I believe I do. Car analogy time! That's what you were driving at, right?

So the group of nuclear scientists should instead be adjusting the AC on the car of civilisation, to represent whether nuclear tensions have cooled off or heated up.

Because of course if you turn the heater up too high, chances are you'll get all irritable, fly off the handle at some idiot who doesn't know how to drive, and launch an ICBM strike against that asshole who keeps tailgating you.

Sooner or later they're going to box themselves into a corner - they only have so many discrete 1-minute steps they can take before they find that the world is more fucked up than they thought possible, but somehow still carrying on.

Then what? Leave it at 1-minute to midnight, or edge ever closer in smaller and smaller increments?

Classist? I'm struggling to see it, but if you'd like to enlighten me on the nature of prejudices I didn't realise I had then please go ahead. However, I think you're assuming more about what I think than what I said provides evidence for.

As to putting artificial premiums on things... yes, of course I place a premium on things I want, that is what a preference is. I suspect there are enough people of similar preference, or come to that similar actual needs, that the original idea that the PC is imminently obsolete becomes unlikely.

You may be right; treating computing as an appliance could well produce devices suited to the "not good with computers" crowd. But I don't want one as my main device, and don't want to see that kind of thing crowd out the market for things that aren't hermetically sealed, underpowered, and locked into someone else's "ecosystem".

Look up the stated requirements for the simple things you see all over the place - Office, Windows itself, that kind of software. Versions from a decade ago (I'm looking at Windows/Office 2000) only ask for a CPU of 133MHz, 64MB of RAM, a few GB of disk space. Those requirements have ballooned upwards as more powerful machines became available

10 year old hardware would run current software at a painful crawl, if at all... anyone whose parents are still using a machine from a decade ago can probably attest to that.

I suppose it's not really very demanding as software goes, but the difference of capability (how fast it runs undemanding software, or how many such programs it can comfortably run at once) between a mobile device and a big box is still apparent.

If I have the maths right, I'm paying more than double what you are at the pump, and it only keeps going up. Damnable extortionate UK prices.

I suspect if your gas prices were the same as ours, efficiency would be a much more desirable thing... especially given the near-certainty that your average USAian is doing more miles across that giant-ass country of yours than those of us on small islands.

Seems to me that the trend isn't "the death of the PC" so much as "the rise of shiny toys for simpletons who don't know how to computer"

Use of traditional PCs might decline among those who want to use a computer the same way they use a microwave –to do a handful of simple pre-defined tasks, without any control or knowledge of the details– and maybe that's a big market segment these days, but I can't see myself replacing my big box any time soon.

I prefer the form factor, the desk setup, the ability to open the thing up and tinker with it, the extra power and storage... everything.

Maybe, but they were also running the software of 10 years ago, which sucked down a lot less in the way of system resources than the software of today. Maybe the upward ramp there is all just an empty upgrade treadmill, maybe not, but for the foreseeable future "the big box in the corner" is going to be the cheapest/easiest way to get a respectable amount of computing power into a home. Hence also, the platform of choice for demanding software.

Doubt you'd be able to sell those shirts for more than you paid for them though, so if you were attempting to use cotton shirts as your store of value you'd do badly when it came time to trade for something else.

So that'd be thrifty spending (still worthwhile), rather than an investment. For storing value, better off with those other commodities you mentioned, the ones that aren't devalued by virtue of being second hand.