When do you think PC building and PC in general will die?

[Spindel]

It will die when building your own car will die. 

 

In other words it might shrink to a even more niche hobby but will never go away. 

 

To further expand on this, instead of the Lego principle that PC building is today, requiring basically no skill. It might move back to how it was in the 70s when you scavenge the market for different chips and solder them together yourself to achieve the most efficient machine you can get. 

 

EDIT:// I just got a flashback to a guy I knew that in the 90ies wanted to expand the RAM on his Amiga (don't remember the model). Because of limited expandability slots to put the memory in he soldered two memory modules togheter and basically doubled the RAM and it worked. Try that on a modern system. 

[Kisai]

 

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

that was actually also one of those crazy IBM / Ken Kuturagi ideas, since every little thing should have been CELL™ powered, your fridge could have actually helped you render things on your gaming console when it had "spare" computional powers... 

 

 

I think the idea was actually pretty good, and something like this may still be the future, reason why it didn't work was those cell chips were a bit premature and were power hungry af while also running hot as hell, no one wanted them in their every day devices such as fridges and DVD players... it simply was highly impractical. 

Well a Fridge has a certain kind of application that no other appliances have, you could put the computer module in contact with the cooling loop and thus it can run silent since the fridge's own cooling loop will cool it and no additional fans are needed.

 

That said, "smart fridges" aren't yet a thing because what was envisioned was you using the fridge's barcode/camera reader to identify what is in the fridge as you put things/take things out, so your fridge could automatically order/restock items. In practice the tech for this didn't really arrive until about 3 years ago (Amazon's automatic stores), because it requires cameras that can identify the exact item in the fridge, and when it's been removed/rotated, even when the light is off. It also needs to be able to locate the best before/expiry date. It has to be as seamless to typical use, otherwise you get the problem that SmartTV's all have, where the computer module actually hinders and creates more work for the user.

 

All you should need to do to use a smart fridge is start with an empty fridge, place items in it (maybe optionally wave the item in front of a camera for it to identify the item the first time.) Any unused processing time on the fridge could then be used for doing other tasks, not folding tasks, but like acting as the main/backup mesh network control. Since a fridge is supposed to last 20-30 years, you want the computer module to be able to be replaced with an identically shaped module, but no fridges do this, they don't even standardize on water filters for front-facing ice/water dispensing.