The Post-PC Era

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You can't wait to hear from you. Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Looks dot com. Hello again, everyone, Welcome to tex Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette, and I'm an editor at how stuff works dot Com. Across from me, as he always is, sits senior writer Jonathan Strickland. If you start me up, I'll never stop. Well, I can see you're gathering no moss, No, I am not. So we wanted to talk today about whether or not we are in a post PC era,

and I hear you guys asking right now. Hey, Jonathan and Chris, why are you talking about whether or not we're in a post PC era? Well, I'll tell you it's because Mark Dean, the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Middle East in Africa, who is a fellow who worked on the very first IBM PC, said it may be odd for me to say this, but I am also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in

two thousand five, selling our PC division to Lenovo. How many in the tech industry questioned IBM's decision to exit the business at the time, it's now clear there a company was in the vanguard of the post PC era. I personally have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn't think i'd live long enough to witness its decline. But while PCs will continue to be much used devices, they're no longer the leading edge of computing.

They're going the way of the vacuum tube typewriter, vinyl records, CRT, and incandescent light bulbs. So we wanted to talk about you know what do we think about that? Well, I'll tell you two things that are making a comeback include vacuum tubes and vinyl. Right. So, but what he says is that there are no lot that PCs are no longer in the leading edge of computing. And he does say they will continue to continue to be much used devices. Well so, and ncandescent lightbulbs still much used. So when

so when was this? When was this that he made this statement? It was not long ago. It was like in August because David Clark, who was an m I T research scientists who scientists said, actually gave a a talk called the post PC Internet. UM. And I found that out actually because I was reading an article from Sarah Rotman Epps, a forester UM who said that the post PC era doesn't mean and a time when there are no more computers. And that's the way I was

interpreting it. Yeah, exactly. Um. She says that what the post PC era means is basically at a time of ubiquitous technology and ubiquitous computing. I should say specifically, um, in which case I would say, yes, we are there, We're there. I agree. See that. That's what The reaction to Dean's uh A statement was was kind of across the board in technology journals and blogs. There were some people who took it to say the PC is dead, which is not what Dean said. He he specifically said

that they will continue to be much used devices. That doesn't mean that they're dead. Um. But there were a lot of people who wrote the death of the PC and that I guess that gets eyes on your article, but it's not a really accurate representation of what Dean was saying, uh, but you know there are other indicators that show that this is this is not this is

not lightly said. Now, first, you've got the example that Dean himself gave, which is not just not the personal example which is interesting, but the example of IBM selling off its PC division to Lenovo. That that was that that caused some eyebrows to raise back in two thousand five, and it still does in August of eleven if you're recording this, because uh, I was sitting at my desk just sort of going about my daily business when Jonathan

dropped me an instant message that said, hey, guess what. Yeah, so yeah, that IBM isn't alone August eighteen eleven, which as of the recording of this podcast was yesterday. On August, HP announced it was considering spinning off its PC division. Yeah. That was after and and um enough, well oddly in off because people are are equating the post PC era

with um things like tablets and smartphones and other things. Uh. Of course we talked about in the podcast about the history of Palm, how HP acquired Palm for his web os, and I actually recently, probably about a month ago now, had an opportunity to play with one of the HP tablets with the web os. I was wondering, because you have a habit of killing technologies, as I was wondering if you were responsible for this Anyhow, I really enjoyed

the web os. When I was poking around on it um in the store, I thought, this was really nice. I really like it. And of course I've got an iPad and I enjoy my iPad UM and I really liked I liked the difference. And I've also used an Android tablet and I liked it too. But I was I'd never actually used the web o s before that, and I thought, well, this is this is pretty neat. I'm glad HP did this well. In the same announcement, HP said that it will it is divesting itself. It's

saying no more. While it's not investing it there that would require a buyer. They're actually shutting it down and incurring a massive cost. I saw people commenting that, um, they had bought it for, you know, to eliminate the competition. No, if they bought it to eliminate the competition, they wouldn't have made anything else that used the os um. But yeah, they're shutting down and they are all that unit and and it looks like they're going to divest themselves of

their PC holdings as well. Yeah, so that means that they are no longer supporting the continuation of of web Os devices, although they did say that they were hoping to continue software development in some way. So what that means in the future, we don't know. Maybe it means that that eventually they will sell web Os off to someone else, Maybe they'll I hope so, or maybe it just means that for all those people who went out there and bought a web Os device, don't worry. We

won't completely drop the support of the existing devices. We're just not going to build any new ones. Right. Um. However, you could argue that that is officially the death of Palm, which you know, we we did an episode on the history of Palm and we talked about how it was the web Os was kind of its end and uh, its legacy that was living on an HP and how it looks like that's no more, which is just kind of sad. But so let's talk about some of the

things that have led to this post PC era. Keeping in mind again, we should say, first of all, let's talk about what roles that PCs are going to continue to fill. Let's do that first, because we need to get out of the way. Otherwise people are going to write in and tell us how important their PC is. Again, we're not saying PCs aren't important. We're just saying they're

no longer the forefront of computing. Uh. There are roles that PCs are are always going to be, or I shouldn't say always, but for the foreseeable future, will be the best device to do certain kinds of tasks. Song. Oh yeah, like your typical office work. I don't think that's going to go away from most PCs for a while. It's just that that's a very efficient and easy way to manage a lot of office work, things like tablets, if it's anything where you're doing a lot of data

entry or anything along those lines. We're still not quite there yet. Now. It's it's rather a pain in the neck to try to write a paper on a tablet, because trust me, I've tried, and it's it's doable, but it's not nearly as easy as it is with a computer. And sure, you could get docking stations that have keyboards on them and everything, but they're they're just not quite as versatile as an UM laptop or a desktop computer. Yep, then we've got gaming. Now. You can play lots of

very popular games on tablets and smartphones. There's no doubt about Angry Birds has shown the world that a simple

game can really dominate the market. But if you are a hardcore gamer, someone who really likes to play uh the cutting edge uh graphically intensive games that are out there, the ones that take a lot of processor power just to to play, not just for the graphics, but for the gameplay itself and the physics engine and all that kind of stuff, then a desktop PC or laptop is not going to just go away from you because the other devices that are out there just don't have that

process and capability of running those games at that level that that that the elite gamers expect. So if you are into media creation or editing, the PC is not gonna go away. I mean, you can do some some of that on on some tablets. There are applications that lets you do some work like that, but it's shoot, you can do some of it on smartphones, yeah, but it's um, it's limited. You're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have nearly the versatility that you would

have with a full desktop computer. Um. And also depending on what you're doing, it may take it's going to either produce something that's of a lower quality than what you expect or it's going to take a lot longer to complete. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that that shooting high definition video and editing that work on a computer, um, the end result will you know, stretch into gigabytes of space, if not terabytes, depending on

the length of the project. And you're not going to find that on a table that amount of space on a tablet or a smartphone. So I mean, there there are certain things that you can use to do that with and I would argue that all the different types of devices can be useful in working together towards the completion of a project like that. But you can't actually do that level of editing with that, you know, with

that level sophistication on something like a tablet. Sure, So now we can talk about I mean, those those are just a few examples. There are others. I mean, obviously, if you're talking about uh doing some heavy duty processing, like things like when you're folding proteins. Uh, then you're gonna need some they're so small. But then in that case you're talking about using actual computers, and not necessarily the processing needs are greater than what the mobile devices

are capable of delivering. But in general, those are just some examples. Now let's move on and talk about the things that make the post PC era possible. From a hardware perspective, we already touched on this, but mobile devices are really the the chief element here. So smartphones and

tablets are really what we're focusing on. These products have really hit it big in the consumer marketplace over the last three years or so four years, Uh, starting with really the Apple iPhone, I would argue, I mean there were smartphones on the market before then, but at least in the United States. Uh, the smartphone market was really just kind of limited to executives and a few early adopters. Well, it sort of depends on how you look at it now.

I mean, there there were tablets before to the Windows based tablets, I don't really catch on. Well, no, they The thing is, these things sort of laid the groundwork. Um, but the thing is, you'd have people like doctors, Uh, you know, especially people in the medical industry were really using tablets, but they were big. They were like laptops that had been flipped inside out so that the screen was on the outside. They weren't heavy. They're still around.

I've seen some um and you know the palm pilot where you had the device in your hand, which gradually became a smartphone. But you're right, they were primarily these were tools that the executive would use or the you know, the business professional would use, not things like the iPhone, which sort of broke that wall down. It was really aimed at the general consumer who wanted to have essentially a portable computer that they could that also acted as

a phone. Uh. Sarah Rotman Epps said that one of the delineators is that it's more of a casual experience and it's more are intimate than it used to be, rather than being something that was set on your desk and you'd have to go to your desk to do it.

Even with a laptop, you know, you have the keyboard and the screen up, and it also gives you the opportunity to interact with your environment no matter where you are, as opposed to like if you have a computer if it's a desktop, then you are limited to the desk unless you unplug everything and you move that desktop over someplace else for some sort of land party or something. Then party laptop is a little more portable, but not so portable that you're gonna be whipping the laptop out

just casually wherever you happen to be. I've worked with people, Sorry interrupt, I was gonna say, I've worked with people who, even in the laptop era, had a sling for their desktop PC so that they could carry it to land parties because laptops didn't and I would argue, to some degree still don't have the kind of processing power that you can put in a desktop PC. Yeah, you can find some gaming laptops out there that put my desktop to shame, but they are still like, compared to the

cutting edge gaming PC are still still behind. And it's because you know, you can only fit so many components into a laptop case and not have it melt. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we while we've talked about it many times, how processors, especially very sophisticated high end processors, generate a whole lot of heat and uh a lot of the gaming PCs, you know, some of them are liquid cooled. Uh, many of them require multiple fans to keep their innards cool.

They might have multiple processors, well, most of them do graphics, high end graphics processors, again generating more heat. Um so, I mean there are things that you but but you can do a lot of work with that, a lot of computing work. Well in games, yes they're games, but they're doing a lot of processing work, computing work to render that information that you see on the screen. So if you're not doing that, if you if you want to be able to interact with your environment easily, then

a smartphone and tablet that that makes perfect sense. Like you're walking around town and you wanted to look up the address of a place because you think, oh, that that restaurant I heard of is nearby. I know it's near here, I just don't know exactly where it is. Well, that's where that kind of thing comes in handy. And once people really started to embrace that, the app world exploded and we suddenly got all these apps that let us interact with our environment in ways we never really

thought of before, like augmented reality. Augmented reality is a great example, and of course augmented reality goes beyond just smartphones and tablets. We've seen that incorporated into handheld gaming

consoles as well. And we should also add that even though we're talking about smartphones and tablets right now, we should there are other things we can talk about, like set top boxes or even just TVs that have computing elements built into them that people are are using to interact with the digital world far more frequently than they are with a PC. I'm sorry, well, I was gonna add on to something that's married to this idea of the mobile device and the things that you have around you. Uh,

there are two other related concepts. There's the ecosystem, the idea of creating a digital ecosystem where your devices can interact with one another in a fairly seamless way so that your experience like you're you're playing a game on your smartphone, let's say, and then you switch over to a tablet and you are able to pick up exactly where you left off on the smartphone, and now you're playing in a tablet, and you know, that's a that's a pretty powerful message you can send to a consumer.

But married to that is the idea of cloud computing. Cloud computing has really done a lot too to bring on the post PC era, because before cloud computing, you essentially had to have a device capable of doing whatever processing needs you had all on its own, right Like you you had to have if you wanted to play a particular game that was on the store shelf, you needed to have a PC that had the stats that that game required at bare minimum. Otherwise you're like, well,

I would love to play this game. I've got the money to play this game, but my computer is not capable of running it. Now, cloud computing, at least theoretically, what you would do is you create a very low powered browser window or or framework on your computer which doesn't require a lot of processor speed. Um that would

be what would be run on your computer. Then you would have a high speed Internet connection to the cloud service operator, which would be running the game on its end, and you would essentially be accessing it through the framework

that's on your computer. So all the heavy lifting is being done on a computer potentially thousands of miles away from you, and it's only that you're when you press a button like instead of pressing a button and your processor tells the game okay, jump, you're pressing a button in the your your computer sends a message to this computer that's thousands of miles away that tells its processor okay,

now jump now. Getting the lag time down, the latency time down, so that that doesn't become a factor in the game. That's important. But we're seeing that happen. I mean there are business is built around it. Online is built around that business. So you've got once you have the cloud computing agent there, it means that you no longer have to go out and buy the newest computer in order to access some of the coolest software that's

out there. So that has taken away the the the incentive to go out and replace your computer every couple of years just to stay up to speed, assuming that the things that you need are available in the cloud. Not not everything you need is going to be there. So a lot of this comes down to personal choice about whether or not you are there certain things that you just don't feel like you that you feel you can do without. Like I know that I can't access

this particular program without having a fast computer. Do I need that program? If I don't need that program, I'm just going to go to a cloud based system and buy a cheap computer, or maybe not even a computer. Maybe I'm I can access it through a tablet or smartphone. Uh, and that has really helped urge on this this post PC era. Yes, right now, we don't need these these desktop computers are laptop computers in order to access some

of the cool applications that previously would have required them. Well, it's just good to know that more about what the post PC era means to those people who have described it. I think it's easy with a name like that, or it's unfortunate that they chose that description because people seem to think that that was the death knell of the computer. But uh, obviously, I mean computers are in so many

different kinds of things. Uh, you know, it's it's just going to evolve, and it's it's become easier to do these things. It's become more cost effective to do to put computers in different devices. Um. And uh, I mean we have the Internet of Things where your fridge is talking to the internet. Um, you know, it's it's Uh, it's good to have some description about what's really going on and what people actually mean by that, because um, I think it should probably I think we've not only started.

We've been in the post PC era for a couple of years anyway. Yeah, it's just it's right now. It's it's I think a lot easier to recognize and to acknowledge the fact that we are in that era. I mean, um, again, it doesn't mean that you're gonna walk home and realize that something all your computers don't work or they've disappeared. Uh,

they've all run off. They don't have a little gem blinking indicating that they need to be on the run, because otherwise the computer executors are going to show up. And yeah, so, uh well, I don't know if anyone's going to get that joke. If you do, let us know, Yeah, some of you will. All right, all of you old timers out there who get that joke, don't yell at me for assuming that you're you're young or young timers who who have seen it. That would just blow me away.

I know there's remake coming anyway. Okay, I'm getting off track. Let's wrap this up. Yes there is. Let's wrap this up. We are going to uh say that, yes, we're in a post PC era. No, it does not mean the computer is actually going away. And I think I think

I'm comfortable with that. So if you guys have any topics you would like us to talk about anything that you specifically think needs to be addressed, You can write us an email our addresses, text stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter, or handle it. Both of those is Text stuff H. S W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out

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