Webdesigner Depot: Is Mainframe2 the end for desktop computing?
Hmmmm. I’m thinking, “Nope.” Not until everyone’s on faster ‘net hookups. And this turns the dial on the ‘rental model’ to 11.
Comments:
My issue is strictly performance. I don’t want to have slowness in Photoshop - it can seriously affect the ability to use it (imagine retouching an image with a small, fine brush, and having the interface pause, and then start drawing again when bandwidth restores). Bad enough on a fast Mac. Lightroom 5 was a power-hit, and tools that were smooth in 4 are now laggy in 5 ... annoyingly so. And that’s without the cloud issues.
Firmly agreed. I meant to add a caveat that some things—games, e.g., or anything really graphics intensive—are just out of the question. Still, leaves a lot of room for low-hanging fruit, word processing and specialized apps and such. I think this will find a market. Kill the desktop, though? See a discussion over on Facebook where I mentioned you and this article…I’m beginning to worry about whether the “desktop” can survive without becoming unbelievably expensive.
Look at how slow Apple was to update their ‘power’ desktop computers. [iMacs are glorified laptops, largely off-the-shelf parts with a fancy custom case.]
Yet a laptop is not powerful enough for what I need to do. An iMac is affordable, yet barely adequate. Some build “Hackintoshes”, but the updates are hairy and it’s patently illegal.
Switch to Windows? I did a couple of times ... too much maintenance required. And Windows 8/8.1 is a freaking nightmare.
Give me Internet2 and a fast cloud experience ... I’d be happy.
Will, I don’t know what sort of power you need for Scrivner, or if it would run in the smallest Amazon instance. But I’ve got one up there, it’s ~ $1 a month for the disk and 2 cents an hour when I’m using it.
As for Lightroom 5. I just upgraded from 1.4, and it’s a lot slower on my early 2009 era iMac. There’s very little that I do that actually stresses a machine, but Lightroom is one of those things. I keep checking the wine site to see if the windows version will run on my herking linux machine, but no luck so far.
Steve Perlman tried to do this as a consumer service with OnLive but in the end his grasp never caught up to his reach. There’s still a service but from co-workers who used to work there the post-bankruptcy version is a shell (er, pun intended).
Thanks, @Eric—I will definitely go and check that out.
Eric, my mid-2011 3.1 I5 gets dragged to a near-stop on some Lightroom functions ... especially annoying working through my Concorso shots. I have to flip through 3100 images, editing, retouching ... and I keep having to optimize the catalog to get decent performance. Even with all that, the previews can take forever to redraw, and the crops go crazy.
BTW, I did a bone-headed thing last night. Started altering an image, forgetting I had all 91 images selected for export. So the alterations I did to that ONE image were percolated to all 91. Well, you can add effects to all those images at once, but you *can’t* undo in bulk. I had to go through each image and backtrack in the history. Luckily the last thing I did was export so it was easy to find. Just don’t make my mistake! Lost a half-hour of good work time.
@Eric—thanks again! I found out that I can run a micro-instance of Windows Server (2012, even) as part of the “free tier” for a year. It’s more than enough (I think) to run Scrivener. Very much appreciated!
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It’s funny…I’ve told you about my issues with Scrivener. And the other day I thought, well, if I had a desktop PC, I could just remote desktop into it. But I don’t have a desktop PC, and I don’t want one just to run one program that I like. So I thought, well, it’s a virtualized world. Why don’t I just go get a Windows instance in the cloud somewhere? And I looked and it’s inordinate—no less than about $45/mo. from what I saw. Within a year, you’d have bought a PC or two at that rate. And I thought, someone is missing a big opportunity here. There must be a lot of low-lying fruit out there. Though I’m sure MS and everyone else doesn’t want that world to happen. So I’ll follow this with interest, though you’re absolutely right that connectivity just isn’t there consistently enough to make the leap wholly. Until we all live on a Google campus or in an Apple spaceship, we must search on.