What Does The Post-PC Era Mean To You? – The ‘Book Mystique
On March 2 in his keynote for the the iPad 2 launch, Steve Jobs famously declared that we have now entered the post-PC era. Actually, he had used the term at least as far back as June 2, 2010, at the D technology conference in Los Angeles, but since he reiterated it to a much wider audience, various commentators have taken stabs at exegesis of what that means, most recently Forrester Research Senior Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in a blog post last week entitled: “The Post-PC Era: Its Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does” which concisely sums up the contemporaneous dynamic as I see it.
Steve Jobs is a guy who doesn’t hesitate kicking concepts and technologies to the curb when his enthusiasm for them wanes and he’s decided to move on. He even left the Macintosh behind temporarily after he was personally kicked to the curb by his own hand–picked Apple CEO John Sculley in May 1985, soon regrouping to launch the optimistically–named NeXT Computer and eponymous NeXTSTEP operating system. But even there he proved to be at least half–right. The next computer (which was actually a superior machine in most aspects other than its astronomical price) failed commercially, but the NeXTStep OS went on to morph into Mac OS X and became Jobs’s ticket back eventually to the chairmanship of Apple, which purchased NeXT In late 1996 for $429 million, getting Jobs back, first as a consultant to then-CEO Gilbert Amelio as part of the deal.
Other notable, albeit somewhat premature jobs in eulogies have been is dumping floppy drives from the original iMac in 1998, and soon after all Macs were floppyless. Few really missed floppies once they adjusted to them being gone.
Then there was Jobs declaration of the Classic Mac OS 9’s passing on April 30, 2002, http://www.macworld.com/article/1445/2002/05/06wwdc.html for the operating system that most Mac users were still using, and eulogizing the classic Mac OS as “a friend to us… always at our beck and call, except when he forgot who he was and needed to be restarted.” However, OS 9 didn’t obligingly keel over and die the way the floppy disk had (at least on the Mac) — there are still an amazing number of holdouts even yet, and OS 9 lived on in OS X Classic Mode until OS 10.5 Leopard replaced OS 10.4 Tiger in 2007. Nine years later, Apple still maintains an active download page for OS 9 version updates.
Sometimes I’ve vigorously disagreed with Jobs and his propensity for dumping technologies before I’m ready to give up on them. For example, dropping FireWire from the unibody aluminum MacBook in 2008. Of course I bought one anyway, but it’s FireWirelessness remains my only serious negative criticism of the machine which has been a rock of dependability and a very decent performer. Enough people agreed with me that FireWire support returned with the 13-inch MacBook Pro that superseded the aluminum MacBook in June, 2009 — four months after I bought mine.
Then there was elimination of buit-in telephony modems that coincided with the switch to Intel processor silicon in 2006. That exclusion was mitigated somewhat for Mac users still stuck on dialup or who want to send and receive faxes by a bone thrown in the form of a pricey external USB modem. In the isolated rural area where I live and others like it, broadband didn’t reach us until the fall of 2009, and the service is still spotty enough that I frequently find myself back on dial-up Internet as an emergency tide–me–over during outages. Unfortunately, with Apple’s IOS hardware, telephone modems are not even an option.
However, I’ll concede that jobs has more often been right than wrong, and he’s probably right about this post-PC era thing, at least if it’s properly defined, and as noted above, I think Forrester’s Ms. Rotman perhaps has taken a pretty insightful stab at that in her blog and video on the topic of how computing is changing. Ergo the “post-PC” era heralded by Steve Jobs at the iPad 2 launch is indeed underway, pointing to a future where computing hardware form factors, interfaces, and operating systems will continue to diversify beyond even what we have today, but Ms. Epps says that the meaning of the Post-PC Era is misapprehended by most of us.
Looking back, she recalls that the “Post PC Era” phrase actually entered the public vernacular back in 2004 when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Times that “We’ve been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had even then already far surpassed PC sales around the world, and further that the post-PC concept can be traced back at least as far as 1999 when MIT research scientist and visionary David Clark gave a prescient talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.
Ms. Rotman emphasizes that “Post PC Era does not mean that the PC is dead, and Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market for personal computers, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Moreover, she projects that even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will still own laptops (140 million). However, as Forrester explains in a new report, it does mean that computing is shifting from:
• Stationary to ubiquitous
• Formal to casual
• Arms-length to intimate
• Abstracted to physical
Ms. Rotman notes that there are a host of technological innovations making the post-PC era possible, and in turn accelerating social change, and vice versa, but in the post-PC era, the PC is alive and well, but adapting to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical, citing the new MacBook Air’s instant-on immediacy as an emblematic example of what’s coming and to some degree already here.
You can check it out Ms. Rotman Epps’ blog and video at:
http://bit.ly/mwvKYD
So here’s what I think the Post PC Era is going to mean to me, at least in the near term. Your milage may, and probably will, vary.
First, I think I really need/want/ought to have an iPad 2, when I can finally obtain one. My only reasonably-close (50 miles) Apple reseller’s iPad 2 ETA keeps getting pushed back — *possibly* mid-June the last time I checked. I remain skeptical about the iPad being more than a complimentary accessory to my fleet of laptops, but figure I’m being shut out of enough things by not having one that a purchase is justified. Speaking of laptops, I’ve had early 2012 penciled-in as my next major system upgrade target even since the MacBook arrived. While years ago I would’ve probably tried to talk myself in to coughing up the price of a 15″ or 17 inch MacBook Pro, I’ve come to the conclusion that the sweet spot happy medium between portability and viewability is a 13″ display, and if one needs more screen real estate than that, 13″ MacBooks (including Pros and Airs) can drive big external monitors. For a bunch of good, practical, and professional reasons (for instance, more power and speed, better connectivity, more and much cheaper data storage capacity, and known-quantity dependability) a 13″ MacBook Pro would make the best rational sense to replace my current MacBook. However, The MacBook Air is awfully seductive and will be very hard to resist, especially if, as anticipated, it gets a Sandy Bridge Core “i” processor speed bump and a Thunderbolt port in it next refresh, which could be the tipping point in its favor.
Ergo, my personal “Post PC Era” experience is going to very prominently include a PC. How about yours?