I find myself making the same point over and over again. When people say “The PC is dead (or dying)” it’s well to stop and think about what is said by the people who say this and what is thought by people who read it.
I think the statement really means “The days of explosive growth for PC’s are over”. When people read this they think “The PC is going the way of the dodo bird”.
No the PC is not going to go away. But I do tend to agree that the days of year over year growth are over.
Think about mainframes as one example. The “death of the mainframe” was widely proclaimed a long time ago. But guess what - they still exist and are used by all sorts of businesses.
10 years from now I feel will still be using PC’s. But they’re not going to be under everyone’s Christmas tree the way they were in the past.
That’s exactly right. This ‘PC is dead’ stuff is nonsense. People still have and require (not everyone, but anyone who works for a living on a computer) real computers.
However, the days of people upgrading every two years are long over. That’s why people aren’t buying PCs. I’ve always been a pretty ‘cutting edge’ type of guy when it comes to my desktop, I built it in 2010 (because my previous one died) and I have no need to upgrade it now or in the foreseeable future unless it breaks. Same with my laptop from 2009. I added more ram and an SSD, but the base system is untouched, because it does everything I need it to do.
Simply put, they’ve hit a wall where the new advances aren’t worth the money to upgrade.
This wall has also been hit with phones and tablets and is just beginning to show itself in the market. For instance, I have a Galaxy Note 2. I bought it when I broke the screen on my Galaxy Note. Unless something happens to my Note 2, I have no interest whatsoever in the new model that they just released. It simply doesn’t offer anything compelling to make it worth upgrading to.