Well, single or "reduced" purpose computers have existed long before the iPad or modern smartphones. Game consoles, audio players, video players go way back...

Well, single or "reduced" purpose computers have existed long before the iPad or modern smartphones. Game consoles, audio players, video players go way back... It makes engineering and economic sense to have devices dedicated to specific purposes, since economy of scale and optimization can produce devices that are better at that specific function than a general purpose one, at a cheaper price point. Devices like the tablets or smartphones address the need of many people to have a subset of a general-purpose computer (messaging, web browsing, media player) without the added overhead of having to manage a full-fledged computer. Functionality that for years has been available mostly on general purpose computers has become so commonplace and necessary that a (huge) market for devices streamlining the experience has opened up. I don't think general purpose computer will disappear any time soon, if anything computers have gotten cheaper, more powerful and, yes, more free. The choice of a computation platform (from a raspberry pi to an eight core server, or maybe an eight core server in the cloud to which you ssh with your raspberry pi), OS (OSX, Windows, a gazillion Linux distributions...), programming language, availability of knowledge has never been greater.