More Confessions Of A “Post-PC Era” Skeptic – The ‘Book Mystique

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “post-PC era” lately, especially since dipping my toes in its waters myself by purchasing an iPad to a couple of months ago.

I continue to be puzzled and underwhelmed. The iPad has its good points: near-instant access to the Internet provided I’m in Wi-Fi range, and being handholdable while I lounge on the couch or in bed come to mind as prominent.

It’s more than just the almost instantaneous wake up. It’s also the informality of the device. When I sit down at my computer and wake it up in order to just do a quick check of my email, I always feel that that since I’m at it, there are probably number of other things I should do and get caught up on. Picking the iPad it up for a minute to do something something short and quick is much more informal and undemanding. But as a replacement for my laptop? Not even remotely close.

I have to admit feeling dismay when Steve Jobs declared at the original iPad announcement that the “post-PC era” is upon us. Nobody consulted me. Personally, I liked the laptop computer as digital hub era, and resolve to extend it as long as I can, but being a realist, I’m aware that you can swim against the tide for only so long before you have to make the choice between going with the flow or getting out of the water — hence my iPad, which I didn’t really need but thought it prudent to get a handle on.

After two months, I am still of a mind that I wouldn’t miss it that much if I didn’t have an iPad, unlike my laptops, which are essential tools of my trade.

I finally did get around to composing (by dictation from handwritten notes, which is my usual mode with a laptop), editing, and submitting an article for publication entirely on the iPad. It was doable, but would have been a lot quicker and slicker on my MacBook.

Probably the biggest stumbling block for me with the iPad is text selection — copying, pasting, and so forth. I find the hit or miss imprecision of the touchscreen and the iOS maddening. Sometimes you tap and get the results you want first try. More often you don’t. I profoundly miss the predictable precision of using a mouse, rollerbar or even a trackpad for pointing and clicking. The touchscreen is just never going to be satisfactory for me. Find a snippet of text in an article online that you’d like to save? First you have to get it selected, typically a hassle. Then try to paste it into a Mail message to send to oneself. But the selection you copied is truncated. Arrrrgh! That’s what frustrates and infuriates me about trying to do production stuff in the IOS. Most everything feels half-baked. Plus different apps behave inconsistently.

For some reason, I find email composition and sending works more reliably in the Notepad app, which sends through Mail, than using Mail itself.

Then there’s browsers. No tabs in Safari, at least until IOS 5 arrives. Opera Mini has a somewhat deeper feature set than Safari, but feels a lot more sluggish. Surprising, considering that Opera is usually close to or at the top of my favorite browser shortlist in OS X.

Best of the iOS browser bunch so far is Diigo (neé iChromy), which does behave more like a proper OS X browser (e.g.: its inspiration – Google Chrome) than the others, but still doesn’t hold a candle to even a bare-bones real browser like Stainless in OS X. I particularly miss being able to open new tabs in the background by command–clicking links.

Speaking of multitasking, don’t get me going, as what passes for it is woefully pathetic on the iPad. Being able to double-pump the Home button and bring up a row of running app icons is emphatically not multitasking.

You may have noted that I haven’t mentioned the iPad’s onscreen keyboard yet.

I’m actually finding it not as bad as I had anticipated based on using the iPhone touchscreen keyboard. The greater expanse on screen real estate makes a world of difference, especially in landscape mode. However, it’s still a poor excuse for a keyboard compared with a real computer keyboard (albeit an understandable compromise in the context of handholdability).

And really, compromise is the central problem of the iPad as a putative replacement for a laptop. There’s been too much of it to render the iPad anything approximating a serious production tool. While I don’t doubt that it’s ideal for a variety of utilitarian professional tasks where portability and handholdability trump input efficiency, that’s not where I live.

All of which makes me extremely dubious about declarative pronouncements that we are now in the “post–PC era,” and that tablets and the iOS represent the future of personal computing.

For example, Mark Dean, an engineer and Chief Technology Officer of IBM’s Middle East and Africa division, who was part of the design team for the first IBM PC back in 1981, and who lead subsequent IBM PC design projects through the 1980s, now says that PCs are “going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.”

Of course, IBM doesn’t really have a dog in this fight any more, having sold off its PC division to China’s Lenovo in 2005, a decision of which Dean says he is “proud.”

Writing in a Smarter Planet guest blog recently, Dean appears to be singing from the Steve Jobs hymn-book, claiming that IBM is in the vanguard of the post-PC era and allowing that “PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device — though there’s plenty of excitement about smartphones and tablets — but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress.” He says that personally, he’s just recently switched to a tablet from a PC as his primary computer, and although he concedes that “PCs will continue to be much-used devices,” but asserts that they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing.

Microsoft, still heavily focused on its Windows operating system, unsurprisingly isn’t a booster of the “post-PC era” trope. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw declares in the Official Microsoft Blog that “I prefer to think of it as the PC-plus era,” and noting that there will be 400 million PCs sold worldwide this coming year, and additionally “Our software lights up Windows PCs, Windows Phones and Xbox-connected entertainment systems, and a whole raft of other devices with embedded processors from gasoline pumps to ATMs to the latest soda vending machines, to name just a few,” but affirming that after 30 years, the PC is “just getting started.”

So was Mr. Shaw, who followed up last week with another blog entitled “Where the PC is headed: Plus is the New “Post,” in which he references the many stories in both the IT tech and mainstream media heralding the arrival of the “Post – PC Era and imminent death of the PC. Shaw acknowledges that people like a bit of melodrama even in news stories, such as a typical theme – “new thing shows up, kills the old thing, end of story.” However, he observes that in the world of technology, it’s rarely (albeit not never) that clear cut, and more often than not, new innovations enhance and complement the things we already have rather than replacing them.

Nevertheless, there are those exceptions. Seeking Alpha’s Jason Schwarz cites an acquaintance who says he used to take his laptop everywhere he went, but since buying an iPad a year ago he’s found that the only time his MacBook Air ever left his briefcase was when he had to take it out for airport security checks, and it got to the point where he hasn’t bothered taking the Air on a business trip in months. This individual contends that we now live in a Desktop/iPad world, and that “the era of the laptop is over.”

And Data metrics supporting that point of view do seem compelling,. For example, market research firm DisplaySearch reports that Apple shipped 13.5 million mobile PC units in 2011’s second quarter, representing year-over-year growth of 136 percent, 80 percent of which were iPads. Meanwhile, notebook sales growth was up only two percent year-over-year and actually down two percent compared to Q1 2011. Meanwhile, tablet PC shipments rose 70 percent in Q2 2011 and 400 percent year-over-year.

However, on the matter of the laptop era being “over” and devices like tablets and smartphones the new kings of PC mobility, I remain unconvinced and inclined to agree with Mr. Shaw that notwithstanding emergence and popular success of new consumer electronics devices like the iPad and its would-be competitors, as well as eReaders, smartphones, set top boxes, and so forth, it shouldn’t be assumed that even cumulatively they can adequately displace laptop and desktop PCs, or even that they relegate PCs to just a market niche, only needed for special occasions.

“Absolutely not,” says Shaw, citing two simple reasons:
1. There are a set of important things that PCs do uniquely well, and they aren’t going away.
2. PCs are rapidly and dramatically getting better at doing the things those companions do.

The MacBook Air, which is selling so briskly that Apple is having difficulty keeping up with demand is a case in point with Appleinsider reporting yesterday that More than a month after introducing its latest Thunderbolt MacBook Airs, Apple is still unable to meet broader demand for the 13-inch models, which can be seen listed at prices well above MSRP on at least one of the internet’s largest ecommerce sites.

Then there is Intel’s Ultrabook platform that like the MacBook Air, synergizes the performance and capabilities of today’s laptops with tablet-like features, and are designed to deliver a highly responsive and secure experience in a thin, light and elegant design at mainstream prices. Intel didn’t just invest $300 million in Ultrabook product development in order to beat a dead horse/

Consequently, I agree with Microsoft’s Mr. Shaw when he says that “while it’s fun for the digerati to pronounce things dead, and declare we’re post-PC, we think it’s far more accurate to say that the 30-year-old PC isn’t even middle aged yet, and about to take up snowboarding.” Laptops aren’t going disappear for a good long time yet.