My point isn't that PCs aren't going to not be needed at all, it's that the mass market for them will shrink away if they jack up the costs. The high end market will stay there, but when games run worse on a $400 laptop than on a $400 tablet, why would you get the laptop? Now if Intel and nvidia increase prices so that $400 laptop becomes $800, THAT will kill it.

You can get a BT keyboard for a tablet for like $70.

Don't project your own feelings about using PCs vs tablets onto the entire market and think that's how it is. In the 90s it was "grandma got a PC!" so they could use the internet and watch videos and such. Now it's "grandma got a tablet!" and the old PC from the 90s is still there in the corner for those times she needs it...she's not buying a new one unless it dies. Make the replacement cost more and she won't replace it at all.

The "good enough" performance of ARM chips on mobile devices is killing the need for the low-end CPUs. The high-end ones are still needed, yes, but there's no killer app to propel people to upgrade their 4yr old high end CPU for the latest high end CPU.

I have an i7-2600k that I run at STOCK speeds with a GTX 770. I can run pretty much every game I have, including ones from 2015, at max settings at 1080p (all the display I have room for). Games are being made largely to run on the consoles first, and the new consoles are weak compared to modern PCs. This isn't the 360/PS3 days when they rivaled PCs, MS and Sony went cheap this time.

So I reiterate--the lack of performance innovation is already here, the CPUs are "good enough" for 95% of the people so they spend more time making them power efficient than faster. AMD's competition isn't spurring Intel to do a thing about making them faster, it only keeps prices down. Should their exiting the market make Intel feel they can charge MORE for what they're giving us now...who would go for that?



The Jedi Master