A lot of people will consider this nothing more than a clever marketing ploy, a healthy dose of Steve Jobs charisma and Apple's corporate sugar. After all, it would make logical sense to persuade consumers into the land of post-pc products if you, yourself are almost tyrannically in control of it. However the significance of Steve's statement go far beyond his desire to take your cash, but perhaps we do live in the post-pc world now. I know people who use their conventional PC multitudinously less because of the presence of their post-pc products.
Before one can even debate the future outlook of traditional PC's, it must be first defined what 'post-pc' really means. The prefix 'post' means 'after', so logically post-PC defines products that proceed PC's. This doesn't tell us much. What defines after? It can be argued that 'after' doesn't even have a significance in this instance as we can't be 'after' PCs if they still exist. As a general term, post-pc can be best defined as products that can capably replace our traditional personal computer. Smartphones for example, can do many things that PC does albeit in a smaller and more eye-straining way. This, in essence can be considered a post-pc product.
Having said that, to analyse why a shift in demand might be imminent we have to examine how the average consumer uses their computer. I once read a funny but staggeringly true statement: a computer without internet is like a bowl without fruit. This says a lot about how consumers use computers, it's abundantly clear that we spend the majority of our time on the internet. More than often we will word process, however often the things that we write are merely products of the things that we research. On the internet. We like to think that we use a lot of media software on our computers, but in all honesty a Facebook user would be hard-pressed to say that they spend more time doing other tasks on a computer than they are on Facebook. This is one of the reasons why PC's are getting bitten by our post-pc products, it's because tablets and smartphones browse the internet so well. It's all about user experience and pinching to zoom is significantly more efficient and fun than Ctrl +, using fingers to physically scroll a page rather than a scroll ball is appealing. And of course touching links rather than clicking is pleasingly natural.
I'm not a believer of dying technologies and dying trends. In consumer electronics, things never die, they merely evolve. And that is what I believe is going to happen to our PC. We will always have PC, but in 20 years time it may look a lot different than the one I'm typing on as I speak. There was once a time when technology was all about becoming more advance and gaining leaps and bounds in technicality. The feature-set and sophistication of an offering determined how good it was. However, now I believe we've reached an era where it's all about intuition. The aim now appears to be creating products that are natural and intuitive. But also experiences that successfully mimic the real, tangible products that they replace.
This might be hard to understand, but here's a scenario: Real magazines are so yesterday. It's all about the magazine subscription on your iPad. The flicking of the screen for page turning aims to mimic the experience of a real magazine, which dare I say will never be replaced. Ebook readers aim to do the same with the same flicking motion to turn pages and their paper like displays. This is also why I believe the stylus is up for a come back, the HTC Flyer has revealed its potential. People do not write with their fingers, people write with pens, and the Flyer successfully imitates the usefulness of taking notes and highlighting and circling important points. It's the only tablet on the market which can really act like one of man's timeless creations: pen and paper.
The unreleased Mac OS X Lion heads the PC transformation. The intuition factor of the iPad plays a huge part in the design of Lion. The advertised features are no longer about the inside workings and the intermediates, but rather it's about getting things done more naturally and easily. For example the new Airdrop feature removes the stigma of difficulty out of wireless file sharing. Sharing files shouldn't be a hard task, after all in the real world it would only require you to grab your paper, walk over to the person you want to give it to and physically hand it to them. It shouldn't be any harder than that on a computer. The concept of Airdrop succeeds in creating technologies as easy as nature, simply drag the file onto someone's name.
Having said this, PC will never become a tablet. The sheer feeling of productivity and power of using an actual computer will never be able to be emulated in a touchy-feely device like a tablet or a smartphone. I'm not a believer in keyboard slider tablets either, or the tablets of old with the spin around displays and touch-pen input. On paper, they are superior devices but they are merely a compromise. They neither offer the pure portability of a tablet, nor do they offer the full power of a dedicated personal computer. Nobody will ever be expected to get much work done on a tablet, they are by enlarge convenience devices which allow you to quickly touch up things. They've never been intended to be the device where you can start and complete projects. Tablet's lack of keyboard is one of the main reasons for this. So what about the Asus EeePad Transformer, or Samsung Slider? Yes, you could very well add a keyboard to a tablet, but it doesn't really measure up. If you truly wanted to be productive then I'm sure most people, and I personally would just buy a portable and capable notebook. Like a Macbook Air, for instance.
It's not about the convergence of devices, and it's not about how much a certain device can do but rather how well it does them. This is the philosophy that spells out the future of any of our devices. It's not logical to build a 5 inch smartphone/tablet, as just because it can be two devices at once, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to be good at them. Personally, I don't want my phone to be 5 inches, because its large screen real estate would eat into the portability factor. A tablet will supply for my large screen appetite, and personally I don't want my tablet to have a keyboard because guess what? That's what my laptop's for.
Phone, tablet, laptop: three products that serve their purpose fully and well.
Consumers don't want compromise, obviously. Nobody wants a compromise. However many manufacturers are willing to provide just that because they believe that the more devices they can combine into one determines its quality. Rather it is how well it performs its purpose that determines how good it really is. Tablets are defining the shift in consumer technology, their sales are strong because they do some of the things that PC can do in a far more natural and intuitive way. However it can't do the thing that makes PC so essential: efficiently complete work. PC will evolve and will definitely introduce more tablet like features and develop more natural and life-like experiences. But one thing's for sure -
The PC will never become a 'Post-PC' product. The PC is here to stay.
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