6 ms·

Why the Much-Hyped Post-PC Era Never Arrived

30 points by tanglesome 12y ago

lupinglade 12y ago
A tablet or phone can't truly replace a desktop/laptop. It was a given.
- jinushaun 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Nice analogy. Jobs was once quoted saying that computers are like bycicles for the mind. That somehow closes the Jobs-quoting circle, I guess.
dkopi 12y ago
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
- dkopi 12y ago
  Also - try viewing this page from a mobile browser.
  - melling 12y ago
    I do most of my surfing on a tablet or phone. Everything usually works well for me. Is there something in particular to which you are referring?
    - pjc50 12y ago
      HN on Android renders in teeny tiny text. Edit - Moto G android 4.4.4,text is about 1mm high and I need to pinch-zoom about 3x to read it.
      - fsloth 12y ago
        Major YMMV. My Note3/Chrome displays everything here just fine...
    - roadnottaken 12y ago
      HN doesn't have a mobile-specific interface. It renders fine on a phone/tablet, but you have to do a lot of annoying zooming/scrolling.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        I especially have to zoom to have any chance at hitting the right upvote button. It's a bit frustrating that this is firmly not going to change.
  - crgt 12y ago
buckbova 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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-rugged-7-inch-tablet-launches-in-june.html http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad-fz-m1-rugge...
squozzer 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I've always heard it as, "Ain't no replacement for displacement."
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
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 12y ago
  >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 12y ago
    "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 12y ago
pan69 12y ago
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 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    Yes, indeed. That might actually be very true. That large group of people who are simply "consumers" today might become "creators" in the future.
- r00fus 12y ago
  It's more than that - recently I had to send an application for services to my prospective provider - they wanted me to fill out some pdf form but also send the front/back of an ID card. In a pre-iPhone era, I would have been required to visit my office and use the print/scanner there. This time, I took pics on my iPhone, then attached using the mail app, saved my draft, then attached the completed pdf form using my laptop mail app and sent it. This is really about laptops, phones and tablets all having equal status as consumers of cloud sites and APIs while having different UX and capabilities.
snowwrestler 12y ago
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 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    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.
raldi 12y ago
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.
- bradleyland 12y ago
  There is nothing a pundit likes more than a false dichotomy. By pushing your opponent to the edge, you makes your counter argument much easier.
- legulere 12y ago
  Actually more stuff get's printed than ever before.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    Got a source for that? Almost nothing gets printed in my office.
    - paulgerhardt 12y ago
      "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/S1462901109000227 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109... [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
- paulgerhardt 12y ago
roadnottaken 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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?
bobajeff 12y ago
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.

30 points by tanglesome 12y ago

lupinglade 12y ago

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

jinushaun 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Nice analogy. Jobs was once quoted saying that computers are like bycicles for the mind. That somehow closes the Jobs-quoting circle, I guess.

dkopi 12y ago

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

dkopi 12y ago
Also - try viewing this page from a mobile browser.
- melling 12y ago
  I do most of my surfing on a tablet or phone. Everything usually works well for me. Is there something in particular to which you are referring?
  - pjc50 12y ago
    HN on Android renders in teeny tiny text. Edit - Moto G android 4.4.4,text is about 1mm high and I need to pinch-zoom about 3x to read it.
    - fsloth 12y ago
      Major YMMV. My Note3/Chrome displays everything here just fine...
  - roadnottaken 12y ago
    HN doesn't have a mobile-specific interface. It renders fine on a phone/tablet, but you have to do a lot of annoying zooming/scrolling.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      I especially have to zoom to have any chance at hitting the right upvote button. It's a bit frustrating that this is firmly not going to change.
- crgt 12y ago

buckbova 12y ago

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 12y ago
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-rugged-7-inch-tablet-launches-in-june.html http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad-fz-m1-rugge...

squozzer 12y ago

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 12y ago
I've always heard it as, "Ain't no replacement for displacement."

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

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 12y ago
>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 12y ago
  "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 12y ago

pan69 12y ago

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 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  Yes, indeed. That might actually be very true. That large group of people who are simply "consumers" today might become "creators" in the future.
r00fus 12y ago
It's more than that - recently I had to send an application for services to my prospective provider - they wanted me to fill out some pdf form but also send the front/back of an ID card. In a pre-iPhone era, I would have been required to visit my office and use the print/scanner there. This time, I took pics on my iPhone, then attached using the mail app, saved my draft, then attached the completed pdf form using my laptop mail app and sent it. This is really about laptops, phones and tablets all having equal status as consumers of cloud sites and APIs while having different UX and capabilities.

snowwrestler 12y ago

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 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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.

raldi 12y ago

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.

bradleyland 12y ago
There is nothing a pundit likes more than a false dichotomy. By pushing your opponent to the edge, you makes your counter argument much easier.
legulere 12y ago
Actually more stuff get's printed than ever before.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  Got a source for that? Almost nothing gets printed in my office.
  - paulgerhardt 12y ago
    "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/S1462901109000227 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109... [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
paulgerhardt 12y ago

roadnottaken 12y ago

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 12y ago
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?

bobajeff 12y ago

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.