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Or I could. How about word processing which, it seems to be forgotten, was one of the primary selling points of PCs? As far as I can tell there's been no improvement on this front in this so-called post-PC world.

PC's are not dying or becoming irrelevant; they are finding their level, helpfully assisted by smartphones and tablets. Desks with computers on were never the best place to watch videos, or read magazine articles, or socialise, because its not comfortable, its too formal and tends to render one temporarily miopic.

They became used for these things; now they will be used less for these things and more for the things they were intended for---writing, compositing, analysis, Civilization games---things for which one wants an upright sitting position and the proper focus of staring at a big screen.

We will see a small decline of PC usage then a leveling out. PCs are currently overused, but will prove to be the best tools for most jobs, as opposed to most luxuries. Jobs like playing Civilization, for example.

Tablet docking stations? Word processing needs very little processing power, so there's no full blown PC needed for the task.

I would rather say PC's (at their time) where quite lucky to expand their market from profesionnal information workers to casual consumers. The post PC era in my view about the consumers fleing the all in one PC to specialized devices that do the job better with less hassle:

- content consumption
- WWW
- simplified media production and sharing (web 2)
- gaming

The full featured office productivity is one excepion but if you look at it from a perspective, what consumer does actually need that after finishing education? For last 10 years I (privetly) haven't created a document that google docs wouldn't handle.

The PC value proposition for consumer market is actually quite questionable once you have valid alternatives and is immune to vendor lock-in (cough * iCloud * cough).

Though I agree with your general gist, we could very well be using work stations for that, by which I mean more dedicated, more powerful, versions of the "home PC". It may well be we will see a split between consumer devices (tablets) and more professional devices (work stations). I'm not saying we will, but we could.



No need. Most of those tasks will not be performed at home. And when talking about Microsoft, they get a large share of their profit from home use. So it may be an important shift.

I sure hope not. I am where I am right now education/work-wise specifically because there was not much functional difference between "home PC" and "workstation" when I was a teenager/student. If all i had available to play with were, for example, a game console and some web-device (like a tablet) for emails and whatnot i would have never tried my hand in programming, 2d/3d graphics and all the other awesome creative things you try out on a regular pc. If the market is split again between content-creation (expensive/professional) and content-consumption (cheap) devices i think our industry (in VERY general terms) will lose many future creative people.

Edited 2011-08-26 10:03 UTC

Though I agree with your general gist, we could very well be using work stations for that, by which I mean more dedicated, more powerful, versions of the "home PC". It may well be we will see a split between consumer devices (tablets) and more professional devices (work stations). I'm not saying we will, but we could. "

We ran Silicon Graphics Onyx and O2 workstations in our CAD department for years - they cost a small fortune.

The advent of 3D acceleration for the workstation-class PC changed the business forever. For the cost of every single SGI box, we could deploy six Windows NT systems.

I fear the scenario you describe above might bring us back to this sort of era - consumer grade devices being cheap and "professional" equipment costing an arm and a leg.

I would consider it to be a massive retrograde step!

(Please note: I loved the SGI's to pieces, but they were simply not competitive towards the end...)

May you live in interesting times, eh? :-)

I couldn't agree more. And even if you could bring some of those applications over to a tablet, it would be a hell of a task and take several years and then more years to get it right

Just think about how long it takes for many productivity applications for "small" things like be 64 bit native, be Universal Binary, get ported to Mac, etc.

I suppose it depends on how you define important. Nobody is suggesting that the PC will go away, it's just that it's weight in terms of what drives technology forward, where the money is being made and its overall social and cultural impact is declining.

We have already reached the point where more than half the devices being used to access the internet is non-pc, soon the non-pc devices will represent far more than half.

If you look at your points one by one you get this:

1/ The design of new Microprocessors
2/ Industrial Design applications (e.g. Toasters, Fridges, Furniture, etc.)
3/ Mechanical Design (Cars, Trains, etc.)
4/ Software Engineering (Not only for PCs, but tablets, smart phones, embedded devices, etc.)

True PCs will probably be best for these functions, but in relatively small numbers compared to the numbers of non-pc devices. How many PC will need globally to do this sort of stuff, a few millions perhaps.

5/ Graphics/Photo Editing
6/ 3D Rendering (Movies, Images, etc.)
7/ Sound Editing (Including composition of Music, etc.)


These points I think are more mixed, here many people will find that non-pc devices are perfectly good enough for what they want to do with their music, photos or videos, particularly as the capabilities of such devices improves. Then there will many pros who will use a mix of PC and non-pc such as pro photographers who are adopting the iPad and a complimentary device in large numbers. The same with videos and music.

8/ The ability to administer, deploy and manage these applications on a network (in an office or at home)

Here I think the collapse of the pc paradigm my be surprisingly rapid. In the home come iOS5 for example a pc will no longer be required to administer anything, the same will go for many small and medium sized firms I think.

I think you may be surprised at how rapid the non-pc device revolution is going to be

I have to make a big snip here, as this thread is already too big for me to manage. Thank you for keeping it civil though.

In my work place, where we design, build and manufacturer Medical Instruments, iOS has made exactly zero impact. We are around 400 people strong.

People do use their own iPads to browse the web at lunch time, but it's going to take a lot more than that to convince me that this is a new paradigm. Maybe I just lack the vision :-)

We'll see I guess!