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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The author is delusional. Post-PC doesn't mean "buy iPads". The nail in the coffin of PCs was placed with the release of EC2 2006 and hammered by the 2007 iPhone release.

PCs today are a dead-end legacy technology. All of the PC technologies on the edge (things like enterprise laptops, POS terminals, etc) are being replaced by mobile or virtual devices. Companies are getting sick of the IT business and are increasingly allowing BYO devices. The legacy Windows stuff is going to get delivered with remote apps, virtual desktop, etc. It's already happening.

How do you justify spending $750-1,000 every 36 months on device replacement when you can spend $20/month for amazon workspaces and buy a cheap thin client every 8 years or have employees BYO?

If we weren't in the post-PC era, Microsoft wouldn't be porting their entire stack of Office products into web delivery platforms. When was the last time you landed a new fat-client application at work?

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On the one hand the article is the typical US-centric nonsense. Anybody who's actually observed how the "other 7.3 billion live" would grasp very well that not only are we Post-PC but that on a deeper level there never really was a PC era. The PC was a kind of aberration, a 40-year blip, an unfortunate accident that only arose due to a bizarre confluence of events like disco music and Texas.

Global corporations like Google and Microsoft are relentless mobile-driven because they don't have luxury of naively focusing on a single market. And when you look at all the fastest growing tech companies in the world, from Instagram to Wechat to gaming, what you are seeing is a landscape where virtually all speculative capital is invested in mobiles.

That said, the PC as a platform is seriously under-utilized. The PC could be so much more but, rationally, nobody is ever going to invest in a powerful PC if all they need to do is run chat and watch videos and fill out forms. This is the irony at the heart of the growing division between the technology masters and those who serve technology: the people who create the powerful mobile platforms and ever-more sophisticated algorithms are all using PCs.

Somewhere, underneath all the spreadsheets for moving money around, and underneath the middle managers writing memos in Word, are the actual workers that read the memos and do the work that goes in to the spreadsheets. The workstation market was the first big application of one-user computers, and will probably be their last foothold.

Reading memos is best done on a tablet or smartphone. Doing the work depends on the kind of work, only content creators and programmers need a full PC; everyone else who works in the non-digital physical world, doesn't.

I see no aspect of reading memos that is better on a tablet or smartphone than it is on a PC. However, I do see some ways in which it is inferior on a smartphone - screen size in particular. So "best done on a tablet or smartphone" seems like a tremendous overstatement at best, and flat-out wrong at worst.

The phrase "Post-PC" seems overloaded. Is convertible tablet/laptop a PC? Is a chromebook a PC?

I'd say about 3/4 of my working days right now I use my laptop just for SSH and a web browser. The big distinctions for me between a machine that I could use most days and one that I couldn't are the keyboard, and the general fit and finish of the hardware.

From a Microsoft definition of "Post-PC", where PC means wintel, that's very Post-PC. From the perspective that I think Steve Jobs was coming from, I'm less sure. I haven't looked closely into iPad keyboards, but I only know of one professional coder that uses an iPad, and his workflow looked pretty painful to me.

If I stuck you with some insane compliance requirements and forced you to deal with an 12" iPad with keyboard, you'd be ok in that workflow -- which is one of the more challenging iPad workflows.

Typical consumer and business task-user workflows are easier on iPad or Android tablets.

From a business POV, the modern stuff is set and forget. It's really difficult with iOS in particular to really fubar your devices.

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