7 ms·

What's a Post-PC device?

22 points by strandev 16y ago

ohadpr 16y ago
I actually believe that PCs are so == Computers for most of humanity that its perfectly fine to discuss post-PC devices I personally think that a Post-PC device is simply a device that for some (and later many) people replaces a PC in their day-to-day computer-related tasks. So if whatever they used to do on a PC they now mostly do on say an iPad then an iPad would be a post-PC device.
LiteOn 16y ago
Must be a device that does not function without a daily sync with your pc...
brudgers 16y ago
"Post-PC device" is Newspeak for "Personal Digital Assistant."
chris_j 16y ago
While it's not fair to define a new generation of computing by its isolation and exclusion of the previous generation, people have been taking a pop at the iPad because a PC (or a Mac) is required before your iPad will work. At all. I'm pretty certain that the Apple II didn't need to be sync-ed up to a minicomputer via iTunes before you could turn the thing on.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  The real reason is that Apple wants to nudge new iUsers towards providing a credit card when being forced to create a iTunes account for activating a iDevice, so that it can have it on file. That's why the process to create an account without providing payment info is made intentionally difficult without jumping through hoops. It is as simple as that.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
recoiledsnake 16y ago
>...allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply. More cheaply? I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500. There is so much hot air expended on essential meaningless PR terms such as this, especially when it comes to Apple. All of this is just posturing for the media and general public and does not hold up to technical scrutiny more than the previous claim about the iPhone running the 'full OS X'. I am more worried about the 30% tax on services that seems to tag along with the so called Post-PC devices.
- wmeredith 16y ago
  It's just sales copy, relax. It wasn't written for you.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- ugh 16y ago
  This is an article about past paradigm shifts and their properties in general, not about whether or not tablets are actually another such paradigm shift, isn’t it?
- hasenj 16y ago
  > I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500. Come on, don't compare crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen to the iPad. The iPad is a completely different kind of device. While its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there, that's not the point. You ignored the whole sentence and picked on "cheaply". You forgot "non-expert users" and "simply". Also, coming back to the price. Think of the value the iPad is offering; not just the specs. Easy to hold, looks gorgeous, plenty of apps, fun to use, fluid experience .. etc.
  - sorbus 16y ago
    If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it. > crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen The iPad has a 9.7in screen, with a 1024 x 768 resolution. By comparison, many netbooks have 10.1in screens with 1024 x 600 resolutions. I wouldn't call that enough of a difference to say that netbook screens are tiny while iPad screens aren't. > its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there Your bias is showing, as is your ignorance of the current specs of iPads and netbooks. The first generation of iPads had specs which were inferior to many netbooks at the time, especially when considering RAM; the current generation (which isn't shipping yet) has comparably fast processors, but much less storage and probably less RAM. But yes, Apple is trying to position themselves as not a part of the herd, removing the need to compete on specs. They are definitely succeeding[2], which allows them both to focus on the interface and appearance and to make their products into appliances, where it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare them to anything else. How do you compare UI, after all? If Apple is able to avoid objective measurements, that's a huge success for them, since they'll be able to sell hardware that's slower or older without anyone noticing. [1] In this case, it is factually incorrect, and perhaps an outright lie, to claim that iPads are cheaper than netbooks. $379.99 for a netbook is less than $499 for an iPad. [2] As your comment makes abundantly clear, Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
raganwald 16y ago
Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are clearly post-PC devices. Why? The filesystem has gone away. Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care? This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music. Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music. On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder. On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor. To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."
- gloob 16y ago
  In order to clarify, I assume when you say "no filesystem", you mean "no user-visible filesystem, but is still muggle-usable (and might well have a filesystem under the hood)", yes? Because we've had computers without filesystems for about as long as we've had computers. Computers with filesystems are a significantly more recent innovation.
  - 16y ago
subway 16y ago
I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve. The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.
dualboot 16y ago
I would actually say that Microsoft's tunnel-vision on everything being a Windows powered "pc" is why they have always failed in the tablet market over the years.
vdm 16y ago
Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken. Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.
uvTwitch 16y ago
A Post-PC Device is a Marketing Term used to refer to a iPad, and as far as apple are concerned, Only an iPad. Personal implies choice, customization, and individuality, and these are precisely the things apple strives to remove from it's devices and services. The ability to choose one of seven particular colors and three price-range specific models is a laughable substitute. The iPad is the first Computer which is post-Personal.
SlipperySlope 16y ago
Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone & iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand. Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline. We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment. The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device? People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data. Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose. As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created. Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250. The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with. Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC). PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden). Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.

22 points by strandev 16y ago

I actually believe that PCs are so == Computers for most of humanity that its perfectly fine to discuss post-PC devices I personally think that a Post-PC device is simply a device that for some (and later many) people replaces a PC in their day-to-day computer-related tasks. So if whatever they used to do on a PC they now mostly do on say an iPad then an iPad would be a post-PC device.

LiteOn 16y ago

Must be a device that does not function without a daily sync with your pc...

brudgers 16y ago

"Post-PC device" is Newspeak for "Personal Digital Assistant."

chris_j 16y ago

While it's not fair to define a new generation of computing by its isolation and exclusion of the previous generation, people have been taking a pop at the iPad because a PC (or a Mac) is required before your iPad will work. At all. I'm pretty certain that the Apple II didn't need to be sync-ed up to a minicomputer via iTunes before you could turn the thing on.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
The real reason is that Apple wants to nudge new iUsers towards providing a credit card when being forced to create a iTunes account for activating a iDevice, so that it can have it on file. That's why the process to create an account without providing payment info is made intentionally difficult without jumping through hoops. It is as simple as that.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

recoiledsnake 16y ago

>...allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply. More cheaply? I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500. There is so much hot air expended on essential meaningless PR terms such as this, especially when it comes to Apple. All of this is just posturing for the media and general public and does not hold up to technical scrutiny more than the previous claim about the iPhone running the 'full OS X'. I am more worried about the 30% tax on services that seems to tag along with the so called Post-PC devices.

wmeredith 16y ago
It's just sales copy, relax. It wasn't written for you.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ugh 16y ago
This is an article about past paradigm shifts and their properties in general, not about whether or not tablets are actually another such paradigm shift, isn’t it?
hasenj 16y ago
> I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500. Come on, don't compare crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen to the iPad. The iPad is a completely different kind of device. While its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there, that's not the point. You ignored the whole sentence and picked on "cheaply". You forgot "non-expert users" and "simply". Also, coming back to the price. Think of the value the iPad is offering; not just the specs. Easy to hold, looks gorgeous, plenty of apps, fun to use, fluid experience .. etc.
- sorbus 16y ago
  If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it. > crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen The iPad has a 9.7in screen, with a 1024 x 768 resolution. By comparison, many netbooks have 10.1in screens with 1024 x 600 resolutions. I wouldn't call that enough of a difference to say that netbook screens are tiny while iPad screens aren't. > its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there Your bias is showing, as is your ignorance of the current specs of iPads and netbooks. The first generation of iPads had specs which were inferior to many netbooks at the time, especially when considering RAM; the current generation (which isn't shipping yet) has comparably fast processors, but much less storage and probably less RAM. But yes, Apple is trying to position themselves as not a part of the herd, removing the need to compete on specs. They are definitely succeeding[2], which allows them both to focus on the interface and appearance and to make their products into appliances, where it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare them to anything else. How do you compare UI, after all? If Apple is able to avoid objective measurements, that's a huge success for them, since they'll be able to sell hardware that's slower or older without anyone noticing. [1] In this case, it is factually incorrect, and perhaps an outright lie, to claim that iPads are cheaper than netbooks. $379.99 for a netbook is less than $499 for an iPad. [2] As your comment makes abundantly clear, Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.

raganwald 16y ago

Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are clearly post-PC devices. Why? The filesystem has gone away. Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care? This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music. Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music. On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder. On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor. To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."

gloob 16y ago
In order to clarify, I assume when you say "no filesystem", you mean "no user-visible filesystem, but is still muggle-usable (and might well have a filesystem under the hood)", yes? Because we've had computers without filesystems for about as long as we've had computers. Computers with filesystems are a significantly more recent innovation.
- 16y ago

subway 16y ago

I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve. The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.

dualboot 16y ago

I would actually say that Microsoft's tunnel-vision on everything being a Windows powered "pc" is why they have always failed in the tablet market over the years.

vdm 16y ago

Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken. Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.

uvTwitch 16y ago

A Post-PC Device is a Marketing Term used to refer to a iPad, and as far as apple are concerned, Only an iPad. Personal implies choice, customization, and individuality, and these are precisely the things apple strives to remove from it's devices and services. The ability to choose one of seven particular colors and three price-range specific models is a laughable substitute. The iPad is the first Computer which is post-Personal.

SlipperySlope 16y ago

Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone & iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand. Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline. We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment. The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device? People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data. Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose. As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created. Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250. The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with. Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC). PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden). Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.