Time to Trash Your Laptop; the Stick Computer is Here!

There was a time when the Personal Computer chip performance followed the Moore’s Law. Somewhere after the Pentium chip was introduced, the performance enhancement started falling short of the predictions of Moore’s Law. While there are a lot of theories about the reason for the slippage, the most important observation was that the Desktop or Laptop processing power lost its significance with the advent of networking. Now network was your Personal Computer, and you had huge resources at your hand. The semiconductor industry too went into a rethink. After a brief blink, the smartphone started demanding more and more processing power. The semiconductor industry took up the challenge, and you had smartphone CPU performance following the Moore’s law again.

The smartphone had advanced with such great leaps that it now can do match the laptop or the desktop. The smartphone browser is no longer a handicapped contender; it can perform all the functions that a laptop browser can. On the other hand, the concept of cloud computing was slowly removing the reliance on the performance of your laptop or desktop. All you need to work on those number crunching applications was just a browser and a net appliance like Chromebook was enough to work on the cloud.

IT consultants have been debating on the strategy to replace the desktop/laptop in the work environment over a long period of time, with concepts like BYOD and Remote Desktop. In the midst of this debate the semiconductor industry have finally delivered the inevitable device; the computer on a stick.

Computer on a Stick

While the internal components of the laptop were getting squeezed every day, it did not really make much of a difference to the device except that the weight was reduced. The reduction in the size and weight of the laptop had reached its limits as the weight of the battery could not be reduced further and the size was limited by the display size. It was to get out of this crunch that the tablet PC was evolved.

To beat the two factors that impacted the reduction of the size of the personal computing device, the semiconductor industry had to come out with a design that is a bit risk as far as public acceptance was concerned. They have made two assumptions. The first one was that the display and a set of keyboard and mouse are something that you would be having at home and office by default.  The second one is that the power to your personal computing device will come through the micro USB port. This made the designers remove the two constraints in reducing the size of the PC. What evolved is the stick computer, more conveniently called as a stick PC. It is a device that looks slightly bigger than an internet dongle which has an HDMI port to stick it into a TV or Monitor.

The device with quad CPUs and 2 GB RAM can have 32 GB of internal storage space in the form of a flash drive. Extra storage can be added using micro SD cards. The Keyboard and mouse connects through Bluetooth. There is a Wi-Fi chip inside to deal with networking. Voila! You have a computer on a stick that can run using Windows or Linux. The best part is that you can carry it on your car keys and use it anywhere as long as you have a display device available.

Linux and Windows 8 PC on a Stick!

It wasn’t long ago that we junked our home desktop PC and settled for the Laptop. New users have already bypassed the Laptop and headed straight for the Tablet.  The new user suddenly has a very new genre of applications, some of which are platform dependent, but the successful applications always come out with multi-platform versions. The economics and the geography of the personal computer software have such drastic changes that the companies who were integrating the hardware looking at the future were totally thrown off the tracks. Take the netbook, it seemed such a wonderful device when it was conceived, but it looks so irrelevant today. The laptop survived on the corporate user’s workspace though mainly because of the inability to move out of legacy applications. However, it still worked as a device to login to their cloud computers. The other reason the netbook or the tablet didn’t much make inroads into the corporate or the adult users computing needs is that they were still slave to popular legacy  operating systems and applications that were installed on their own device and not something on the web.

Well now in the year 2015 we have a new kid on the block, called the Intel Compute Stick loaded with Windows 8, which will win the last frontier in this war against the desktops and laptops. The new kid is the Stick PC. Yes, it’s a PC packed into a stick the size of a pack of chewing gum. Just stick it into the HDMI port of your TV or Monitor and voila! You have a PC in your hands. Cool, but where are the keyboard and the mouse? Oh, they can be connected over Bluetooth. And how about disk space? Well, there can be up to 32 GB of flash memory, and if you think you need more there is a slot for the micro SD card. Of course, you have Wi-Fi and USB ports too, to connect to the net. What more do you need? Operating System? Sure! No worries the Intel Compute Stick Windows 8 comes pre-installed with Windows 8.1 at the cost of $149 with a 2GB RAM and 32 GB storage.

The Intel Linux Compute Stick comes with lesser storage at $89 a piece. We are soon going to see people carrying their Personal Computers on their car keys.

Carry Your Windows 8 PC on Your Car Keys

Have you ever wondered where all the computer retail stores have vanished? Yes, the desktop manufactures all fell like a pack of cards within the last decade. Laptops have moved to the consumer electronics space. You want computing products? You will find it along with mobile phones, tablets and digital cameras not very far from the washing machine and the television. With the processing power of the smart phone getting more and more powerful every day I was wondering what would happen to laptops. The netbook has already taken away a chunk of the laptop market. And now we have the new challenge from the Stick PC with Windows and Display bundle priced very near to the laptop.

Let us check out what do you get in a Windows 8 Stick PC and display bundle. The stick PC looks like a pack of chewing gum. It has an HDMI port that you can stick into the display. The stick PC can have a quad processor in a system on a chip configuration used in smartphones along with 2 GB RAM. It has a built-in flash drive that could be up to 32 GB in size. Additional storage can be added in the form of micro SD cards as the stick has a slot for it.

The SOC has built-in Bluetooth connectivity for connecting to other devices like keyboard or mouse. The touch panel of the display device in the bundle is ideally suited for operating in a Windows 8.1 environment. There are USB ports to connect to other devices. On the whole, it’s a pretty package, and I don’t mind replacing my laptop except that I lose the mobility. I guess we should soon see a bundle with a Stick PC Windows and a tablet-sized, battery powered display that you can fix on a stand if you want. So after you have used your device at home, you coolly slip out the stick PC from the display and put it into your pocket.

When you reach your workstation in your office, you will have a display on your table and you can take out your stick PC from your pocket and stick it into the display and continue your work from the point where you left it. Cool isn’t it? What do you do when you travel? Well hotels, airport lounges and dentists waiting rooms should be soon providing you with HDMI display devices for you to slip in your stick. Yes, you will be carrying your PC on your car keys.