Technology: Barron's Top Story -- November 4, 2023

Locator: 45937TECH.

Link here.

In light of this week's earnings report by Apple, this is a most interesting article on so many levels, but especially with regard to timing.

With regard to Apple, my hunch, the three top Apple hardware releases next year (2024):

• Vision Pro: to be met with mixed reaction, mostly negative; 
• will be a drag on earnings for at least three years;
• industry will love it; "you and I" -- not so much
  
• Apple iPhone 16
• possibly better received than the "15"
  
• a 27-inch iMac geared for streaming and gaming
• one word: huge 
• this will make Tim Cook look like a genius
  

Now, to the linked article:

As sales of personal computers soared during the pandemic, you could almost hear PC makers saying, “We told you so.”

For years, laptops and desktops had remained technology’s workhorse, even with most of the industry’s attention moving to smartphones and the cloud.

With everyone stuck at home in 2020 and 2021, global PC sales surged nearly 25%. Then offices reopened and the upgrade cycle came to an abrupt halt.

By 2022, PC sales were falling once again. This time, PC makers like Dell Technologies, HP Inc., and Lenovo Group are taking a different approach to rev up sales: The PC business is going all in on artificial intelligence.

AI's big opportunity goes beyond the cloud. 

“The killer app of AI,” says Dell Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke, “will be that you’ll love your PC again.”

The working theory of AI has been that it requires big, powerful computers, driven by hard-to-find graphics processors, primarily from Nvidia.

All of that computing—the creation of large-language models plus their continuing use—happens in the cloud.

Meanwhile, laptops, desktop PCs, and even mobile phones become simply access points to the cloud, where AI services like ChatGPT do their computationally intensive magic.

Even before AI, consumer and business laptops had largely become dumb terminals for using online platforms from Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alphabet‘s Google, Meta Platforms, and Apple.

Documents are in the cloud, email is in the cloud, photos are in the cloud, music is in the cloud.

“The network is the computer,” Sun Microsystems computer scientist John Gage presciently said 40 years ago.

PC makers are looking to change that paradigm. They are readying AI personal computers, with the first models set to arrive in the next few months. The microprocessor companies are excited, too. The common goal is to enable PC users to run generative AI applications right on their desktops, whether connected to the network or not.

Unfortunately I have to leave it at that. 

 So much more at the link. 

We will come back to this.