• 4 CNN Reporter Flees From Tunisian Police and uses a smart phone after his regular camera was seized.
• 5 pop02 tutorial – editing video with an android smartphone
• 6 US DOJ v M$ – Findings of Fact – Microsoft’s Actions Toward Other Firms