Ok folks, let me know when you throw out your computers. I mean, seriously. I don't want to hear the 100th story about how ipad changed your life unless you literally get rid of your computer. If the number of people who replaced a computer with a tablet exceeds the number of people who still have one, we can talk about that post-pc mumbo-jumbo. So, how's gonna be?
Alright folks, tell me about how great this whole "computer" thing is when you throw out your pen and paper. Maybe I'll get on the internet after you all stop talking to people face-to-face.
Doesn't follow. The question is how technology is affecting people's lives, and the answer, for now, is: immediacy and ease of use. For you, the iPad is a Unix machine with no file system and no shell. For a normal person, it is a magical way to share high-quality photos and talk with people across the world. That may not be very high tech, but it's currently holding together human relationships and families that otherwise wouldn't, and ultimately that's what is making an impact.
Yeah, but we don't say that we are in the 'post pen-and-paper era'...
... because pens and paper are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on the computer.
Just like PCs are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on a tablet.
But you didn't graph the phrase "post pen-and-paper era" so I don't understand your point. The previous poster's point was that we don't claim that pen and paper are dead. Are there countless of uses of the world "paperless?" Sure. What is the connection? I tried to graph "can't find anymore paper because no one uses it" but it didn't yield any results.
But I would say in the 'post mainframe era,' we've gone from a time when most computers were mainframes to a time when most computers are not. Thus talking about the 'post pc era,' implies (in my opinion) that the vast majority of people will only have a table.
Surely that would be when the vast majority of computers are not PCs, not that the vast majority of people only have a tablet. Given the ubiquity of devices in the average home that have microprocessors, that do computing jobs that PCs can do, that aren't actually PCs, we've been there for a while.
Now if he'd said that we were in the tablet era, that's another thing.
"those calculators that printed to roles of paper" are called adding machines, or "10 keys". They are still around in a virtual form.
If you have a full size keyboard with the number pad on the right side, in Windows, you can open Calculator|View|History, and you have a digital adding machine right on your computer.
Its an interesting question. Probably won't get a lot of takers here on Hackernews but my non-programming friends are totally in the "Great I can toss this stupid PC" camp.
For them, they have never written a line of code, their work doesn't require them to change a computer but it does require that they communicate, schedule meetings, take pictures, exchange data. For them a 'phone' is not enough and a laptop is a bit too much.
The market for computers has many components, one component is the engineer / programmer / scientist. Their use of computers is like their use of calculators, they always have one somewhere. But there is another component to that market which is much larger which are the people that are forced to use computers because businesses don't use the yellow pages, or have catalogs, or answer customer support calls, or deal with people on a face to face way.
For that segment of people the iPad is a total win. They can look things up on the web, they can order from Amazon, they can keep in touch with their friends, and they can fill out forms etc. They will have a PC in their den or something for a while and when they haven't turned it on in 6 months they will put it out with the other junk at their next garage sale.
You are completely ignoring the MS Office market. Try typing an essay or a report on an iPad or making a good presentation. You certainly can, but its not even remotely efficient (or a good "user experience" or "magical").
These days the only time I need Office is when some idiot sends me a document in one of their proprietary formats. But taking your point to be the more general "word processing / spreadsheet " market (since I don't feel like the data base aspects really caught on mainstream) I observe that there are fewer and fewer documents that are 'word processed'.
What is perhaps more relevant, is that I have tools available on the iPad that are at least as functional as using a typewriter to type up something (the pre-Office world) And if I absolutely must type rapidly on the iPad there are keyboard solutions out there. But I don't think I am compelled by the argument "You can't do Office[1] therefore you can't get rid of your PC."
What I do see is people using a device for all of the things they used to use a full blown computer for, knowing that those same people never exploited half of what their computer could do. And much of that has been driven by the notion that there is "one thing" which you use to do this stuff. A wedge was driven in that notion by 'smart' phones, and a bigger wedge is being driven into that notion by tablets.
[1] "Office" here is of course a stand-in for a variety of capabilities which one might classify as 'information manufacturing'
Way too small, requires a fidgety external keyboard... tablets don't look good for general office use, especially when compared to ultrabooks -- the real future of office computing IMHO. Why should I waste my time attaching/detaching/packing a tablet and an external keyboard, when I can just close the screen and be on my way? And all this trouble just to get... a screen smaller than 20-year-old monitors? Most office people don't care about screen resolution; if I had a penny for every monitor I've seen running at resolutions much lower than what the hardware could deal with, I'd be closing in on Warren Buffett. They want BIG LETTERS and LOTS OF SPACE, and don't care how it's achieved.
Tablets are good for certain use-cases, but when it comes to typing to save your life (i.e. your business), they are simply not a match and will likely never be. Couple that with the small screen real estate (spreadsheets these days are enormous), and you see how the iPad can be taken seriously only by the detached upper echelons who play golf all day. The rank-and-file will keep asking for (lighter) laptops forever more.
Bold statement. Keep in mind lots of us were balking at the idea of touch screens for even writing text messages when the iPhone came out.. Or jump back less than a lifetime to assumptions about how long it would take to get computers the size of our bedrooms.
Take a step back, and really consider how likely it is that laptops are FOREVER. It might be true, but things change and I think it's historically much more likely that ANYTHING you point a finger at today will be transformatively replaced in due time, than it is that you'll be able to accurately predict a permanent future for whatever an ultrabook is.
I actually don't have any idea what an ultrabook is, but it sounds like a very small idea... not something I'd bet on or invest in for the very long term.
I still hate writing on a touchscreen. It's slow and error-prone. It's only better than not writing at all.
Touchscreens are fundamentally limited by the size of your finger. Firstly because you have to physically press the UI element you want to interact with. Secondly because your finger obscures whatever's underneath.
Of course, you can get around this by decoupling the physical location of the UI element and the physical location of your finger. It's called a trackpad.
Touchscreens are great for some tasks. But they are not great for tasks involving high information densities (writing, spreadsheets, mostly anything that can be classified as "editing"). For those, people will continue to use keyboards and mice until they evolve cone-shaped transparent fingers.
Ultrabooks are MacBookAir-like laptops. Technically the term is an Intel trademark, but it's a widely-accepted synonym for "very thin and light laptop with extra battery life and no optical-disc bay".
As soon as they start to get over the 11-to-13'' form factor (and lower in price), they're going to replace the current generation of work laptops. They'll get thinner and thinner; as batteries and bluetooth-like technologies improve, sooner or later they'll even lose USB ports, and you'll be left with a device that is literally a screen and a keyboard. Some models will have a detachable tablet screen, no doubt, but the heavy lifting will still be done with a real keyboard.
But interestingly, the touch keyboard does suck very badly. It's only because of other factors that I accept the "touch keyboard." But in reality, it's very, very annoying, let's be honest. Pre-iPhone, I texted happily without even looking at the screen. Now, I can never figure out why I keep hitting certain letters that I didn't mean to. I feel like an elderly person typing. And you can google this stuff, it's a very common view. We haven't really innovated with a touch keyboard, we just deal with it. If I had a technology that could let me have a touch experience but give me a tactile keyboard when I need, it would be great. Although, I agree with you on the ultrabook thing, not sure about that.
I don't know. What happens when you can dictate your documents? That and gestures and the occasional keyboard might go a very long way.
I don't think it will change tomorrow. But I could see the home market making the shift, gradually. Where the business market will be fifteen years from now we'll have to see.
1. Every office in the world will buy each employee a separate office room so they can dictate their documents without being disturbed by the other employees.
2. Every office in the world will buy each employee a $10 physical keyboard.
I don't think folks will do all their work from home, but I think it will increase quite a bit for professional workers over the next 20 years -- mostly because space is expensive, and working from home is desirable for many people.
Surprised I got down-voted. It's kind of naive. Many programmers that have families prefer to go to work instead. Working at home, as a non-bachelor, you're seen as being able to take care of all the domestic issues (dishes, trash, run errands) and many people would just rather strike that balance. Sure, a lot of people like it but I don't think it's going to be that common. Even our industry, supposedly the most forward thinking, and even in SV, many require working on-premise. If working from home is too liberal for SV, it's going to be too much for the rest of the country for much longer than 20 years.
Well, I didn't down-vote you and I have a family, but my wife worked from home for quite a while and liked it. I think it would be tough when the kids are little, but when they are older it would work fine.
I don't think most folks would end up working from home 5 days a week -- there are still things that work better face-to-face. But I could see folks _only_ coming in for face-to-face time.
I do not disagree, engineers need CAD tools or simulators, architects the same. Take all the professional people and put them in the category "Need a computer for their job." Now create another group called "Don't need a computer for their job." Compare the sizes of the two groups.
I don't think anyone expects that general purpose personal computers are ever going away, but there is a pretty compelling argument that the bulk of computational assets will fall into the 'appliance' category rather than the 'general purpose' category.
As Atwood points out, Microsoft strove to have a PC in every house, and they succeeded! PCs have higher penetration in homes than TVs. However, given tablets and their capabilities, it is looking more and more likely that this trend will stop and that the number of homes without a PC in them will begin to rise again. its an open question how many homes that will be but it seems likely it will happen.
They do, but they don't have to. Some careers are notoriously averse to evolving technology - I still see HP-12C calculators around the office because many of its users refuse to learn anything newer - and business and accounting are two of them.
There is little stopping them from using newer tools but inertia.
That's because they're exactly what a competent finance person needs for conversational analysis. Spreadsheets have their place but if you cannot talk without a keyboard you are way too deep in the numbers. And the batteries never die, at 3am on day 3 of due diligence in Toledo your phone and its finance app will be dead but that 12C will still be cranking out present values, amort schedules, target return rates and IRR. Those calculators are maybe the most fit-for-purpose white collar tool I've ever seen.
EDIT: I don't care for MSFT, I loathe Word. But Excel on Windows is a genuinely fine tool -- overused by a lot of people b/c the Windows anti-pattern keeps them from proper tools, but still a really useful piece of work. You can't do detailed modern financial analysis without it. The alternatives -- Linux, Google Docs, even Excel on Mac -- aren't even close.
I'm OK with pocket calculators. What I find weird is that inertia has kept the 12c being produced long after it became a relic. There are many other business-oriented pocket calculators out there with much nicer and efficient interfaces than the 12C.
What some courses teach is not financial math - it's "how to get numbers out of a 12C". This is just perverse.
For writing, almost anything. For spreadsheets, unless you need Excel plugins, again, almost anything. For project management? There are a good couple tools around.
They don't need Office. They are just used to it, much like accountants are used to their 12C's
The problem here you see is that people don't want to spend time learning computers if they can avoid it except for browsing.
Now most students are being trained to use Office at school.
I use to see the world from an "Open Source" programmer's point of view: "You have the choice to use OpenOffice". But then after I saw the reality for a while, things start to sink in and it becomes obvious that people don't want to be liberated the way I thought they ought to be.
People are OK with MS Office. It becomes a piece of software that, no matter how hard geeks want to argue about the Pareto Principle or not, will stood the test because people were being trained regardless its complexity.
So yeah, from "feature/functionality" perspective, there are alternative. But from skill-wise, willing-to-learn aspect, there aren't until Universities and/or schools start teaching young people to use something else.
OTOH another argument is: you don't need the other alternatives if you have Office.
I know your use cases may ignore it, but Excel, from what I've seen is unmatched. There are things you can do in it that are either difficult to do in other spreadsheet apps or require a database.
It's limitations are outweighed by how fast you can do cut and dice data, including pivot tables (ie, basic OLAP). Google Docs is still too limited (ie, try filtering and sorting on multiple columns).
If you know of a way I can do this in a desktop or web-app for the entry price of Excel (free would be nice, but I don't mind paying), I'd be happy to know.
You're missing the point. You are on Hacker News, you will probably care about such things. My mom doesn't care if you can't filter and sort on multiple columns. She cares if the thing is easy to use and portable, which the iPad wins hands down over a PC.
Most people have PC's at the office or in school's for that. And with the keyboard dock I found the iPad pretty good for wordprocessing (and I prefer doing presentations on it).
Of course at that point it gets annoying to have to take your hand and reach over to the screen all the time , so you probably want to plug in some sort of pointing device..
Now it becomes a hassle to carry all of these docks and accessories around with you so you think "gee , I wish somebody could invent something that combined my screen, keyboard and mouse into one unit..."
Another point to bear in mind is that whilst people will have computers at work and at school a great many people , especially students will want to do work from home.
People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be.
Let's take cars for example, how many people do you know that own medium to large size cars with 5 seats and a trunk where for 90% of their daily driving the car only contains the driver , possibly one passenger and an empty trunk?
Jiggy, I completely respect this point of view, but understand you are arguing from the base assumption that people have to spend a lot of time doing that complex processing.
To exploit your analogy (cars are always good for that :-) how many people own trucks these days? There is always a market for a truck, its the best selling unit of Ford's inventory, but people who only occasionally move stuff or carry stuff often will borrow or rent a truck when needed rather than own one)
The other interesting part of this conversation is the conflation of cause and solution. Your point 'especially students will want to work from home' is particularly salient. When I was a student the PC didn't exist, I still worked fine from home :-) But more importantly as the presence of PC's in the home grew, teachers gave students the opportunity to do work on them rather than say writing it out long form, etc. But as tablets become common at home and with students, and especially tablet based text books, the opportunity to provide even better tools for students is possible.
Imagine a world where your history home work is to write an essay on some topic in the text book that is also on your tablet. Writing an essay is pretty trivial mechanically, you don't mouse a lot and you can do the whole thing even from a soft keyboard.
And this comment for me really sums it up : "People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be."
This is spot on, and there are many people who are looking at tablets and deciding that it can cover even their foreseeable needs. And that, for me at least defines, the term 'Post PC', when something other than a PC can meet the extant and foreseeable needs of someone with respect to information communication and manipulation.
I think it depends on what you define as "Post PC" , whether we really talking about "post wintel" or "post keyboard and mouse".
I think the precision and speed advantage you get from a proper keyboard and mouse setup vs a touchscreen, especially when you consider how cheap both of these items are will mean that they are around for some time even if it as an optional add-on rather than a core part of the whole interface.
I see the "post pc" as more of a rethink of the PC minus the general historical baggage that various versions of Windows etc have carried with them for last 20 or so years.
What I think people are really clambering for is a better user experience from their software.
Let's take the filesystem as an example.
Years ago it made sense to have an OS with the concept of files and folders being exposed to the user.
Why? Because you needed to be able to group your stuff together, either things for a particular project or because they were of a particular file format (word documents , spreadsheets etc).
You would also have "drive letters" which told you whether it was on the "C drive" (inside the computer) or the "A drive" (portable). This is no longer important since we can trivially sync most things to the internet regardless of where the bits are physically stored. In fact Unix doesn't even have the concept of drive letters at all.
File formats can now easily be replaced by Mime types and meta info since fast SSDs and indexes can be used to search either the device itself or cloud storage very quickly. This means it is easy to have an app that loads and immediately provides a list of all the documents which it can work with.
The only requirement that is left is the "grouping", folders are pretty bad for this because you can only group in one dimension. A better system might be some form of "tagging" for example tagging as "work" or "my project" etc.
By removing the filesystem from the user's consciousness you have already massively improved usability and I think this is probably the biggest thing that has made the iPad so easy to use because it essentially turns the install process for an application into a 1 stage thing. Combine this with having updates automatically install silently in the background and an application ecosystem built around the idea of the internet and web as a first class citizen in the OS rather than an extension of it and you have a very seamless experience.
The physical "input into the device" landscape though I see as something blown open and I really don't think there needs to be one dominant paradigm here.
While typing on a tablet is certainly not ergonomic, iWork for iPad has pretty amazing user experience. It actually feels better and more intuitive than the Mac version thanks to touch and gestures.
I used to use my laptop all the time. Browsing the web, social web jerk-offery, entertainment on planes, whatever.
The iPad has pretty much replaced my laptop entirely for casual computing. I barely use it these days. Mostly it gets dusted off for looking at porn, since Flash isn't coming to mobile. And even now, that's becoming less and less an issue as more content distribution – adult and otherwise – moves to H.264.
Laptop is still good for designing things, for writing code, cutting video, whatever. But I'm quite impressed by how thoroughly the iPad has replaced it for the majority of use cases. And that's how it works. It doesn't happen overnight. It creeps. I didn't immediately stop wearing watches when the cell phone became ubiquitous. But eventually it was a no-brainer.
+1 for the most part the only time I ever use my desktop at home is to manage images from my SLR and... That's about it. 90% of my non working computing time is spent in an iPad.
I'm curious to see how the iPad comes together with photo management. The retina display makes photos gorgeous to explore. And you've got iPhoto now.
The big problem is the workflow sucks – importing images to the iPad from an SD card can be pretty slow. And fiddly, since you need to hold onto an adaptor. Wonder if there's an iOS client for any of those WiFi-enabled SD cards. Wouldn't help with speed but maybe the ease-of-use would make up for that.
I'm with you - I'm an amateur shutterbug with about 100K photos in Aperture, and my house was recently burglarized - they got my EOS7D and a bunch of glass. I promised myself I would _not_ purchase a new camera until I could get something directly onto my iPad. I went to London a couple weeks ago with my (ancient) EOS-10D that the burglars couldn't be bothered to take, and I found, that even though I had a zoom 28-135 + fully charged EOS 10D with the Lens cap off in my hand - most of the pictures I took where with the iPhone 4S. I knew that they would seamlessly get into my photostream, and editing/sharing them into path could be done realtime.
Part of the "Post PC" era, that I'm starting to grok, is also entering the "Cloud" era. Data that is not connected, or highly mobile, is much, much less valuable in that world than it used to be.
Huge (HUGE!) opportunity for an SLR with dead simple and fast streaming into the cloud/photostream/iPad.
So the iPad can't be disruptive for computing unless people also stop using their computers completely? It can't be disruptive and, say, replace 80% of the usage for 80% of the people?
I've shared this anecdote several times on HN, but my parents bought iPads instead of laptops for travel.
I know people who email from iPads. It's really pretty common.
And I think the "expensive toy" trope is pretty passe at this point. I have an IDE (AIDE) running on my phone, and since it's a Droid 4 with a keyboard, it's really pretty usable for projects of modest size. And the debug cycle is ridiculously easy, unlike running a phone emulator on a PC.
The fact that you have to jailbreak an iPad to be able to write code you can run locally seems like a defect to me, but that doesn't mean the tablet form factor is a waste of time, just that the iPad is not my particular cup of tea.
And iPhoto, iMovie, and the myriad of music applications provide the opportunity to do all sorts of creative work on a lightweight device that gets fantastic battery life.
I'd say that's more than enough to take it out of the toy category, and into the "very affordable PC substitute for many applications" category.
I used to do small code fixes and push them back to Git with my old N900. This tablet has he capability as well, but somehow I haven't gotten into the habit. Maybe because this device is WiFi-only, so not necessarily online when I would like to clone and weak some repository...
Well, while we're throwing out anecdotal evidence, my accountant constantly uses his iPad. I've never seen him use a laptop for anything but he takes notes, sends email, and even creates and edits spreadsheets on his iPad.
When you stop insisting that iPads are toys and start just using them, it's pretty incredible what you can do. Can you do everything on an iPad? No. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything.
(And I bet something you've looked at online over the past week has been created on an iPad... hell, this comment has been created on an iPad.)
You can get typographically correct apostrophes on an iPad by holding down on the ' key on the onscreen keyboard. A palette will pop up including curly apostrophes.
Perhaps not you, or many HN readers, but for many the answers to all of those are "yes".
For example, my non-tech girlfriend has had an ipad for 6 months now and the only time I've ever seen her use the computer was for word processing and creating presentations. "Office" kind of stuff.
The iPad isn't designed for user like us. It's designed for casual, everyday uses: like your mom.
> the only time I've ever seen her use the computer was for word processing and creating presentations. "Office" kind of stuff.
i.e. for work. Laptops/PCs are for working, tablets are for playing -> little more than expensive toys, in the same way your TV was. Are tablets replacing TVs? Absofuckinglutely. Are tablets replacing work laptops? Not a chance.
Toys eh? Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, pg likes to invest in things that forum trolls dismiss as toys (http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html).
You cite content as creation as a reason why we're not in a post-PC era, but I think you overestimate what most PCs are used for. What percentage of PCs are used to create online content anyway? Also, how do you know you haven't received an email from an iPad or seen a Facebook photo uploaded from an iPhone. You're extremely dismissive, but the proof will be in the numbers. Certainly post-PC is overhyped as a meme, but tablet sales growth is astronomical. If trends continue for any appreciable length of time, it will be impossible to deny that tablets are dominating every-day computing.
I'll agree that this is they key difference. I'm sure that my ideas of computers are good for - there value to society - is different to most users.
Perhaps what really gets me is the idea that the tablet 'revolution' is necessary leading us to a better place. One day we might look back fondly at the 'family computer' that sat in the living room, where someone discovered a love of programming, or creating movies, or whatever. Stuff that other less 'general purpose' devices don't do.
I write and edit blog posts and books on my iPad. Some of them have been front page, top ten and even #1 on Hacker News. Are you SURE you haven’t ready anything that was created on an iPad?
Interesting. In the last two years my mother hasn't sent an email on anything but an iPad, and my dad does it entirely via his iPhone. Perhaps they're just unusual that way.
Unless you're checking email headers, you just might not know if you've received emails from people using an iPad. I send dozens of emails weekly from my iPad 1, both directly through the Mail app and through online apps like Desk.com. And this is doing real work: tech support, dev communications, and more.
And TV? I think I watch video on my iPad perhaps once every couple weeks. And then its likely just a 3 min Vimeo clip. My iPad is absolutely a work device; it's in fact my full on-the-go work solution.
My parents, who are 70 and 66, both primarily use an iPad for computing these days. My mother's main email client is her iPad. When they went on vacation late last year, both brought their iPads along to allow them to communicate, find things, etc. It's gone way beyond expensive toy.
> Have I ever received an email from someone using an iPad?
I have. My father, my mother, my aunt, my best friend, one of the most skilled software engineers/architects I know, an engineering manager I work with, several members of mailing lists I'm on... Oh, and I send email from my iPad occasionally, though I'm still more attached to my laptop than most people. I've been too busy to adapt my workflow.
Before Television came along, people were going to movies at least once a week. Movie theaters still exist and people still go, but it's no where near the same.
For post-PC, I think the important metric is how much more time are people spending on their tablets and phones vs. their PCs rather than whether or not they still own a PC.
Exactly. I'm only using my laptop when I'm actually writing code. All the rest of the computery stuff (like HN) happens in a comfortable chair with a tablet.
Eventually either somebody invents a great way to write on these devices, or I'll finish my visual programming project (see http://noflojs.org). Then (and only then) I can see my laptop usage starting to near zero.
That looks interesting, most of the visual programming tools I have seen or used thus far are unusable or inefficient compared to writing code but that actually looks like something I could see myself possibly using.
When I think about a program in my head I basically construct it as a huge mental diagram anyway and then translate it into code. Perhaps detailed visual design is the way to go.
Visual programming has been around since the 70s and has never really taken off because it requires lots of screen real estate. The conciseness and semantic density of text will never be beaten.
You don't discuss philosophy with flowcharts; why should you code that way?
Well , we have vastly increasing screen resolutions as demonstrated by the new iPad not to mention easy zooming etc.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that you entire program will be converted to a diagram overnight but it might be an interesting way to declare general structure.
I've designed algorithms via OmniGraffle similar to this, though had to manually write the code later. It's an interesting way to do things, and it does seem to make designing complex things easier.
Yet almost every software project I've been to has started with boxes and arrows on a whiteboard. What if these boxes and arrows would be the executable application? And what if you could go to a running application, see how it is connected, and how data flows between components?
False dichotomy. "Post PC era," at least as this article is using it, means "the time after PCs became commonplace in the vast majority of homes," not "the time when people started getting rid of their PCs." The rise of a new type of device does not require the extinction of an old type of device. No one would deny that automobile have replaced horses for transportation, yet plenty of people still own horses.
The iPad doesn't have to replace a computer to make a big difference in computer sales. I bet there are large numbers of people who already have computers but that aren't upgrading them like they normally would because the iPad serves their needs. Or not buying additional PCs (one for the kids for example).
The iPad is sort of like buying a scooter when you live in an urban area. If you already have a car you might not get rid of it, but you drive it a lot less and when it comes time to be replaced, its worth is now a conversation instead of a sure thing.
I think this is partly because there hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade your PC for a while unless you are really into PC games or are doing some very intensive work.
If you bought a new PC 6 years ago it probably has a dual core CPU , 2GB+ of memory , a 100GB+ HDD and some hardware accelerated graphics.
In other words enough to comfortably run Windows 7, Office, Chrome and even Photoshop.
There are still plenty of workplaces around where computers are still predominately Pentium 4s.
In the last 8 years I've gone through three laptops (MBPro, MBPro) six phone (Palm Treo, iPhone, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S) and three tablets (iPad, iPad 2, iPad 2012).
At work, for that entire 8 year stretch, I've done 100% of my network diagrams/power points/Boring-office-stuff on a Dell Precision 650 with a grand total of 4 GBytes of ram (That was a lot back in 2013) running (and still running) windows XP.
I think _that_ has a lot do with why AAPL is now roughly double MSFT.
Linux has traditionally maintained support for older hardware - through driver support, forums to answer questions, and Linux installations that are snappy even on old hardware.
Actually, I see desktop computing (including laptops) hitting a plateau already just from being good enough (factor in Windows XP's decades-long lifetime).
Arguably if desktops are plateauing, embedded devices will follow a similar trajectory on a shorter time scale - all the hard-knock lessons are already known.
Ultimately the year of the Linux desktop won't happen - but businesses will face fast-shrinking margins for desktops, laptops, and per-seat software licenses.
Seriously. And on a related note, I don't want to hear another word about how the "television" is going to be a big deal unless it's from somebody who's already thrown away all of their radios.
In fairness, if anyone pronounced that the advent of the TV was going to herald the "post radio era," I would say they turned out to be mistaken. People don't listen to radio the same way they did before TV, but it certainly didn't go away.
If the PC remains as ubiquitous as the radio did, it won't really be a "post PC era", it will just be an era with a greater diversity of computing devices.
I agree, and additionally would like to know; how much tunnel vision must one have to believe that the next generation of a single successful tablet, in a sea of tablets that are failing, denotes that we're "post-PC" because the PPI has been increased
More than one third of US households have more than one PC. It’s probably a good assumption that most US households with iPads will keep at least one PC, but it’s very possible that many households are replacing their second or third PCs with iPads. After getting an iPad many households might not replace their kitchen or living room PC once it breaks. Maybe kids will get an iPad instead of a cheap laptop.
It would actually be very interesting to look at that question more closely. I’m not sure whether there is already data out there.
I think it’s important to emphasize that for the iPad to supplant PCs, people don’t have to ditch every PC they own. Many own more than one.
In the past, I always had a Power Mac / Mac Pro. It was a needed item for some of the stuff I would do. In the last couple of years, I have switched to a 17" Macbook Pro. I expect in a couple of years, I will be down to a MacBook Air with a nice external monitor at home. The form factor of my needs is getting smaller.
My Dad is now retired. He was a big PC guy and had various PC portables not a few of which were tablet convertibles. Today, he has an iPad and doesn't use anything else. He can e-mail, look at pictures, browse the web, and keep track of his bank accounts. It also makes for some decent entertainment for his grandson (my nephew).
We both started at much different places, but the Post-PC era has arrived for him, and I am one of those people who needs the trucks just as some still need bigger iron.
What people are replacing is their upgrade cycle: they buy an iPad instead of a new PC, and just hang on to the older PC for a while longer. Many of my non-techy friends are doing this.
My girlfriends computer broke a few months back. She bought a tablet, and has no plans to get a laptop anytime soon. Not saying this is happening in droves. But it's slowly coming to pass.
Let me know when I can sync music and podcasts from my music library to my iPhone without a desktop then I might consider believing this post pc mumbo-jumbo.
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