The Post-PC Era

Once again, an article on Tech Republic got me thinking.

What's behind the slump in PC sales? Can the industry turn around?

Specifically, it was the following lines at the end of the article.

‘Between now and the next "crucial holiday buying season," it's imperative that PC makers who want to avoid that fate put together product lineups that aren't so, you know, PC-like.’

This got me to thinking about the whole concept of the PC, and what a post-PC era might be.

First, I didn’t buy the post-PC era BS when Steve Jobs said it, and I still don’t…well, maybe not.  PCs are not going anywhere.  We are going to be using PCs for the next several decades.  There is still a need for powerful desktop PCs. 

The problem is that most of us are learning that we don’t really need a PC for most of what we have done on a PC for the last couple of decades.  We really do not need PCs to surf the web, to check our email, check Facebook, watch a video or two.  Netflix and Hulu Plus are both available on tablets and smartphones (Hulu too, if you work at it).  Some tablets even have HDMI ports, so you can push it to your TV.  You can even do Word Processing on a tablet, if you add a keyboard. 

It is beyond these simple tasks where I start to see the weakness of my tablet, but I do not do them very often.  Picture editing is possible, but I find nothing to match Paint.net, which I have on my PC (it’s free).  But, as I said, I do not need Paint.net very often. 

I can easily imagine a future where there is one PC in my house.  Right now there are 4.  As a family, we have not made the switch to tablets.  My son likes PC games too much, and I am the only one with a tablet.  But, I can imagine each of us with our own tablet, and one PC for the things that require a PC.  I cannot yet imagine not having a PC at home.

The PC has dominated for the last two decades because of its versatility.  It could be anything.  It could be a lightweight portable for hauling across the country.  It could be a multimedia machine for listening to music, watching videos, even recording and producing them both.  It could be a graphics workstation, handling the largest pictures with ease.  It became our window to the internet, to email and webpages, to social networking and Wikipedia and all those other things.  For many, that window to the internet is really all a PC was…at home.  That job is being taken over by smartphones and tablets.

I quoted the end of the article above, but I am now going to quote the beginning.

“PCs are for work, tablets are for fun.”

And he quickly followed with…

“No one climbed on Santa's lap and asked for a new laptop. They wanted a Kindle or an iPad, or maybe even a cheap Android tablet, all of which cost less than a PC and are easier to wrap.”

Tablets were the hot gift of the season.  Now, it could be that tablets are just this season’s Tickle Me Elmo, but I don’t think so.  The momentum has shifted away from PCs towards tablets, but the real momentum is for the hearts and minds of users.  Lots of people still use PCs, but people don’t want PCs.  They may still need them, but that need is like how some people actually need Minivans.  They may need it, but it is not what they want, what they desire, what they dream about.

So, maybe we have entered the post-PC era.  The era when the PC slips from being an object of desire, like a sports car, and becomes the tool that we use because we need it, like the Minivan.