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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 8, 2004
New Life for the PC Computer development has been a steady, plodding process, but a coming series of innovations will transform it. Here's what to expect The personal computer may have revolutionized the way people communicate, calculate, gather information, and run a business. But their shape and style has remained mind-numbingly stagnant for nearly three decades. Save a few flashy designs from Apple (AAPL ), year after year the PC has remained a bastion of anti-design, a wasteland of beige boxes full of circuits hooked to clunky monitors. Sure, their performance improved dramatically over the years. Today's models have more memory by several orders of magnitude than PCs made a decade ago. The chips that power them now boast eye-popping data-processing speeds that were unimaginable at the dawn of the PC revolution in the late 1970s. And today's desktops and laptops take up less space, largely because of flat-panel displays' widespread adoption. But on the whole the PC industry has followed a steady, plodding evolutionary path. WAVE OF ENGINEERING. No longer. In the next decade the PC will finally morph from a beige-box bomb to a thing of beauty. The first hint of bigger changes to come emerged with Apple's nifty iMac, the all-in-one with a swinging flat-panel display on a crane-like extender arm. In the past year, the PC industry has unveiled a plethora of new looks and out-there concept computers that radically depart from the dominant big-paperweight model. Displays will come untethered from CPUs and will wander all over the house receiving rapid data streams over wireless Wi-Fi connections. Laptops will transform from the rectangular sameness to incorporate new shapes that could resemble a PDA, a portfolio, or even a magazine. Want that PC in hot pink and in the shape of an orb? No problem, the PC factory of the future will personalize a mold for you and fit components to match. These PCs will be the beneficiaries of a new wave of engineering in every aspect -- from newfangled display technology to better takes on battery life to improved storage vaults. Look no further than the dazzling displays now under development. Old-style CRT monitors were deadweights and dead uses of space. Today's displays are flatter, thinner, and lighter, thanks to LCD technology. But the next generation will be even better. Think plastic displays that you can roll up and put in a tube or tack up on a refrigerator. SILICON-POWERED BUTTERFLY. How about the old warhorse, the disk drive? It's poised to undergo a set of technology shifts that, although evolutionary in nature, will have the revolutionary effect of providing massive storage capability exceeding a terabyte in the average home PC within a decade. That's enough to handle tens of thousands of high quality MP3s or hundreds of feature-length movies. That compares to 80 to 100 gigabytes that are the standard today, an amount that's far too small to handle the approaching tidal wave of rich recorded media such as high-definition TV, which sucks up 20 gigabytes of memory in a single hour's recording. Add it all up, and you have an industry that's not unlike a caterpillar that's about to turn into a vibrant silicon-powered butterfly. In this special report we explore these possibilities and give you an inside look at what the future holds for the personal computer by detailing the innovation path for key areas such as design, displays, storage, and batteries. Advances in all of these categories and more will conspire to make the PC one of the most dynamic players in the electronics segment in the coming decade.  By Alex Salkever, Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online
BW MALL
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