People keep saying this but I don't think it's true. If your computing begins and ends inside a browser window then I suppose you don't need much. But for a lot of people processing power still matters. It matters how fast I can compile and run unit tests, it matters how well I can play games, it matters how quickly I can trans-code video, it matters how long it takes to process a filter on a large 300dpi image in photoshop.
And too there is the other side of the browser, all those sites running applications chewing through CPU cycles (facebook, gmail, twitter, amazon, even hacker news). The prospect that 5 or 10 years from now we'll be able to cram the computing power of an entire rack (say 1TB ram, 100 cores) into a single 1U pizza box server at a reasonable price has a lot of geeks salivating, including me.
If you think of transcoding video as video chat and photoshopping as automatic photo color correction and indexing when you import your photos, just about everybody does it.
I am very happy with my Atom-based netbook, but, you know, there is no such thing as a computer that's too fast.
transcoding video as video chat and photoshopping as automatic photo color correction
The former can be done more efficiently in dedicated hardware, which is also bound to be cheap. I suspect that this could apply to the latter as well. Just take the most common operations, such as the ones supported by iPhoto on OS X and support those in hardware.
There may be no such thing as a computer that's too fast, but there's also computers which are too hot, too heavy, too bulky, or useless because they no longer have power.
I'd like a cheap thing with the form factor of the MacBook Air, which can also act as a virtual terminal to my Smart Phone. The amount of computing power on a current smart phone is way more than enough for a majority of work-related computing. Add in sync backup of the smart phone to the cloud, and I think that would be ideal. You'd have none of the disadvantage of cloud computing, plus all of the advantages. You'd also have all of the advantages of the phone/pocket computer form factor, but none of the disadvantages when you need a better input device.
>> "there is no such thing as a computer that's too fast."
Right, but my point was that these days it's more likely to be the HDD, or network that's the bottleneck most of the time.
My Macbook pro is absolutely never CPU bound. It could have half the CPU power and I wouldn't really particularly care. Half the CPU power but SSD would be a massive performance gain.
I absolutely agree about today's mainstream usages.
A future app that's very popular and needs the power would change that. It's the kind of thing that is likely to happen as clever people play with that extra power (consider PARC research labs).
And too there is the other side of the browser, all those sites running applications chewing through CPU cycles (facebook, gmail, twitter, amazon, even hacker news). The prospect that 5 or 10 years from now we'll be able to cram the computing power of an entire rack (say 1TB ram, 100 cores) into a single 1U pizza box server at a reasonable price has a lot of geeks salivating, including me.
Don't mistake the average case with every case.