Every year, it’s becoming more apparent to me that computer speed isn’t improving like it was 5 years ago and I’m okay with that because most of the processing power is being handled in the cloud.
These are my Wakoopa Stats for last month. I used Firefox for 20 hours and spent another 10 hours on Justin.TV (a lifecasting site) which I visited in Safari Web Browser. Email took a solid 10 hours of my time in Microsoft Entourage and another 6 hours spent in Twhirl while I was twittering up a storm. I usually use Yoono for Twitter but I was doing some testing on the other platform for a few hours and it took over the top spot.
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If you analyze the graph and replace Entourage with Gmail and replace Twhirl with Yoono in my Firefox Sidebar it would mean that I’ve spent nearly all of my time doing things in a web browser. Aside from rendering a webpage, my computer doesn’t have to do much. Let’s add in Pandora for music, Google Reader for RSS and Hulu / Netflix for on-demand movie watching. Yep we’re still doing everything via a web browser.
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It’s amazing to me how people, including myself, want the fastest hardware when nearly everything we do is performed in a browser and the servers on the other end are doing the grunt work. PCs are getting cheaper because people don’t have to buy the fastest hardware anymore. Sure video games and HD playback via Blu-Ray take some processing power but technologies like OpenCL that offload tasks to the graphics card will mean that more people can have Intel Atom powered netbooks that fit in their pocket for most tasks. Our PCs can be sub $1000 and still do every task we need and this means less power consumption on the client level. Of course, there will still be people like me who spend $3000 dollars on an Apple laptop but if your typical usage is launching Firefox and playing Flash video, there’s no need to have a super fast computer.
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My girlfriend Laura does everything she needs to do on a 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4 with 2 gigabytes of ram and it’s slow at booting or when launching FireFox 3.1 but once she’s on a website, the computer doesn’t have to do much and that’s the beauty of living in a web browser. My next laptop is going to be a netbook powered by a 1.8Ghz Atom processor. As long as it can drive a 24″ monitor and run Windows 7, I’ll be happy and be able to get everything done.
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Paez
