Will the PC make a second comeback as the "Super Tablet"?
It’s official: people want their PCs back.
When tablets first made their appearance, they were supposed to be the next step in the evolution of mobile computing. iPads and Android tablets are, after all, easier to maintain, safer, virtually virus-proof, and allow a better organization and workflow, as everything is at the user’s fingertips.
Why haven’t they made it? Why has the tablet failed to deliver on its promise to obliterate the PC?
The answer is easy: It was never meant to.
Introducing: the “Super Tablet”
The Super Tablet was the concept with which the industry should have lead with, and never had, mostly due to a younger market and technology yet to be attained.
What is a modern-day example of the “Super Tablet”? The Microsoft Surface gets pretty close, although one big problem is a price tag that very few are willing to get past. Yet, it is a PC... and a tablet, nonetheless, which is what tablets were initially expected to be, yet never were.
When android was first introduced, first on smartphones, then on tablets, users felt very strongly about the things tablets couldn’t do, rather than on what they could do. Of course, as with all new things, excitement over novelty prevailed, yet the most attractive feature of tablets have always been the affordable price tag.
Tablets got better, and yet sales still lag, while, surprisingly, PC sales have began to mount. This trend might be odd to those who believe that consumers will always go for the “next big thing”. In reality, it makes perfect sense. Consumers don’t need “new”, they need “better”, and better means to do the things users want to do on a PC, but on the go.
Running Windows, or Mac applications on a tablet is, after all, what users have been wanting all along. Office applications, such as spreadsheets and word processors are only the tip of the iceberg. The ability to run higher-end applications, like Photoshop, or AutoCAD, and of course, games, has always been a roadblock for tablet manufacturers, as apps only go so much further, before hitting performance and user experience hard limitations.
This begs the question on whether the real comeback of the PC is yet to happen, in the form of a “Super Tablet”? More specifically,
what would it take to make it happen?
Of course the “resurrection” of PCs, in their new form factors, would entail a barrage of modifications and technologies, some of which are still in a very early stage of development.
Substituting Intel chips with ARM chips, or equally cost effective, and energy efficient, technology would be a crucial step, along with the development of interchangeable components, making the Super Tablet just as easy to upgrade and modify, as a traditional PC. Needless to say, RAM will need additional refinement and resizing, to accommodate more advanced components, such as a proper GPU and HD audio.
Another obstacle would be storage size. A traditional SATA drive has no place in a Super Tablet, and SSD drives are way too expensive. A newer, more cost efficient, yet reliable solid-state technology is needed to ensure that the cost of this Super Tablet is still as affordable as that of a regular PC.
Different CPU requires a different breed of operating systems that is not as platform-dependent as the current one.
The next level of Mac Vs PC
Let’s picture a world in which Super Tablets exist, and where Microsoft and Apple are once again, at odds with each other. Who would have the upper hand?
As long as Microsoft doesn’t break its dependence on Intel chips, and its religion of backwards compatibility, Apple is very likely to offer the best product. Alas, Apple isn’t likely to give up its position as premium products manufacturer, which means, Microsoft will have to come up with a tablet that, while moderately priced for low to medium-end consumers, can still perform at least 50% to 75% as well as its competitors, while offering the full range of available PC software applications.
Synergy
The new buzz-word Apple is now using to illustrate its concept of cross-compatibility and collaboration between desktop and mobile devices is likely to be a big part of what might make the Super Tablet an invaluable product, if it will ever see the light of day.
The “synergy” in Super Tablets will likely be created by interoperability between Super Tablets and compatible mobile devices. Apple has already take this concept to the next level, and with the introduction of typically mobile-bound features, such as Siri, within the Mac OSX ecosystem, it seems very likely that Apple could take the lead in a hypothetical world where Mac OSX runs on a “suped-up iPad”.
In this exercise of the imagination, one could speculate on an inevitable merge of all mobile and desktop operating systems into hybrids, such as: Microsoft Windows+Windows Phone, OSX+iOS, Android+Chrome OS, at which point, Mac Vs PC Vs Google could become a very likely scenario.
Back to reality
The truth is that, at present, a true Super Tablet, AKA: “the PC of the future” is a very unlikely concept, whose testament of that is Microsoft Surface, a device that has every intention of offering the convenience of a tablet, and the power and versatility of a PC. Yet, how many low to medium income consumers are willing to pay a month salary for it?
It is true, the PC as we know it is dying, and it is bound to turn into something different, something better, yet, just as market analysts at Gartner’s predict: the future will be driven by low price tags, not necessarily by premium performance, at least until the economy improves. After that, it’s anybody’s guess.