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.
... 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.
Now if he'd said that we were in the tablet era, that's another thing.
Sure we do. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=paperless&y...
Tablets won't make anything obsolete, let alone desktop computers.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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'
Project Managers and Business Analysts are another category of people who rely on MS Office heavily as well.
Programmers may not.
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.
There is little stopping them from using newer tools but inertia.
They don't need Office. They are just used to it, much like accountants are used to their 12C's
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.
A person close to me is currently taking Accounting courses and calculator + paper do not cut it. You need Excel.
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.
What some courses teach is not financial math - it's "how to get numbers out of a 12C". This is just perverse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Oh, well, looks like you're stuck in that ol' pc era after all...
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.
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.
I've shared this anecdote several times on HN, but my parents bought iPads instead of laptops for travel.
They're still just expensive toys. And I really, really mean that.
Have I ever received an email from someone using an iPad?
Nope. Not once.
Has anything I've looked at online in the last week been created on an iPad?
Nope.
Post-PC? Try post-TV.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
(This comment was written on an iPad while relaxing on a comfy chair. You can tell because I'm not using typographically correct apostrophes.)
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.
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.
Hmm.
email, how... quaint.
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.
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.
Of course pending a convincing replacement for the keyboard and mouse I'm not sure how long it is until we see this in office environments.
However I don't necessarily equate Post PC = Tablet , there will be other devices that fit other needs.
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.
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.
You don't discuss philosophy with flowcharts; why should you code that way?
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.
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.
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.
The iPad is an order of magnitude more simple than OS X or Windows, which are themselves quite a bit more user friendly than Linux.
I think something like Chrome OS is a more likely business target than Linux (thin client-ish and mostly web/cloud based).
However, people do switch to Linux all the time because "Windows got too slow."
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.
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.
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.
Look at this graph: http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/index.cfm
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.
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.
Or do you want to know when the average user can sync her music library/podcasts to an iPhone without a desktop?
Spotify (or even just iCloud) + a podcast app like Downcast meet the needs of average users today.
To subscribe to iTunes Match
Launch iTunes 10.5.1 or later on your computer. You cannot subscribe to iTunes Match from an iOS device.
Personally I get my music onto my Android phone with a MOG subscription, and I sync a number of other things with Dropbox.
For just $24.99 a year . . . hmm no.