If the rumors are correct, my current 2-year-old MacBook Pro may be the last 17-inch laptop I'll own, replaced with a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a "retina display" that effectively has a higher pixel count but with no Ethernet port. That may be good news for my back, but the gradual move away "laptops as workstations" worries me a little bit.
While Dell still have docking stations and with Thunderbolt on Macs you can daisy-chain displays and maybe even the network, there's still no clear reason why everybody prefer paying a hefty premium for what are essentially 95% of the time stationary computers. At the same time, with faster Internet connections, using a home computer as a remote display for a big server at work (the way consoles worked up to the 80s) is now easier than ever. Hey, if OnLive lets gamers play video games on remote consoles in real-time, I think a simple remote desktop would be fine.
I suspect that "virtual consoles" of pooled virtual machines are still years away from common use simply because the large vendors in the virtual machine market still have prices too high unless you go above hundreds of machines. Until Open Source projects pick it up (the same way they did for servers in general), most companies will simply skip over virtual desktop consoles. In effect in we're in the uncomfortable in-between the supremacy of desktop workstations and a return to consoles, paying an unnecessary premium on portability.
So, how many dongles and wires will I need for my next "portable desktop"? One for the Ethernet port, one for Thunderbolt to DVI, one for the lock, one for the headset, and finally one for power.
Published on May 23, 2012 at 21:19 EDT
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