Take a look at your fingers and what rests beneath them.. Is it the satin white and steely brushed glitter of Steve Jobs’ latest GM crop? Or is it one of Bill Gates’ home-baked, black and blue meat pies?
Everyone owns a computer and even though the terms are slightly misleading, it’s either a Mac or a PC. PC’s obviously have the handicap in the looks department, you can tell that PC designers look to the stealth bomber for inspiration but every time neglect the fact that a multi-billion dollar jet will always look like a multi-billion dollar jet while a computer designed to look like a multi-billion dollar jet will always look like a fat kid dressing up as a character from the Matrix and posing for MySpace photos. Macs tend to fail on reliability; the first run of everything they make explodes, be it on your desk or in your pocket and the second run has a battery life of 3.5 minutes. By the third run they’re back to blowing stuff up and on the fourth run they figure it was all to do with the charger and charge you a million pounds to replace it.
The whole debate is pointless though, the computer is heading towards it’s demise. According to Niklaus Wirth, ‘Software is becoming slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.’ By 2050, computers will be as fast as they’ll ever be. Adobe for instance, in their giddy excitement at the increasing speed of your laptop, are bolting more and more fatuous features onto Photoshop . And although you can now turn Slough into a New York apartment at the click of a button, wait three years and claim an actual degree for it, it ultimately makes your computer slower then the previous model with the previous software.
Don’t fret though, by 2050 quantum computing should be well on it’s way, and what the tech world is wondering is who’ll be pumping out these wonders of physics. It’d be nice to think that in 2065 I’ll be flicking through iTunes using only my mind on an iQuantum in a house made of glass and holograms but to be honest, Apple are rarely top of the tech tree, so it’ll probably be a Dell. Words – Tobias Revell