Five reasons why we shouldn't kill the PC just yet
It is being prognosticated that the PC, as we know it, will soon be replaced by an ever growing range of smaller, portable, wearable and integrated devices ready to take over, one by one, each and every single task PCs have been used for in the past few decades.
While such scenario is bound to become reality, at some point in our lifetime, there are at least five very valid reasons why we shouldn’t rush to the dismissal of the PC, just yet.
Before getting on to this checklist, there is a reason why we are saying “PC”, and not “Desktop PC”. The desktop PC has undergone its own evolution, formerly the king of the consumer household, the go-to hub for blogging, web surfing, tax-filing, social networking and gaming, it has been also the theater for endless malware and viral software drama, spanning over two decades of blue screens of death, mysterious pop-ups, and countless hours scouring the web for how to get rid of “this” or “that” (insert generic late 90s desktop malware name here).
What’s left from the desktop PC, has shed the “desktop” part, as it became an ubiquitous entity, living in devices most don’t even consider as such, according to the traditional definition of a Personal Computer.
The PC has now evolved into the five categories of devices that keep us from discounting the PC as a computing environment and custom laptops are in a league of their own.
1. Laptop PCs sales will hold steady at least until 2017
The market of portable PCs may be smaller in respect to the multitude of iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices on the market, but according to data from Statista.com, it’s a very steady one, with numbers projected to hold strong at 200 million units per year, plus or minus.
2. There is more to PCs than just laptops
Traditional laptops make for a mere percentage of the range of products that can be defined as PCs, such as ultra-portables, cloud-based net-book hybrids like the Chromebook, which supports both cloud-based and offline applications, bare-bone micro-PCs for retail, POS and other minimalist applications. Custom PCs still hold strong in production, design and development environments, as well as networking server applications.
3. Consumers are still getting used to do everything on their phones and tablets.
Humans are creatures of habit, and some habits are hard to kill. There is a percentage of users who are not aware of the fact that they can do spreadsheets or type and print documents over WiFi, directly on their smartphones and tablets. Other users might be aware of it, but still refuse to make the leap and embrace a completely mobile environment. There is also a segment of users who find mobile screens simply too small to see and operate.
4. PCs have gone through dramatic improvements in reliability and performance compared to their predecessors
With better and more advanced operating systems, such as OS X Yosemite and Windows 8.1, the PC (and Mac) is no longer seen as an energy-inefficient, noisy and unstable contraption, as it was in the era pre-Windows XP, and before multi-core CPU's were popular.
5. Global sales of PCs worldwide are likely to increase in 2015
According to this data from Statista.com, global PC sales will reach 295.7 billion dollars in 2015 from their lowest point in 2009, which was 219 billions.
It’s very likely that what is driving the sale is more advanced operating systems and improved performance, as well as a more affordable price point.
Having said that, the landscape of consumer PCs beyond 2017 is anybody’s guess, as new technologies are likely to revolutionize computing for the masses in ways we can only barely speculate.
As with living organisms, the PC is no different, and its survival depends on its ability to adapt to a new ecosystems of lighter, faster, smarter and more ubiquitous devices, even if it might take some time still.