Lost my bet: the PC isn’t dead… yet

lemire.me

5 points·profcalculus··2 comments

"What holds us back to the PC is the keyboard. There is simply not a good substitute for the keyboard right now. We could do away with the monitors."

I don't think we can do away with monitors. I can't imagine someone who spends the entire day writing e-mails or memos or marketing literature, or working with spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations (i.e., a large percentage of office workers) wanting to use a tablet-sized screen all day. A large monitor mounted at eye-level has vastly superior ergonomics. (Also, the ability to read tiny text on a tiny screen diminishes with age.)

It doesn't seem like the author of this article is very familiar with how computers are used in the corporate world. If he wants to extend his bet for another three years (i.e., "PCs will be dead by 2018"), I think the odds would still be against him.

Content consumption is a good use case for mobile phones and tablets. And this is exactly what is happening(or happened), as people primarily use it for content consumption.

Content creation on the other hand, especially programming/development and any serious video,audio and image editing are better suited for a PC.

The precision of the mouse and the speed with which the mouse and keyboard can be operated cannot be achieved on a mobile phone or a tablet.

The PC is going to be around for a long time to come even if the PC market might shrink(as it is happening now) as it's integral to the process of content creation.

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