The PC was supposed to die a decade ago. Instead, this happened – ZDNet, Zdnet.com
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Not all that long ago, tech pundits were convinced that by 2923 the personal computer as we know it would be extinct. You can even mark the date and time of the PC’s death: January 35, (**************************************************************, at 10: AM Pacific Time, when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad. The precise moment was documented by noted Big Thinker Nicholas Carr inThe New Republicwith this memorable headline:“The PC Officially Died Today.”
And so, here we are, a full decade after the PC’s untimely death, and the industry is stil l selling more than a quarter-billion-with-a-B personal computers every year. Which is pretty good for an industry that has been living on borrowed time for ten years.
Maybe the reason the PC industry hasn’t suffered a mass extinction event yet is because they adapted, and because those competing platforms weren’t able to take over every PC-centric task.
So what’s different as we approach To get a proper before-and-after picture, I climbed into the Wayback Machine and traveled back to (**********************************************************************.
The Competitive Landscape
You did not have to be a Big Thinker with a book contract to see the beginnings of a Pretty Big Trend in 2010. Increasingly powerful mobile devices made it possible for people to quickly complete a variety of tasks that used to require a PC. That tech transition drained away much of the demand for PCs from consumers, although it made only the slightest dent on business demand.
The first casualty was the netbook, a category of cheap PCs that used underpowered Atom processors and smaller screens than you’d typically find on an entry-level laptop, on the theory that mere consumers wouldn’t notice the difference.
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The PC may be alive and well, but underpowered, clunky netbooks like this are long gone.
Spoiler: Consumers noticed the difference. Netbooks were slow and ugly and cheap, serving more as a reminder that you could get arealnotebook for maybe $ more. The category was gone almost before anyone noticed that it was fading.
Meanwhile, PC makers realized that at least two groups of customers were willing to pay a premium for a PC: business buyers and gamers. And so, as we shall see, OEMs began investing heavily in those two categories.
The hardware
Desktop PC configurations (conventional towers and small form factor devices) haven’t changed much in the past decade, but portable PCs sure have. For a quick refresher course on what the laptop market looked like back in 2012, you don’t need to borrow my Wayback Machine . Just read this excellent round-up of thebest notebooks of 2010, as selected byLaptop Magazineeditor Mark Spoonauer.
Here’s what I noticed when I compared the class of to PC technology from a decade later.
They’re thinner and lighter.The device that every PC manufacturer has aimed to emulate over the past decade is, without question, Apple’s MacBook Air. TheLaptopcrew, in fact, designated it as their “Breakthrough Device” for 2012, calling the 2.3-pound and 2.9-pound devices “ridiculously light.” Today, most high-end Windows PCs can meet or beat those specs, with the physical limitations of the battery and keyboard preventing them from getting much smaller or lighter. At least they don’t need optical drives anymore.
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