Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Handheld computers sell in the millions, a.k.a., smartphones. The folks who produce the videos and the apps, however, need something else.

We’ve all see the numbers on smartphone sales – millions. I am still astounded at how many of these things sell in the U.S. and around the world. And we’ve seen the sales of the tablets as well.

A Dinosaur Computer (?)

Who in the world would buy an old-fashioned under-the-desk computer, keyboard, mouse, and monitor? There is a group of people who would and still do. They are known as:

Producers

These aren’t producers as in movie or music producers. They are producers as in people who build products. Hence, the name.

These are the people who make the videos, photoshop the photos, write the apps, and do all those old-fashioned things that require more processing power than you find in an iPad. While many producers are creative types that flit and fly about with ideas falling from their ears, many producers are the boring types of people who understand Fourier transforms, differential equations, matrix multiplication, and that ilk.

Have you done any million-point Fourier analysis on your iPhone lately? I didn’t think so.

The producers still buy those big machines with multiple monitors and they don’t even play Call of Duty on all that hardware. The Call of Duty producers use all that hardware to produce it, as do the guys who make the great Call of Duty commercials as do the guys who make the telecommunications chips that allow you to WiFi and 4G and all that stuff.

The next time you see an ad for big hardware, a.k.a., dinosaur computers, remember that someone produced that app you are using to twit a photo of the funny looking computer to the world.