10 ms·

The ‘Post-PC Era’ Never Really Happened and Likely Won’t

60 points by kerng 8y ago

Nasrudith 8y ago
It depends on how you define post PC with all seriousness. Some people already use only a phone or tablet as their computing device. We aren't even post mainframe era shockingly as some still use mainframes instead of server racks. And that is actual ones not virtualizations of ones with proven but basically unmaintainable software.
scott_s 8y ago
I find the authors claims odd. Yes, people who used computers for work before everyone had a smart phone and tablets were plentiful still use computers at work. That hasn't changed. But what people use at home for things that are not work has most definitely changed. I know people in their 20s and early 30s who do not have a computer with a keyboard - and if they do, I've never seen them use it at home. In 2008, I would expect most people in their 20s and early 30s to have a laptop at home, that they used for basic internet stuff. I don't expect that anymore. The author seems to think only about professional activities. But from what I have seen, home consumption and day-to-day activities have moved off of "computers" and on to devices like smart phones and tablets. This is true for me personally: I have a work laptop, but I don't have a functioning one at home anymore. At home, I only use my tablet and smart phone. Years ago, my personal laptop broke, and I realized there was no point in replacing it.
- ascagnel_ 8y ago
  I think this is also why tablet sales have slowed down in recent years -- once you get to about 2013/2014, the benefits gained from buying a new tablet basically leveled off for most users, when the average use case is email, web browsing, watching video, and maybe some light gaming. The same thing happened with cheap laptops in the early 2010s.
travbrack 8y ago
I'm counting the days until I can just plug my smartphone into a KVM dock and have it be as useful as a full-blown desktop.
- alain94040 8y ago
  Yes, except the future is wireless. So no dock required (let's say, 5 years from now).
- frankydp 8y ago
  Something like Dex? https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Note that Samsung was neither the first nor the best to tackle this problem. Motorola did it arguably "first" with the Atrix and the BIONIC on Android back in 2011. Once Android 4.x hit, they were able to remove the trashy custom Linux it ran and show the Android tablet interface when plugged in that way. Microsoft, more recently, did a proper PC-on-a-phone implementation with Continuum on Windows 10. Pop a Lumia 950 or an Elite x3 into the dock and you have a Windows PC. But minus legacy apps, of course. This was the "best" implementation I've seen. The commonality with both of these, is the hardware arrived ahead of the software being able to carry them. Android wasn't ready to support the Atrix at the time as it didn't even have a tablet UI at the time, and UWP apps weren't developed enough to equate to a "PC" either.
    - Aloha 8y ago
      I'm really hoping for a version of macOS that could support a complete embedded iOS in it, electrically, there is no reason why I cant fit the processing power I need in my computer, in a phone or tablet - but as you correctly point out, the software still has no arrived. (I speak to macOS, because I'm an Apple Ecosystem guy - the same approach could be taken by microsoft)
Aloha 8y ago
I've been waiting for a while for someone to call this. While consumers may have moved on to do most of their device time in front of a phone, tablet or phablet, the rest of us still spend many hours a day in front of a computer. There is still a sizable functionality gap between a tablet or phone, and a laptop or desktop computer.
- Retric 8y ago
  Intel etc is not making money because I use a PC they make money when I buy a new one. I have been upgrading my tablet more frequently than my PC in large part because I spend so much time on it. Multiply that shift by 1+ billion people and you start talking real money.
  - Macha 8y ago
    On the other hand, many people bought some discount Kindle Fire and that's their tablet until it breaks. The reason Android tablets died as a market is it turned out their replacement rate was not nearly as high as smartphones, so investment in new models stopped.
- seppin 8y ago
  It has to be the keyboard, right? No other machine (phone/tablet) has a workable input device.
  - frankydp 8y ago
    Keyboard + Mouse + Screen real estate Phones/Tablets are consumption devices first, and everything else is an afterthought/hack.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Banks still use mainframes, and mainframes still have capabilities that laptops generally don't have. Neither argument means we're not in a post-mainframe era. Today the majority of computer & internet use happens on a phone. But it's still a small majority, so we cannot yet call it a post-PC era. If/when that turns into a substantial majority we'll be in the post-PC era, even if you and I still primarily use PC's.
buboard 8y ago
Except it has happened. It used to be that, for 100% of computer-using people , switching from entertainment (games) to something creative in the computer (making games ) was a download away. Nowadays a miniscule amount of people uses a computer in "work mode" (i.e. not a laptop).
- fipple 8y ago
  I don’t know about making games but music making software on iOS is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to get started with than on PC.
  - buboard 8y ago
    ok. lets except music. touch interfaces naturally lend themselves to it. then again i m not reeally sure you can have a finished, mastered song using an iOS app.
    - mikestew 8y ago
      Finished, mastered songs have been done on much less than the iOS version of GarageBand. By people you've probably heard of, too. Twenty, thirty years ago I might not have killed someone for a copy of iOS GarageBand, I would have been willing to seriously maim.
      - pq0ak2nnd 8y ago
        I find it interesting to consider the implications of the quality that comes out of mastering on iOS vs a real studio (where you have a trained engineer and dedicated equipment): the former is of lower quality, but it doesn't really matter because we've become of culture of "good enough" that settles for sub-par achievements. I would say that falling standards have made content creation more prolific, to the disappointment of those who care (and not just perfectionists). A culture raised on overcompressed and pitch fixed productions just won't care about dynamics and good mixing. To quote a friend when discussing food: "If all you've ever had is Velveeta..."
Isamu 8y ago
> Steve Jobs’ vaunted, much quoted ‘Post-PC Era’. Actually this traces back to an aside by Steve Jobs, where speaking of the iPad he said "we think these are post-PC devices, we really do". This was immediately taken to be a statement that he felt that PC was going away, rather than that the devices were not trying to be PCs in a new form factor, but something post-PC. People should have gotten a clue when Apple did not stop selling laptops and desktops.
- nradov 8y ago
  But Apple has reduced their R&D investment in laptops and desktops, at least on a relative basis. They haven't updated their "pro" desktop line in years. I suspect they will eventually offer a more powerful line of iOS devices to address content creation use cases, and gradually phase out the legacy MacOS product line. Unifying their product lines around a single OS would eventually deliver a lot of savings.
paulgerhardt 8y ago
I worked at the Post-PC lab in Colorado for a while. The premise, at least when the term was coined, wasn't ever that Desktops or the new (at that time) "Pen Computing" interfaces would ever go away. Rather it was always that "computerization" would invade all walks of life until suddenly everything would become computer. Much of the research we did was looking at life would be like when suddenly everything you interact with would have a programmable interface, rather than only being able to program things through your PC. 30 years on much of that has turned out to be more or less true with cars, lightbulbs, door locks, and so on. But of course like all "predictions" of the future it's made using the terminology that was in vogue at the time and sounds funny to us now that it's here and other terms like IoT eclipsed their popularity.
Spooky23 8y ago
The author is delusional. Post-PC doesn't mean "buy iPads". The nail in the coffin of PCs was placed with the release of EC2 2006 and hammered by the 2007 iPhone release. PCs today are a dead-end legacy technology. All of the PC technologies on the edge (things like enterprise laptops, POS terminals, etc) are being replaced by mobile or virtual devices. Companies are getting sick of the IT business and are increasingly allowing BYO devices. The legacy Windows stuff is going to get delivered with remote apps, virtual desktop, etc. It's already happening. How do you justify spending $750-1,000 every 36 months on device replacement when you can spend $20/month for amazon workspaces and buy a cheap thin client every 8 years or have employees BYO? If we weren't in the post-PC era, Microsoft wouldn't be porting their entire stack of Office products into web delivery platforms. When was the last time you landed a new fat-client application at work?
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Somewhere, underneath all the spreadsheets for moving money around, and underneath the middle managers writing memos in Word, are the actual workers that read the memos and do the work that goes in to the spreadsheets. The workstation market was the first big application of one-user computers, and will probably be their last foothold.
  - jarfil 8y ago
    Reading memos is best done on a tablet or smartphone. Doing the work depends on the kind of work, only content creators and programmers need a full PC; everyone else who works in the non-digital physical world, doesn't.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      I see no aspect of reading memos that is better on a tablet or smartphone than it is on a PC. However, I do see some ways in which it is inferior on a smartphone - screen size in particular. So "best done on a tablet or smartphone" seems like a tremendous overstatement at best, and flat-out wrong at worst.
- 8y ago
cicero 8y ago
I hope this means that Apple will give the Macintosh line more attention.
ksec 8y ago
From who's perspective ? From Steve Jobs and Consumer? Of course we are in Post PC era. There are roughly 300M+ iPad in active uses, more than double of Mac users in a much shorter time frame. You want everyone to owe a PC? Now lots more people are accessing the internet via mobile. The post Pc era Steve said never meant it will completely replace PC. He said it himself in I think D8 interviews, where PC are like trucks, they are useful, they won't be gone, but we just need much less of it. And that "steady" PC shipment mentioned? You should thanks PC gaming for that. And especially China. At peak there were over 100M Chinese player playing PUBG at the same time. The problem with tablet right now is that Apple did little to nothing making iPad with Keyboard usage better. The UX for lots of Pc tasks, which are answering email, excel, are sub optimal, especially so for those who's job are mostly those tasks.

60 points by kerng 8y ago

It depends on how you define post PC with all seriousness. Some people already use only a phone or tablet as their computing device. We aren't even post mainframe era shockingly as some still use mainframes instead of server racks. And that is actual ones not virtualizations of ones with proven but basically unmaintainable software.

scott_s 8y ago

I find the authors claims odd. Yes, people who used computers for work before everyone had a smart phone and tablets were plentiful still use computers at work. That hasn't changed. But what people use at home for things that are not work has most definitely changed. I know people in their 20s and early 30s who do not have a computer with a keyboard - and if they do, I've never seen them use it at home. In 2008, I would expect most people in their 20s and early 30s to have a laptop at home, that they used for basic internet stuff. I don't expect that anymore. The author seems to think only about professional activities. But from what I have seen, home consumption and day-to-day activities have moved off of "computers" and on to devices like smart phones and tablets. This is true for me personally: I have a work laptop, but I don't have a functioning one at home anymore. At home, I only use my tablet and smart phone. Years ago, my personal laptop broke, and I realized there was no point in replacing it.

ascagnel_ 8y ago
I think this is also why tablet sales have slowed down in recent years -- once you get to about 2013/2014, the benefits gained from buying a new tablet basically leveled off for most users, when the average use case is email, web browsing, watching video, and maybe some light gaming. The same thing happened with cheap laptops in the early 2010s.

travbrack 8y ago

I'm counting the days until I can just plug my smartphone into a KVM dock and have it be as useful as a full-blown desktop.

alain94040 8y ago
Yes, except the future is wireless. So no dock required (let's say, 5 years from now).
frankydp 8y ago
Something like Dex? https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Note that Samsung was neither the first nor the best to tackle this problem. Motorola did it arguably "first" with the Atrix and the BIONIC on Android back in 2011. Once Android 4.x hit, they were able to remove the trashy custom Linux it ran and show the Android tablet interface when plugged in that way. Microsoft, more recently, did a proper PC-on-a-phone implementation with Continuum on Windows 10. Pop a Lumia 950 or an Elite x3 into the dock and you have a Windows PC. But minus legacy apps, of course. This was the "best" implementation I've seen. The commonality with both of these, is the hardware arrived ahead of the software being able to carry them. Android wasn't ready to support the Atrix at the time as it didn't even have a tablet UI at the time, and UWP apps weren't developed enough to equate to a "PC" either.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    I'm really hoping for a version of macOS that could support a complete embedded iOS in it, electrically, there is no reason why I cant fit the processing power I need in my computer, in a phone or tablet - but as you correctly point out, the software still has no arrived. (I speak to macOS, because I'm an Apple Ecosystem guy - the same approach could be taken by microsoft)

Aloha 8y ago

I've been waiting for a while for someone to call this. While consumers may have moved on to do most of their device time in front of a phone, tablet or phablet, the rest of us still spend many hours a day in front of a computer. There is still a sizable functionality gap between a tablet or phone, and a laptop or desktop computer.

Retric 8y ago
Intel etc is not making money because I use a PC they make money when I buy a new one. I have been upgrading my tablet more frequently than my PC in large part because I spend so much time on it. Multiply that shift by 1+ billion people and you start talking real money.
- Macha 8y ago
  On the other hand, many people bought some discount Kindle Fire and that's their tablet until it breaks. The reason Android tablets died as a market is it turned out their replacement rate was not nearly as high as smartphones, so investment in new models stopped.
seppin 8y ago
It has to be the keyboard, right? No other machine (phone/tablet) has a workable input device.
- frankydp 8y ago
  Keyboard + Mouse + Screen real estate Phones/Tablets are consumption devices first, and everything else is an afterthought/hack.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
Banks still use mainframes, and mainframes still have capabilities that laptops generally don't have. Neither argument means we're not in a post-mainframe era. Today the majority of computer & internet use happens on a phone. But it's still a small majority, so we cannot yet call it a post-PC era. If/when that turns into a substantial majority we'll be in the post-PC era, even if you and I still primarily use PC's.

buboard 8y ago

Except it has happened. It used to be that, for 100% of computer-using people , switching from entertainment (games) to something creative in the computer (making games ) was a download away. Nowadays a miniscule amount of people uses a computer in "work mode" (i.e. not a laptop).

fipple 8y ago
I don’t know about making games but music making software on iOS is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to get started with than on PC.
- buboard 8y ago
  ok. lets except music. touch interfaces naturally lend themselves to it. then again i m not reeally sure you can have a finished, mastered song using an iOS app.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Finished, mastered songs have been done on much less than the iOS version of GarageBand. By people you've probably heard of, too. Twenty, thirty years ago I might not have killed someone for a copy of iOS GarageBand, I would have been willing to seriously maim.
    - pq0ak2nnd 8y ago
      I find it interesting to consider the implications of the quality that comes out of mastering on iOS vs a real studio (where you have a trained engineer and dedicated equipment): the former is of lower quality, but it doesn't really matter because we've become of culture of "good enough" that settles for sub-par achievements. I would say that falling standards have made content creation more prolific, to the disappointment of those who care (and not just perfectionists). A culture raised on overcompressed and pitch fixed productions just won't care about dynamics and good mixing. To quote a friend when discussing food: "If all you've ever had is Velveeta..."

Isamu 8y ago

> Steve Jobs’ vaunted, much quoted ‘Post-PC Era’. Actually this traces back to an aside by Steve Jobs, where speaking of the iPad he said "we think these are post-PC devices, we really do". This was immediately taken to be a statement that he felt that PC was going away, rather than that the devices were not trying to be PCs in a new form factor, but something post-PC. People should have gotten a clue when Apple did not stop selling laptops and desktops.

nradov 8y ago
But Apple has reduced their R&D investment in laptops and desktops, at least on a relative basis. They haven't updated their "pro" desktop line in years. I suspect they will eventually offer a more powerful line of iOS devices to address content creation use cases, and gradually phase out the legacy MacOS product line. Unifying their product lines around a single OS would eventually deliver a lot of savings.

paulgerhardt 8y ago

I worked at the Post-PC lab in Colorado for a while. The premise, at least when the term was coined, wasn't ever that Desktops or the new (at that time) "Pen Computing" interfaces would ever go away. Rather it was always that "computerization" would invade all walks of life until suddenly everything would become computer. Much of the research we did was looking at life would be like when suddenly everything you interact with would have a programmable interface, rather than only being able to program things through your PC. 30 years on much of that has turned out to be more or less true with cars, lightbulbs, door locks, and so on. But of course like all "predictions" of the future it's made using the terminology that was in vogue at the time and sounds funny to us now that it's here and other terms like IoT eclipsed their popularity.

Spooky23 8y ago

The author is delusional. Post-PC doesn't mean "buy iPads". The nail in the coffin of PCs was placed with the release of EC2 2006 and hammered by the 2007 iPhone release. PCs today are a dead-end legacy technology. All of the PC technologies on the edge (things like enterprise laptops, POS terminals, etc) are being replaced by mobile or virtual devices. Companies are getting sick of the IT business and are increasingly allowing BYO devices. The legacy Windows stuff is going to get delivered with remote apps, virtual desktop, etc. It's already happening. How do you justify spending $750-1,000 every 36 months on device replacement when you can spend $20/month for amazon workspaces and buy a cheap thin client every 8 years or have employees BYO? If we weren't in the post-PC era, Microsoft wouldn't be porting their entire stack of Office products into web delivery platforms. When was the last time you landed a new fat-client application at work?

whatshisface 8y ago
Somewhere, underneath all the spreadsheets for moving money around, and underneath the middle managers writing memos in Word, are the actual workers that read the memos and do the work that goes in to the spreadsheets. The workstation market was the first big application of one-user computers, and will probably be their last foothold.
- jarfil 8y ago
  Reading memos is best done on a tablet or smartphone. Doing the work depends on the kind of work, only content creators and programmers need a full PC; everyone else who works in the non-digital physical world, doesn't.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I see no aspect of reading memos that is better on a tablet or smartphone than it is on a PC. However, I do see some ways in which it is inferior on a smartphone - screen size in particular. So "best done on a tablet or smartphone" seems like a tremendous overstatement at best, and flat-out wrong at worst.
8y ago

cicero 8y ago

I hope this means that Apple will give the Macintosh line more attention.

ksec 8y ago

From who's perspective ? From Steve Jobs and Consumer? Of course we are in Post PC era. There are roughly 300M+ iPad in active uses, more than double of Mac users in a much shorter time frame. You want everyone to owe a PC? Now lots more people are accessing the internet via mobile. The post Pc era Steve said never meant it will completely replace PC. He said it himself in I think D8 interviews, where PC are like trucks, they are useful, they won't be gone, but we just need much less of it. And that "steady" PC shipment mentioned? You should thanks PC gaming for that. And especially China. At peak there were over 100M Chinese player playing PUBG at the same time. The problem with tablet right now is that Apple did little to nothing making iPad with Keyboard usage better. The UX for lots of Pc tasks, which are answering email, excel, are sub optimal, especially so for those who's job are mostly those tasks.