[SmartPhones] Mobile computing and the demise of the desktop
Apple’s earnings, which were recently released, had an interesting subtext beneath numbers that generally disappointed investors. As Apple’s flagship iPhone and iPad sales had another brisk quarter, Macintosh sales slowed, and desktops fell 13%. With the iPad eclipsing overall Mac sales, is the tablet finally poised to banish the desktop to the annals of technology history? The dawn of the specialized processor One of the major factors that might spell the end of the desktop as we know it has been the rise of specialized processors. In the traditional end-user computing market, upgrading processing power was largely a question of adding more transistors. Need more number crunching, video processing, or data manipulation power? Add more transistors. Computer graphics largely led the transition of specialized processors in the end-user space, with everyone from gamers to graphics professionals quickly discovering that a commodity video expansion card, optimized for mo...