Intel's Compute Stick?

What do you do with a PC on a stick?

Intel's Compute Stick delivering a full Windows 8.1-compatible PC on an HDMI stick for $150. It has an Intel processor, 32GB of storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a USB port, and it can just plug into any screen and turn it into a PC. Cool, right? It's part of a new revolution in computing, which is turning every screen into a computer. We're just not sure why.

The Compute Stick becomes available right after Google announced its Chromebit, which does the same thing but with Chrome OS. And bubbling under these slicker consumer products, for a while, has been a whole world of semi-functional Android-powered sticks, usually with cheap Rockchip processors.

The whole category is a bit of a side effect, a knock-on from the development of smartphone technology. All of the parts here are smartphone parts. The companies have just removed the cellular radios, and with them the need to deal with annoying, controlling mobile-phone companies and federal regulators.

We're Fighting the Law...

The obvious challenge that most of these products are trying to solve is that people want more Internet content on their TVs. We want to stream all of that stuff that we know is out there, and thus be able to break free from overpriced cable TV bundles. Smart TV interfaces are awful, and a lot of content is restricted from streaming on TVs because of incomprehensible licensing restrictions that make no sense to normal humans. So the PC sticks, intitially, will become ways for people to watch what they want to watch on TV.

There's an advantage to having a full PC even there, by the way. Roku, Amazon, and their ilk all still sign up for the miserable mesh of licensing agreements, which means that you can watch things on your laptop but sometimes not on a PC. Hooking up a PC to your TV lets you get around all that nonsense.

Unfortunately, as soon as you start trying to solve that problem, you earn some powerful enemies. The TV studios, cable companies, and content owners don't want you to break their rules, absurd as they may seem. Individuals can generally survive in the gray areas of streaming what isn't formally permitted, but isn't officially forbidden, but any real company that tries to improve access to content without cutting the existing players in will get slapped down.

A PC on Every Billboard That leads to the second problem. Home theater PCs and Android-powered TV sticks have existed for years, but they've never broken through to the mainstream because their setup and interfaces just aren't simple enough for non-technical users. That's because professional developers shy away from working on this problem out of fear of getting sued by content companies. That leaves development to individual hackers and open-source projects, which aren't known for creating interfaces that the non-technical can really enjoy.

So let's look at other uses. The sticks could do amazing work as digital signage for businesses, but that isn't going to get consumers' blood flowing. Dell and others have been plugging sticks as a thin-client solution for enterprises, but they haven't been taking off in a big way. As a primary computer, I don't see the advantage of these sticks over a cheap laptop, especially after you have to pay for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.