Was 2011 the death of the PC?

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Well, it's been five years since the year that some magazine (I think it was Wired) dubbed the death of the PC, and yet I still see new laptops being sold at Best Buy to this very day. To be quite frank, I don't want the PC to be completely replaced by tablets. Tablet computers just aren't powerful enough for all of my hacking and programming needs, and most of them are either riddled with malware (like Android) or so locked-down that you can't even install a basic command line interface on one (like the iPad). Can you even get a CLI for an Android tablet? I'm not sure. What is your opinion on this?

I'm starting to see notices that application software won't be supported in the future.

http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2015 ... -software/

I doubt the demand for PCs is ever going to go away, unless they come up with something even more advanced but still with PC functionality. I even recently got a laptop because my old one stopped working, I think the hard drive was burnt out. But yeah also in the last year I got into playing League of legends and cant really play that on a tablet, not to mention even games you could play on a tablet I prefer on an actual PC. I have a tablet but the screen is rather scratched but I haven't bothered to find any places to replace the screen yet.

Aside from that I prefer browsing the internet and watching videos on a PC more as well, for one the screen is bigger, though for videos I really prefer to watch them on a t.v.

Yeah, I'm thinking PCs may become more of a niche market now that we have tablets, but there will always be a market for them. If nothing else, there's the fact that they're bulkier and thus harder to steal, so places like public libraries will want to have PCs rather than tablets so people don't just walk off with them.

OS sales indicate a huge shift to phones. Tablet sales seem to have peaked insofar as market share - they are leveling out, losing to phones as phablets become dominant.

Android is a modified version of Linux; as such the command shell is there, you just need a terminal emulator app to access and use it (and perhaps root access).

Looking at our company's IT inventory as an anecdotal example, we have a PC for most people, several for task specific stations, and a number of laptops for mobile workers. The only tablets are used for website testing & design since a portion of our outside sales uses tablets to show information to potential clients/customers. I'd say that for businesses, the PC isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. One huge advantage is they are so easy to control in a centralized manner; we buy them in bulk, image their hard drives, control the software on them, control how they are used, what network resources they access...etc.. From that point of view they are far more secure and a known quantity & quality. Management likes that aspect, as it makes things...predictable.

I think the period of most people having a PC in their house was a bit of a fluke. In 1991, it was rare for people to have a PC at home. In 2001 it was common, and in 2011 it was typical. It was just because the internet was so useful and cool, and that was the only practical way to access it. As it becomes easier and easier to access the internet, I think people will just not bother with them anymore.

There will always be a market for PCs as tools, and for hobbyists. But I think their mass-market appeal will erode back to early 90s levels.

Why precisely 2011?

The iPad was announced in 2010. 2012 was when the current retraction in US pc sales began. A lot of people at the time (and today) expected that the PC market had peaked and would never recover.

Tablets have been a minor interest of mine since...1994. The iPad really was the first time they were viable to the general population rather than a vertical or "captured" market (like specialized technicians, etc). However, according to IDC, 2014 Q4 was their (tablets in general) peak in sales and they've been declining ever since. 2015 showed between -4% and -7% depending on quarter in worldwide sales. Most analysts seem to think it's due to phones reaching a screen size the same as smaller tablets. The question is what will come next, as consumers have already pushed back on phones becoming too large, loss of portability and increase in fragility.

I can't see people going back to writing their own software, so when people can't get the software they want for their PCs, the demand for PCs will go away.

Tablets and phones are for media consumption. Last time I checked, you can't do serious media creation on a tablet - programming, real video editing, sound design. For most of those you want more power and a keyboard.

Maybe programming and other media creation is a niche. That's sad. That wasn't the promise of the PC revolution.

I agree this is sad. I have young teenage niece and nephew, and they seem very uninterested in how any of their gadgets actually work. It's even more of a shame because my niece in particular was fascinated by that stuff when she was littler, but now she's lost interest.

I'm fine if she lost interest on her own. I'm afraid our culture is encouraging kids to not look behind the curtain, and to think of the tech they as too complicated to be understood.

Probably this.

Most folks will access the Net with their smart phones. Only a minority will have PC's because they need them to run a business, or to do graphic arts, or audio editing, or some other vocation/avocation.

Exactly creating content for tablets and mobiles, and creating the infrastructure of the web.

Personally I can't work without 2/3 monitors.

The home PC, might be replaced by their TV, as is the largest screen in the house normally.

excellent post

Our family had PC's in our home going back to the early 1980's. So, I'm not sure that it was as rare as you might think it is.