Tower PCs: An Endangered Species?

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining explainingcomputers.com this time i'm going to talk about the future of the desktop tower pc personally whenever i think about a computer i still first imagine a large case fitted with a motherboard and drives and other components but i'm also aware that due to changes in technology and the rise of mobile devices that the tower pc may soon be an endangered species tower pcs have been around for a very long time indeed if you owned a personal computer over 30 years ago but chances are it was about the same size roughly the same form factor as this modern tower admittedly 30 years ago your computer might have been placed horizontally rather than vertically on the desk and almost certainly it was beige rather than black but the basic size was roughly the same as this modern tower pc and yet today as we all know people are far more likely to own a smartphone or a laptop than a tower pc and to give ourselves a feel of this we look across to the data for how people view this youtube channel we discover that only 50 percent of views are now on desktop and laptop computers combined with the other 50 attributed to a phone tv or tablet more broadly if we examine this data from canalis we see that over the past 10 years laptops have constituted an ever increasing proportion of traditional computers sold and of course in the past few years not all of the desktops in this chart would have been tower pcs having established that desktop no longer dominates let's turn to the specific fate of the tower pc what we have here is pretty typical this is based on a standard called atx advanced technology extended that was introduced in 1995. and atx itself was a development of an earlier standard called at introduced by ibm in 1984. so the default the de facto standard for pc form factors hasn't really changed for the best part of 40 years although of course what's inside the case has changed a great deal if we look back to an early 18 motherboard i've got one here one of the things that strikes you straight away about an early board like this this has got a 386 processor one of the things that strikes you is the lack of on-board connectivity we've only got one connector on this motherboard it is here it is a keyboard connector and therefore if we look inside an atpc case we discover a lot of expansion cards to provide all of the connectivity and we also discover a power supply at the back and at the front a stack of drives including one drive for reading and writing a floppy disk now since the transition from the at to the atx standard all motherboards have had an input output and i o panel so if we switch around this tower we find its i o panel on the back there it is provides lots of connectivity usb ports audio jacks an ethernet port for connecting to a network pretty much all of the connectivity on many tower pcs is on the i o panel which is part of the motherboard and because it's part of the motherboard it means you don't have to have a lot of expansion cards inside the case and indeed many tab pcs today will have no expansion cards inside them at all and the ones that do have expansion cards probably have just one card which is a graphics card for if the pc is used for gaming high-end video editing things like that the other big changes taken place across the past five or ten years has been a reduction in the number and the size of the drives inside the average tower clearly the floppy drive has now gone the way of the dodo the floppy drive is now extinct and even optical drives aren't as common as they used to be although this pc still has a dvd drive and even hard drives are becoming less common inside tower pcs because of the rise over ssd storage and today it's now not that uncommon to find a tower pc that doesn't have a floppy drive or an optical drive or a hard drive because it only uses ssds for its storage and that storage might be on two and a half inch ssds like this but it might all be on m.2 drives tiny little s sds like this which plug directly into a computer's motherboard now one of the big consequences of the fact we've got fewer and smaller drives in our tower pcs and fewer or no expansion cards is that there's a lot of wasted space inside the case indeed in the average tower today there's probably more empty space and there is space occupied by useful components and it's therefore not a surprise we've seen the rise of the small form factor the mini form factor desktop pc marketplace with devices like this able to offer all the computing power that many users require to get a taste of where things are likely headed we just need to look to apple so if we go across to the apple website here we are we can see what the product range starts to be listed with the laptop computers but it then boots across to the desktops the first of which is the imac 24 and as we can see as this loads in this is a desktop pc integrated into a very thin monitor moving across we then get the mac mini another very small computer as we can see in the picture here although we can scroll down for an even better picture there we are we can see the size of the map mini relative to the keyboard and then after the mac mini the third desktop range is the mac studio recently launched the empower station as it says there that gives us a one picture of it if i can scroll properly let's scroll down though for a better it means to give us a better idea of the size there we go we can see it relative to the size of the monitor here and the mac mini and the mac studio both have a footprint which is less than 20 centimeters or 8 inches square all of the desktop macs we've looked at so far also use one of apple's m1 arm processors which have the cpu gpu and ram integrated on a single component this allows apple to deliver small powerful desktop computers that are also highly energy efficient indeed it's not until we go across to the mac pro the last of the list here there it is that we find a tower form factor computer there we are there's the mac pro if we go down there there we are clearly this is a tower mac and the mac pro is currently still based on an intel xeon processor and has a starting price of six thousand dollars so for the majority of mac users the tower desktop form factor is already extinct back in the realm of ibm compatible computers intel has for some years sold very small desktops called nucs or nooks nook stands for next unit of computing and as we can see if we scroll down on this page you can purchase a nook either fully assembled or as a kit which can be customized with some of your own components most nooks are 117 by 112 by 54 millimeters in size or 4.6 by 4.4 by 2.1 inches a wide range of processors are available with some looks in this very small form factor having an i7 cpu and up to 64 gigabytes of ram until very recently all nooks had soldered processors that could not be changed however in february 2022 intel announced the nook 12 extreme with a socketed cpu this supports an i7 or an i9 with the case being 357 by 120 by 189 millimeters or about 14 by 4.7 by 7.4 inches as a result a nook extreme can be fitted with a conventional graphics card and it's therefore not hard to imagine desktops of this size becoming popular with gamers as well as those who use pcs for video editing or 3d graphics just because apple and intel now sell small form factor desktops it doesn't necessarily signal the demise of the tower pc this said there are now lots of different small form factor desktops on the market from many different manufacturers some of these are mini pcs like this odyssey x86 j4105 whilst others use a micro atx motherboard to produce a miniature tower like this acer aspire xc that is similar in volume to a knock extreme yet other small desktops use a mini itx motherboard which allows a desktop pc to be built but is roughly the same size as a shoebox and sometimes far smaller as we've seen with the mini itx build that i've done on this channel to me at least what all of this suggests is that atx form factor tower pcs like this one are now sadly an endangered species certainly it's getting fairly rare to see boxes of this size being rolled out in organizations in companies in university departments you don't tend to see cases of this size being rolled out unless there's a particular specialist application and as apple has shown us so well with the development of its m1 chips and soon it's m2 chips it's now possible to integrate a great deal of processing power and memory and graphical processing power onto a single package and my guess is that sometime in the next five to ten years we're going to see a cpu gpu npu ram and storage all in a single package and as that type of development really takes hold i think it's going to be very difficult to keep justifying the sale of what are in effect largely empty boxes so to summarize all of this i would first make three key points firstly a smaller and smaller proportion of computers will be desktops and a smaller and smaller proportion of desktops will have an atx or similar tower form factor and thirdly even in gaming and video editing small form factor alternatives will by 2030 turn traditional tower pcs into a niche product sadly what these three points almost certainly imply is that it's going to get harder and harder to maintain and build your own computer for the best part of 40 years people like myself and many of you who've wanted to build our own machine have been very lucky that ibm created an open standard all the way back in 1984 and that that standard has pretty much endured so we could go and buy our own components buy our own box put them together build a pc like this but that's going to become harder and harder to do as a smaller and smaller proportion of hardware is in the same sort of form factor that allows that to happen granted things like intel's nooks can be self-built to a certain extent you can configure them but it's not going to be quite the same as building a tower pc this said i don't think with a form factor like this will disappear without a fight i would suspect that in 5 10 15 20 50 years time we will still see around some tower pcs although i suspect by then they will have become retro hardware i suspect there's going to be a massive marketplace for decades to come in second-hand components and in retro-style cases and parts so that people who want to keep building tower pcs will be able to do so but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very recent [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 312,829

Keywords: end of tower PC, future of tower pc, future of desktop pc, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, ATX, AT and ATX, Intel NUC, Intel NUC Extreme, Apple M1, Apple tower PC, future of computing, future computing, future desktop computing, future desktop PC

Id: DPFblw4ybHE

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2022