The Passing of the Personal Computer Era

An anonymous reader writes "AllThingsD columnist Arik Hesseldahl noticed another milestone marking the passing of the personal computer era: for the first time since the early '80s, the share of worldwide sales of DRAM chips consumed by PCs (desktop and laptop computers, but not tablets) has dropped below fifty percent. Perhaps a more important milestone was reached last year, when more smartphones were shipped (not sold) worldwide than the combined total of PCs and tablets (also noticed by Microsoft watcher Joe Wilcox). While this is certainly of tremendous marketing and business importance to the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and PC OEMs, others may reflect on the impending closing of the history books on the era that started in Silicon Valley a little over 35 years ago."

Comments

Re:Toys dont replace tools

[Colonel Korn]

every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases.

Boot time, battery life, and hot laps

I have a netbook with androidx86 installed on it so its basically a keyboard equipped tablet. Doesn't get too much use compared to the ipad because:

Pickup and go "boot" time of androidx86 netbook is about 180 seconds, "boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock

Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is ... I donno but its apparently way longer than I'm willing to work on something in one sitting. Every time I use the netbook I have to plan, OK, now when the battery dies I'll either switch to ... or plug in to charge there... or ...

Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.

I would assume an android tablet is equally useful, not ipad specific... basically my android phone with a bigger screen would be a really nice tablet.

I find I task switch with the ipad a lot. Not switch apps inside the ipad, but in real life. I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds. You don't talk about a geographic location in theory, you just google map it. I've got a, one, minute this morning to check my email. Do I spend three minutes booting the desktop or fifteen seconds on the ipad? Lots of little task switching like that.

If you have Windows 7 on your netbook, it would take 1-2 seconds to resume, matching the iPad. If you had a decent netbook, your real useable screen-on-and-doing-stuff battery life on the netbook would be 10 hours, comparable to the iPad. You'd also be able to do a hell of a lot more than you can on the iPad. Typical netbooks are also comparable in temperature to the iPad and have no fans whatsover. In fact, were netbooks ever made with fans? I never saw one so now I'm wondering whether you're just making this up. Everything you describe as slow on your netbook should actually be at least as fast on a netbook as on a tablet.

I don't think tablets suck. Tablets are awesome because of the form factor, the generally awesome displays, and the examples you didn't choose (like reading a book or using a variety of specialized apps to do things netbooks don't do as well). Your examples, however, just show that you're worse at computers than the average dude on the street.