Stefan Mileschin

Ever get the impression you have been lied to?

In 2007 Steve Jobs announced that humanity had entered the “post PC era” and that the world would be completely mobile.

Like many things this was marketing spin designed to look like Jobs’ legendary “vision” while peddling Jobs’ touch screen smartphones. While the world did become more mobile, the post-PC era never arrived.

In fact, it does not look like it will in the near- to medium- term future. Tablet sales have tailed off and smartphone have levelled off. Meanwhile the PC is still with us.

Tablets did put a ding in PC sales, but only in several such as real estate and construction. While PC sales aren't exactly surging they're steady. Business people still carry around a smartphone and a laptop. A tablet is being used as an ancillary device, used primarily for media/content consumption. Phablets managed to remove the need for you to carry two devices.

So what went wrong?

Firstly, the tablet and smartphones were never going to kill off the PC. Jobs did a good job of convincing people that would happen, but it really couldn’t. People found a use for mobile gear alongside their existing PCs. PC power was still needed for serious work and you needed bigger screens to see the fine print of life.

Jobs knew that you could create a fad which - if you were lucky - would become established, and smartphones did, tablets less so, but at the end of the day people still had to type documents, do number crunching and process higher level graphics. Mobile is good at communication, but it is not so hot at these things and it is not going to be for a long time.

The bottleneck is no longer bandwidth. In fact 5G will probably give users all the bandwidth they are going to need for a few decades. Instead mobile requires devices to be small while paradoxically able to see the screen. This smallness precludes any of the power needed to do some of the things users want.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...never-happened