Nov 17, 2012

The Death of PC

I'm using iMac with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard in my home and Lenovo ThinkPad with Windows XP in my office. As I wrote in the entry "Whydo I buy Apple Products?", basically I'm satisfied with both of iMac and ThinkPad.

It's enough for me just to be able to use a mailer, a browser, and MS-Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). I guess that most PC users are as same as me. This situation hasn't changed since I began to use Windows 95. I can say that there has been no innovation of PC at all for the past seventeen years.

When I touched PC at the beginning, I used PC with MS-DOS 3.1. At that time, I didn't connect PC to the Internet, and mainly I used word processor, 一太郎 (Ichitaro), which was the most popular Japanese word processor, and WordPerfect, and Lotus 123.

After Windows95 was released, the way of using PC was changed dramatically. It became much easier for me, as an ordinary user, to connect PC to the Internet, so a mailer and a browser became must-have items. MS-Office expelled WordPerfect and Lotus123, and I began to use PowerPoint. It was a kind of revolution that changed my office life.

And then, as I wrote, although PC has been improved, nothing innovative happened.

Now I should update OS of my PCs. Some of applications, for example Flash Player and Kindle, don't work on Mac OS 10.5, and the end of service of Windows XP will be April 2014.

I called the customer support of Apple, and we talked about which version I should update to. The latest version is Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, but it is possible that some of old software don't run on the version 10.8, so I decided that I would update to version 10.6. In similar way, my company decided that they would update to not Windows8 but Windows7.

It's too much of a bother for me to update OS, because nothing will change by updating OS. It's just marketing of Apple and Microsoft.

2 comments:

  1. MS-DOS?! Now you've brought back memories! I remember MS-DOS and floppy disks and telex machines!

    Recently there's been an emphasis on touch screens for PCs (not just tablets), especially with the brand-new Windows 8.

    I can't get used to touch screens. They're OK when I'm playing, but when I want to work, I need a clean screen without smudges, a fast keyboard and a superfast internet connection. Stop faffing around and get serious! :p

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    1. I like ThinkPad's pointing stick, because I can keep my hands on the keyboard. I didn't use Windows8, but I guess that I don't use touch screen. In fact I like command line interface, so I love MS-DOS, haha.

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