
Why the Much-Hyped Post-PC Era Never Arrived - tanglesome
http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/why-the-much-hyped-post-pc-era-never-arrived.html
======
raldi
This is like the articles people used to write about the failure of the
paperless office to materialize. The revolution wasn't about literally having
no paper anywhere in the office; it was about being free to use paper for what
it's good for (e.g., cheat sheets, brainstorming, scratchwork) and getting it
out of the roles where was terrible (archives, data listings, memos...)

Similarly, "post PC" just means you're no longer chained to a desk or forced
to use Microsoft products -- not that the last PC has been stricken from the
Earth.

~~~
legulere
Actually more stuff get's printed than ever before.

~~~
Igglyboo
Got a source for that? Almost nothing gets printed in my office.

~~~
paulgerhardt
"World demand for paper is expected to grow by 2.1% per year until 2020."[1]

Though that's not exactly fair analysis. See for instance this graph published
by the European Commission Joint Research Center [2][3]. Developed countries
will use paper 0.5% more per year (less than population growth of 0.8%) but
emerging countries (like China at 0.5% population growth) use it at 4% more
per year.

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109000227)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/luBKny9.png](http://i.imgur.com/luBKny9.png)

[3]
[http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22544en.pdf](http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22544en.pdf)

------
snowwrestler
It arrived and we're living in it. The most popular operating system in the
world is a mobile OS. So is the second most popular.

This idea that PCs would vanish is a straw man; that's never been part of the
"post-PC" concept. Even in a post-PC world PC sales would still be expected to
go up over time, simply because of population growth.

> Chris says that this is because there are a lot of jobs that you simply
> can't do with a phone. To illustrate that, Michael Dell asked, "When your
> kid goes off to college, are you going to give him only a cell phone?"

Ha, this just proves the point. By the time almost any kid goes off to college
today, they've already had a cell phone for years. PC is just what they use to
do their homework. That is the exact definition of what the post-PC world was
predicted to look like.

> As a result, there is no post-PC era, but rather an era in which the device
> you use is the one that works the best at the time and under the
> circumstances.

Again--this is the exact definition of what people mean when they say post-PC.
A decade ago, in the PC era, every single thing you wanted to do on a computer
had to happen on a PC. Today there is an explosion of connected devices, and
the PC has moved from being the central object, to a specialized tool you use
when you need to.

~~~
marcosdumay
> This idea that PCs would vanish is a straw man; that's never been part of
> the "post-PC" concept.

That's not what people were saying. Even as recently as December 2013.

> Even in a post-PC world PC sales would still be expected to go up over time,
> simply because of population growth.

That's certainly not what people were saying. There were even claims that low
volumes would make the PC more expensive, and out of reach of entire groups.

~~~
snowwrestler
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
PC_era)

This has a good summary of what was actually said.

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pan69
Mobile devices are mostly "consuming" devices. If you want to do computer
based work, e.g. type a letter, you're going to need a different type of
device (i.e. laptop or desktop, one with a decent display and keyboard).

What has changed from the desktop era of the 90's is that there are a lot more
consuming devices today. People now have phones an tablets to access the
Internet who wouldn't have this type access 10/15 years ago.

~~~
walterbell
_> People now have phones an tablets to access the Internet who wouldn't have
this type access 10/15 years ago._

Some (hopefully many) of whom will discover what is possible on desktop
creative platforms that have less restrictions than phones.

~~~
pan69
Yes, indeed. That might actually be very true. That large group of people who
are simply "consumers" today might become "creators" in the future.

------
seanmcdirmid
Post PC was never about PCs disappearing, it was only about a maturation of
that market; we can expect no real growth from PC sales in the future.

IBM just announced a new mainframe yesterday and we've technically been post
mainframe since the early 80s. We've been post PC since 2009 or so (earlier
for desktops), we'll hit a peak on phones soon enough.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>Post PC was never about PCs disappearing

That's exactly what is was about. I don't think its fair to move the goalposts
now. I think its clear that the standard bog PC or laptop where the end user
has admin rights to modify it, install software from arbitary sources, etc
just isn't going to go away and that the mobile/touch format is extremely
limiting outside of a certain use cases.

There were minority voices who called this. We said that mobile/touch is
wonderful for consuming and trivial tasks, but just can't compete with a big
screen, big keyboard, big processor, etc. I remember the Jobsian types yelling
us down. I think for all of Apple's innovations, they are still really a
consumer/consumption based company. They'll never crack the enterprise
productivity egg. There's something odd about seeing so many workers carrying
both an ipad and a laptop to business trips. This is also why I think the MS
Surface might mature into something that bridges the gap as a single device.
I'm not holding my breath, but if I had to buy a new Windows laptop, I might
just spring for the Surface, especially after Windows 10 comes out.

~~~
bobajeff
"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what
you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban
centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and
power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much
started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks.
They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value,
but they’re going to be used by one out of X people."

I don't see any moved goal posts.

~~~
aetherson
I do.

That quote doesn't just say that PC demand stagnates, it says it goes down,
massively. It says that from X people who, at the time of that speech, use
PC's, only 1 in the future use PC's.

And we're seeing that's not true even if X=2. And X was never supposed to be
as low as 2.

What we are seeing is that a massive amount of computer USE moved over to
phones and tablets -- tons of web browsing, tons of email browsing,
calendaring, etc. Probably if you looked at the PC era and the post-PC era in
terms of seconds in front of a screen or whatever instead of people, you'd see
that 1/X ratio. But for people, it remains useful for almost everyone to have
a PC -- even if they use that PC less than they used to.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Consumer PC demand has gone off a cliff in the last few years, to the chagrin
of companies like Lenovo and HP. Corporate PC use has remained steady and even
increased to pick up some of the slack (it helps that these are a bit more
profitable than consumer sales).

There is no point in upgrading a PC you hardly ever use, even if you don't
toss it out altogether. Better to get a new iToy every one or two years
instead.

------
dkopi
It never arrived because touch screens will never out perform a mouse and
keyboard. Perhaps in the future when tablets/phones/rifts have a better man
machine input interface

~~~
sp332
Lots of companies tried putting keyboards & trackballs on phones. People
bought phones with big screens instead.

~~~
roadnottaken
Part of what makes keyboard + mouse so efficient is that you're sitting at a
desk while using it. I've never been quite sure how a phone + keyboard/mouse
is supposed to work. And if you plug it into a screen and sit at a desk then
why not just use a computer?

~~~
fokov
I always figured the future will be a light weight device that you carry which
automatically backs itself up to the cloud (like current phones) but with the
extra ability to "hook" into simple docking stations for multiple monitors,
keyboards, speakers, network, etc when it is needed. This way the little
device can work without anything else, but also allow a full user experience
of a desktop.

This way I could dock my phone at home or work and have full access to my work
without carrying around a big, heavy laptop. Utilizing external docking power
(possibly another computer) would be great until phones get all the horsepower
we need. Chances are this is one of the goals of the casting devices
(Chromecast, Amazon's device, etc).

Streaming and cloud infrastructure still need to get better because American
ISPs just put the money in their pockets instead of creating a better product.
Chances are this device will show up in foreign markets first. I'm not in EE
so I haven't tried to build it yet...but maybe one day for fun.

~~~
roadnottaken
I agree, this sounds like a great future!

------
bobajeff
I have a feeling this is one of those things that happens but just not the way
many imagined it would.

Like with Linux and Open Source Software in general becoming popular. Many
probably thought open source was going to be this new business model powering
software companies. People also probably imagined a Linux-based Desktop
distribution was going to become more popular than Windows. Instead hardware
and service companies adopted open source software and usually as components
as part of a proprietary product. While Linux made it's way through to
consumers via a phone OS.

Yet the way these things happened doesn't contradict the prediction in anyway.
Just because people added on their own speculation doesn't make what was
originally said false.

With that said it's going to happen because the PC as we know it doesn't work
in people's lives the way they need it to. It works for programmers, designers
and writers perhaps but for everyone else is not the right tool for the job.
And it's only a matter of when something more suitable is made.

And In many cases a phone is that but due to some artificial constraints
(Flash, Traditional website design, and plain old device discrimination) it's
not always up to the task.

------
squozzer
In the car world, one occasionally hears the truism "There is no substitute
for cubic inches."

And sometimes in the tech device world there is no substitute for square
inches.

~~~
Cieplak
I've always heard it as, "Ain't no replacement for displacement."

------
roadnottaken
It's going to be a long time before keyboards and mice are replaced for things
like spreadsheets, graphic design, coding, or writing. If all you're doing is
texting or facebook, sure -- tablets are great. But any sort of precision work
will require precision input-devices for the forseeable future...

~~~
JadeNB
I'm not sure that your first sentence follows from the second. It is
(probably) true that precision work will always require precision input, but I
think to equate 'precision input' with 'keyboard or mouse' ignores possible
future revolutions. Who would have thought in the '90's that touch would
really be a viable general-purpose input mechanism in the near future?

------
buckbova
I loved the idea of having a phone that could do everything and waited in
anticipation for the atrix 4g webtop application. But it didn't live up to
hype.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1opzCFrRkI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1opzCFrRkI0)

~~~
walterbell
Hopefully OEMs will make cheaper versions of this Panasonic Windows tablet,
which supports a dock with external monitor, kb,
[http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad-
fz-m1-rugge...](http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad-
fz-m1-rugged-7-inch-tablet-launches-in-june.html)

------
lupinglade
A tablet or phone can't truly replace a desktop/laptop. It was a given.

~~~
jinushaun
Jobs' "truck versus car" analogy. Everyone switching over to cars as their
daily driver doesn't eliminate the usefulness and necessity of owning trucks.
It's just a new equilibrium.

~~~
aetherson
Well... sort of. But it's probably more aptly a bicycle versus car analogy.

Like, suppose that originally there were 1,000,000 people who all owned PCs.
There are a few ways that could change:

a. All of those people, or 950,000 of them or some other gigantic number of
them, could give up their PCs and start to use a phone and/or tablet instead.
This is what you might call the naive death-of-the-PC scenario, in which the
PC either disappears or becomes an unusual tool for specialists.

b. 500,000 of those people or somewhere in that vicinity give up their PCs and
start to use a phone and/or tablet instead. This is what you might call the
realistic death-of-the-PC scenario -- the PC doesn't disappear in any way
disappear, but demand for it is permanently massively lower.

c. Few people give up their PCs at all. Instead, large numbers of them get
phones/tablets in ADDITION to their PCs, and move some of the work they used
to do on their PCs to their phones/tablets, but everyone or a large majority
of everyone keeps their PCs and still do some work on them. This is the rise
of the smartphone without a corresponding fall of a PC.

I think that scenario C has turned out to be the reality. Smartphones and
tablets have replaced the PC heavily for some use cases, but have not replaced
the actual device very commonly at all. It's somewhat unlike a car/truck
tradeoff -- while some people need trucks, most people don't, and have cars
instead. It's more like a car/bicycle tradeoff -- most people who have
bicycles, even ones who use their bicycles regularly, also have cars.

~~~
camillomiller
Nice analogy. Jobs was once quoted saying that computers are like bycicles for
the mind. That somehow closes the Jobs-quoting circle, I guess.

