My next PC won't be real

After working a bit with Eclipse and the Android SDK, I have come to the realization that my PC is a bit ... lame ... and needs to be replaced. The PC is an old Dell Optiplex that I found in the "giving place" in my apartment building. Someone else was throwing it away, and I adopted it. I replaced the disc and pushed the memory to the limit. It served me well for the past few years, but it cannot handle the development tools effectively.

The question is: what new PC do I select? Should it be a PC? Or a Mac? Or a tablet? I'm thinking that the new PC will be none of these.

Perhaps my new PC will be a virtual PC in a cloud. Instead of buying a physical PC and installing it at home, I can rent a virtual PC on a cloud service (for example, amazon.com's EC2, or VMware's cloud). I don't need the PC -- all I need is the processing power to drive Eclipse and the Android SDK.

Think about it... I don't need the PC box sitting in my room. I don't need the cables and wires. All I need is processing power... and I don't really care about the location of the processor. With the internet, I can run my applications anywhere.

I *do* need a way to talk to the virtual PC. I need a mechanism to control Eclipse and see my files. (Really, I want a tablet app that lets me talk to Eclipse in the cloud.)

In the eldar days (before the first IBM PC), the only folks using microcomputers were determined hobbyists and a few really determined business users. The latter thought that they wanted computers, but all they really wanted was the business applications.

Today, people use computers but only from inertia, and Apple has shown another path. People want processing power, not computers. They don't care about CPUs or memory... all they want is for their apps to work.

Current cloud apps are offering a glimpse of the future of apps. Phones and tablets have made the purchase and installation of apps easy and inexpensive. GMail and Google Docs have made apps available wherever there is an internet connection.

Why would anyone go through the trouble of buying and installing a physical PC?

The current cloud offerings are built around servers. Amazon.com EC2 is designed for servers (build your own, but talk to it like a server). Google App Engine is built to run web apps.

The next wave will be personal computers in the cloud. Computers that can run plain apps and talk to you in a VNC client, or maybe even a browser.

The following wave will be personal apps in the cloud... and apps will mutate to live in the cloud. The app will have two parts: a small client on your phone or tablet and a back end on the server in the cloud.