@sboverie@...
Never going to happen... Mobile devices are always a trade off in power, storage space, and user comfort. All of these things will come at a sacrifice for sake of portability and all of these things increase productivity. Greater portability = less productivity.
Just because "post PC" devices are outselling PCs right now does not mean that people are getting rid of their PCs. You can watch TV and Videos on tablets too. Where's all the sales figures and doomsday predictions for the post TV era?
I could go on and on about why having a PC with near unlimited private storage space, backup and restore capabilities that are not limited by a slow network speed, a high resolution monitor outside of the portable range, multiple monitor support, your own choice of OS and applications not dictated to you by what is allowed in the market place, the ability to have administrator privileges to your own system without violating the manufacturer or service providers TOS, etc. etc... but if someone hasn't gotten it by now they aren't going to.
Most of the people weighing in on this non-debate about a post PC era are trying to sell something. Apple, MS, and the other "post PC" device manufactures are trying to sell you devices; ZDnet and other publications are trying to drive traffic to sell more advertising. There is no post PC era. Processors have changed, OSes have come and gone and evolved but PCs are not a certain processor or OS. A PC is a "personal" computer. The Arm architecture or another may become the norm and x86 may go into decline one day but I predict that day is much further away than this decade. When this occurs it will be the post x86 era not the post PC era. My first PC experience was pre x86... yep, for those that don't know, (and I am sarcastically placing the ZDNet editors that are predicting the "post PC" era in this category) the first PCs were not x86 and the first PC operating system was not Windows or OSX or even MSDOS. And yet these were the beginning of the PC era with no mouse, no GUI not even color monitors or graphics of any resemblance to what we have today.
So why is it that editors like Jason Perlow and Larry Dignan seem to agree on this sort of nonsense?
"we're on an architecture not much different than the original 5150 PC. The PC architecture---hatched at IBM and turned into a standard by Wintel---is almost certainly in its final decade in the consumer space. We have entered a post-PC era and that means the x86 is going extinct. Personal computing won't disappear, but the PC as we know it will."
Utter nonsense. IBM did not "hatch" the PC architecture. It was standardized around x86 largely in part due to Wintel but that doesn't make Wintel PCs the definition of PC. There were other architectures and OSes that predated Wintel. Like Wintel itself, they either evolved or became defunct and disappeared, while others emerged more recently and are still growing in use and acceptance, albeit slowly.
Jason Perlow says: "Personal computing won't disappear, but the PC as we know it will." What drivel! If that's the case, the PC era ended several times in the last thirty years.
The PC era began with the advent of affordable computing technology consisting of input, output and storage devices. Since that time, it has evolved and the PC, as we know it today, is nothing like the PC of the beginning of the PC era. However, the basics of what defines a PC (Personal Computer) has not changed by much even though the capabilities have: Processor, memory, input device(s), output device(s), storage. This is the definition of a Personal Computer, not the processor architecture, type of input devices, or software. And while more services will be accessed in the cloud, much of our computing needs are much too personal or private to be filled or entrusted to a cloud provider so the PC will live on even as it evolves as it always has since my first PC, the Timex Sinclair, which bears little resemblance to my Linux Mint desktop I'm typing this on now.
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