I think the mischaracterization is of what mobile is replacing. It isn't the PC. A PC is primarily a computing device, an iPhone is primarily a communications device.

The iPhone and iPad aren't replacing PCs, they're replacing newspaper, radio and telephone. They're only replacing PCs to the extent that the PC had already partially replaced some of those things.

In my experience tablets are also replacing books and tv.

I suspect that in a lot of houses the parents are now using tablets, the kids are using PCs/laptops and the tv is mostly off.

Well this is how it is in our house :). Our tv now exists for netflix via chromecast once or twice a week.

For kids, their default go to device isn't the PC. That's what they use when they have to do something which isn't great on a tablet.

The other interesting thing is what they think "isn't great on a tablet". Non-professional photo or video editing - if you're a 15 year old today, that's a tablet thing, not a PC thing. A lot of gaming is phone/tablet rather than a PC.

A PC looks to me to be primarily homework using something MS Office-ish.

You can take my ability to dissipate over a half kilowatt from my cold dead hands. Some games will always be better on PC because they can make use of the power.

Just the proportion of people who play computer games who see them in this way is shrinking rapidly.

I think the real disruptive potential of GoogleTV was that it allowed you to search for something and have results from all of these disparate feeds show up in a single list. It put content from the web (including independent and user-generated content) on par with network programming or programming delivered via the web instead of a cable subscription.

When networks blocked GoogleTV from accessing their streams without tinkering with user agent strings, etc. it really put a dent in the whole strategy. The point was to show you everything that was available on the big screen in your living room. Networks wanted you to watch on the TV via the more lucrative cable and rental options and only use free web streams as an alternative when you're at your computer in the office or the hotel.

In this way, current tablet-to-TV options like Chromecast and AppleTV are less disruptive since they don't put web content on the same level as cable content. To watch TV you just flip through the channels. To watch web stuff you need to connect some device and push content to the TV. It's a small thing but I think it's a legitimate difference. Firing up YouTube to push a video to your TV isn't the same as searching for "video games" on your Google/Apple TV and seeing TotalBiscuit come up in the same search results as something from Viacom.

The latter have not been making any inroads...

It may not be official Google Android, but low cost generic Android tablets are massive in Asia. Most of them are low spec devices but that's all you need if all you're doing is watching movies and a bit of web surfing.

Now, I'm in perhaps the richer country of the whole region.

"Worldwide sales of tablets to end users reached 195.4 million units in 2013, a 68 percent increase on 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. While sales of iOS tablets grew in the fourth quarter of 2013, iOS's share declined to 36 percent in 2013. The tablet growth in 2013 was fueled by the low-end smaller screen tablet market, and first time buyers; this led Android to become the No. 1 tablet operating system (OS), with 62 percent of the market (see Table 1)."

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2674215

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple-ipad-t...

That's why I've started calling them 'personal communicators' instead of 'phones'. Sounds a bit more Star Treky as well :)

I don't know if that's entirely true. A lot of people bought PCs 10 years ago simply because that was the only way to access this new Facespace thing their kids told them about. Those users are now using tablets or mobile because it serves their needs better than a desktop did.

The reality is that a whole lot of people bought systems with way more capabilities than their use case or abilities warranted. Desktop sales are down, and for this reason I don't think they are coming back. "Real" computer users will still use real computers, everyone else is probably better served by mobile.

Are you sure about that?

I am a developer. I have a computer for programming and a couple of LAN party games. I have a phone for everything else.

I have a monster custom built desktop at home that I don't even bother plugging in.

PCs are becoming work devices. They are cool because you can take a laptop home and do professional stuff on them for cheap, but they aren't ubiquitous or necessary like they used to be.

Mobile is great for 1) consuming content 2) interacting with your extended environment when you are not grounded to a computer (summoning an Uber, paying with an app, etc.) The money in content consumption will go to either the content creators or the digital sharecroppers (Facebook).

So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?

As a programmer, I suspect I could probably type the entirity of a days work into the computer in a half hour.

If we count tablets as mobile too (they're wireless after all and plenty of them come with SIM slots) then the consumption part gets a bit better, in landscape mode you can read PDFs on them but the part of work that requires significant input would - for me - not be an option.

Some days, I'd totally agree with you; I'm not really sure of the next step(s), and have to give myself lots of time to think about things. This tends to apply when I'm entering unknown territory, and my tasks are relatively fuzzy and uncertain.

On the other hand, some tasks are extremely straight-forward (repetitive / memory-based), and more or less completely WPM and flow-bound. Even working with relatively efficient editors (using shortcuts, macros, VI bindings, etc), it's hard to type out (or otherwise input) much more than 2000 lines of code in a day. These types of tasks certainly require efficient input, and could be greatly enhanced by even better human-to-machine interfaces.

(I'm also a programmer, and these do come from my own experiences)

A lot of modern languages/platforms are able to be used as a REPL console. Same with commandline tools.

Being able to rapidly experiment with bits of code to identify the correct solution can be incredibly valuable.

I don't care if it's a bottle neck. I want an efficient means of typing, so that I can keep my focus on other stuff. Maybe I could do a lot of my typing using a terrible interface like my phone, but it would be very aggravating.

I never understand this prediction. That's a bit like saying I don't need a car because I could just dock my bicycle into some sort of enclosure with four wheels. Tablets, smartphones, and laptops/desktops were all built for different purposes and cannot be full replacements for each other, just like a bicycle can't fully replace a car without some serious sacrifices.

At this point, if you have anything worth securing, its probably a good bet that your device will get compromised in the next 5 years. Compartmentalized devices helps with that significantly, since it means only partial compromises.

What if an iPad Air could simple attach to a MB Air chassis and only serve as the display when attached?

Android is a bit better than iOS in this respect, but not much.

None of the mobile vendors have any incentive to change this, since it would mean forfeiting the App Store tax and for Apple would cannibalize the Mac market. The only way I see an uncrippled mobile device entering the market that is high enough quality to compete is if someone with none of these conflicting interests bucks the trend. Android is pretty forkable, so a droid fork that solved the security problems in a non-feudal way and that supported the sort of docking you describe would be disruptive.

Dell? Compaq? HP? A "washed up" PC vendor with stagnant market share would have nothing to lose and might have the resources to pull it off.

The App Store "tax"? Sure, Apple doesn't mind the cash. But they are first, second and third a hardware company: that's where the real money is. The reason they have no intention to allow side loading apps on iOS has to do with user experience, eliminating support headaches and security (order may be different, but these re the reasons).

The fact is your dream device would appeal to the same people who buy desktop Linux machines now. They exist, but they are a tiny part of the market. Nobody can stay in business catering to just those customers.

In practice this means that PCs and their unlocked OSes will continue to hold onto their market niche until or unless mobile bridges that cap.

In 5 or 10 years dockable tablets are going to be every-goddamn-where, especially in business. It just makes sense, and is too all around practical. And for most computer uses, even "intensive" ones, it's perfect. You get portability plus productivity in the docked configuration plus huge economic benefits. Tablets are mostly just screens, batteries, and a handful of chips, all of which are super amenable to economies of scale in manufacture. Tablets are going to be cheaper than dirt eventually, and because a tablet can be a self-contained computer it'll tend to be the default computing choice. The biggest thing missing today is primarily good software.

I would instead focus on the work done with virtual machines. If instead I had a subscription service to access a virtual machine that had the ability to run any application I wanted, streamed to my mobile device that would then display it anywhere I wanted. My mobile device could connect me to any amount of computing power I need (in reason and with a large enough budget).

Why on earth would I buy this whole separate machine to do this? My personal computing device that I carry around with me everywhere could allow me to perform any function possible, I could have a full desktop computer anywhere I wanted as long as I have a internet connection and a screen.

Gaming could take place anywhere as well. You wouldn't need a gaming rig, the processing power would be handled elsewhere whilst your device handles the graphics processing and streaming.

Internet speeds will have to increase exponentially, but are we really that short sighted to state that personal computers will never be replaced by mobile devices? Yes it may not happen tomorrow, but it will come

This is why I find machine learning and optimization such fascinating areas to watch. At a certain point, we may reach the practical limits of what human gestures, commands, and requests can tap into or do. The machine (or rather, the distributed ecosystem of machines) becomes more and more important in automating X, suggesting Y, and predicting Z.

I enjoy the prospects of VR and AR, especially in an omniconnected world. Those always seem like interesting use cases for a smart(er) phone. But I'm a lot more excited about the non-UI advances that the "internet of things" can bring us. When we free ourselves from the limitations of human comprehension, human attention span, and human neurological heuristics, we can do so much more. To me, the "large untapped areas" are all the things we won't have to tap to access (terrible pun intended). Before we can get there, of course, we'll have to connect all the devices.

At the risk of sounding hokey, naive, or unapologetically futurist, I look forward to the day when kids will say, "Wow. When you were my age, you actually had to touch things to make them work?"

Obviously flesh blood is a good thing, however, this problem space has been thoroughly explored.

The real unexplored area is that few people have noticed just how insanely powerful the GPUs in these devices are, but again the problem is in working out what they might be useful for, especially given the trend is for mobile "apps" to really be trivial front ends for web services.

Yep. After doing mobile for a while you start to notice that most apps are just listviews hitting REST endpoints. Not exactly earth-shattering technology.

Keyboard for text entry coding, digitizers for design/art/photo-work and possibly (multi)touch for richer, Smalltalk-like UIs. I've always thought three-button mouse weren't such a great idea (ergonomically) -- but a lot of the same things that work well with them (Smalltalk, ACME), should work fine with multi-touch -- as long as we evolve the GUIs a bit to take proper advantage.

I have had an iPad since the first version. I also have had various touchscreen "tablet" PCs prior. The problem is not the hardware now its the software -- and the software has gotten so, so, so much better. I can do real work from a tablet and a phone. The best practices devs first discovered and now proliferating more widely. That takes time but we are seeing the results now.

The number of use cases is less important.

What are the most common use cases?

You're conflating people that use computers as part of their job incidentally, with people that use a computer because their job inherently necessitates one. Refer to this article about the most common occupations in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-10-m...

Managing emails, customer relationship software, and checking websites are often the extent of how a person uses a computer at their job.

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> So we find ourselves in the ironic situation of a domain that is experiencing almost unprecedented growth but in which almost nobody is making money except Facebook and the vendors of what are essentially gimmicky slot machine games.

Business facing software never gets mainstream news whether it's mobile or not. It just so happens that most new and popular consumer focused technology is mobile / web.

Making news =/= making money.

Microsoft, Oracle, etc. make gobs of money selling to business and enterprise customers. You never hear about it because it's uninteresting.

In the same vein, you don' hear about business software that runs on mobile. "Make my business software work on mobile" is a booming category of work in software development.

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> People that need to edit complex spreadsheets, compose scores for films, analyze genomes, and render 3d effects need real computers.

In the cases you suggested you propose that it's different. However, they might need the physical interface of a real computer, or the technical power of a real computer, but they don't really need a "real computer"

- traditional input devices (keyboards) are increasingly compatible with mobile hardware

- tablets and cell phones are only getting MORE powerful, not less

--

It's really just a matter of time before the line between mobile and desktop disappears.

Part of what's keeping it there is simply the fact that desktop class hardware from the last 2004 is still good enough to do what most people need to do in 2014

For some people, it's not the input that matters, or the computing power, but the output. Big, high-res displays are still in demand. I'm not sure wearable displays will ever replace them -- even if Glass gets to be much higher than its current 640x320 resolution, it's a lot more difficult to shift your focus from one part of the "screen" to another if it's being projected directly into your eye.

The former is almost certainly false. I'm not going to be drafting briefs on an iPad any time soon, nor are CPA's going to be poring over spreadsheets on iPads. On the other hand, the proportion of overall technology users that need to do these things is shrinking because of all the new users coming online who use technology for consumer and social media purposes. E.g. there are far more kids using tablets and phones, who never used a desktop computer before, than there are CPA's hunkered down in front of giant Excel spreadsheets. So the latter is almost certainly true.

A good point of comparison is the 3D graphics market. Initially, it was primarily used for CAD, etc. But consumer 3D exploded, and because it was such a bigger market, all the R&D effort migrated in that direction. Workstation users still exist today, as many as ever did, but now they use re-purposed consumer hardware.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens to people who use desktop and laptop computers. I imagine I'll still be drafting briefs on my Mac 20 years from now, but my Mac will probably be re-purposed mobile technology.

You clearly don't work for baby boomers. My partners love that shit.

I have played a bit with a very preliminary version of "Virtual Desktop" (1) and it is shockingly usable even at the current low res of Oculus

With a properly built out VR desktop that allows for multiple "monitors" or workspaces + mobile VR tech a few piterations out I think it's in the cards that our current Pc form factor dramatically changes or blends towards truly mobile hardware

(1) https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8...

"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable."

It's amazing that a "cross-over" is considered a truck, when there's practically nothing in common. At least the SUV shares the same chassis as a truck in most cases.

Going back to Jobs point, I would be interested in some historical numbers. The truck's healthy market share might just be due to the popularity of the SUV.

This is true, but the point is that this is now a very small (and very rapidly shrinking) fraction of what constitutes "computing".

Digital photography - used to involve a PC, doesn't need to now. Casual video editing (which lets remember is the vast majority of video editing) - used to involve a PC, doesn't need to now. E-mail and electronic communications - used to involve a PC, doesn't need to now. Basic productivity/note taking/sorting/keeping - used to... you get the picture.

It's not just that SmartPhones/tablets are replacing some PC tasks, it's that there is a whole new swath of users for whom what might previously have been thought of as computing has nothing to do with a PC.

Think of it in terms of shooting video. 40 years ago if you were shooting video there would be a good chance you were some sort of professional (or at the very least an enthusiastic amateur). Now, if you're shooting video, you're probably just a regular person. That doesn't mean that Smartphones have changed what professionals do or use, but it does mean that professionals are a very small fraction of the video now being shot.

The PC is the same, it's still there and still needed, it's just shrinking in terms of it's proportion of what's being done.

That's a bit of a red herring. One of my colleagues uses a Surface; the first thing she does on arriving at the office is plug two cables to work with a proper screen and keyboard. Then when she has a meeting, she simply unplugs and uses it as a tablet, which is useful for passing it around, etc.

People that need to edit complex spreadsheets, compose scores for films, analyze genomes, and render 3d effects need real computers. As a developer this kind of customer is in many ways a better customer to serve than a teen snapping selfies on a phone.

But in between those sits 90% of the market, which is everyone who works all day with not-that-complex Office documents (certainly stuff that can be handled by a quadcore, 2GB machine) and web apps which offload most work to the servers (third-party or internal).

I may be biased because we provide solutions on top of a web-based, Free Software platform (https://www.odoo.com/), but I believe most of our clients' workers could replace their laptops with tablets + stand without any loss of functionality.

And, even if we do see an increase in more hybrid devices like the Surface, you can't just blow up a touch screen app to 24". Specialized tasks will still require specialized software.

Fair enough. You pay for the extra power, though; you can buy two iPad Air 2 for the price of the cheapest 13-inch Macbook Air.

Consider his use metonymic and look at the picture on page 28. When you see "mobile" see "extremely personal device that you interact with ubiquitously and almost continuously, with sensors so it senses your movements, listens to you even when you are not explicitly manipulating it, and is constantly connected." Today, essentially the only devices like that are phones.

But his core points are: - You no longer sit down to have a "computing experience" -- it's increasingly part of the fabric of society and life - This will only accelerate and new devices and modes and capabilities will flourish and extend it - This shift is transformational, not incremental. - Almost any plan that made sense a few years ago is now irrelevant.

These are concepts that are so clear that they simultaneously appear banal and yet will go unrecognized by most people even as they are being planed by these "banal truths".

Spot on. I've been a follower of his for some time now and while he's obviously smart an insightful, he does sometimes veer into hyperbole bordering on know-it-all snark. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, other than that the audience might not take it as seriously as an argument made more rationally.

Working in the industrial and automotive manufacturer setup, people buying equipment don't give a shit whether a touch screen is an actual improvement for the people on the shop floor. They buy anything that looks like a tablet and has a touch screen, as much as the workers might curse it.

Seriously, who is this guy?