Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"The post PC era" is meant to refer to a world where (except in some specific professional contexts) people largely stop buying PCs because of a new class of mobile devices that takes over their workload entirely.

Then I think we're a long way from seeing this era, simply because anything that requires more than a couple lines of text isn't just better on a keyboard than other input devices—it's vastly, insanely better (at the moment), a problem I don't see being solved in the nearish future. Rather, I suspect many if not most people will have one PC-esque device for keyboard heavy things and one or more "mobile" devices, using your definition.

This also assumes you're not counting laptops under your "mobile" rubric, which I don't think you are.

Anyway. I don't even see desktops going away all that soon because of one thing that gets lost on HN discussion: they're cheap: http://jseliger.com/2008/12/26/computer-post-desktop-or-lapt... .



"Then I think we're a long way from seeing this era"

Agreed, but we're just starting, maybe in a few years, who knows...

IMO, the term post-PC is a nice way to differentiate Android/iOS/WebOS/etc tablets from previous generation tablets that ran Windows or some Desktop version of Linux.


I think the laptop, rather than tablet, form factor is going to dominate in the medium-term future, because the portability vs usability tradeoff just doesn't encourage giving up your keyboard.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the laptops of the future will have a full-featured OS rather than a locked-down iOS-style OS. I mean, I'm sure yours will, and mine will, but will your mother's?


Oh, agreed. And the newer ultrabooks make the portability vs usability tradeoff much much smaller.

And maybe open/closed OSs will eventually converge. Look at Lion and Windows 8... I just hope they remain open!!!


They'll just put their iPads into a keyboard dock, or bring a keyboard attachment like the HP TC1100 had. The keyboard could be something like 100g by itself too.


People don't stop buying the old stuff just because there's new stuff. See also: horses, bicycles, cars.


Yeah, which is why the "post-PC" terminology has a propaganda tone. It's not going to be "post-PC": more like "pop computing" or "computing lite".



I am more inclined to think of post PC era -> Internet era. Where we less frequently use desktop software and move into the browser(cloud).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: