My experience, and that of most people, is that, PCs nowadays are less expensive than owning a smartphone or any tablet. For a smartphone, one needs to purchase the device, or it comes included as part of the package that includes the device and the smartphone. Thus, a person could end up with a smartphone which, in reality, ends up costing thousands of dollars in the span of a 2-year cell plan. No PC nowadays approaches that kind of cost, unless one wants to consider that broadband is also needed to do a lot of the things a PC does nowadays. However, smartphones become obsolete a lot quicker than PCs, and thus, people might end up purchasing 2 or 3 or more smartphones, as opposed to just a single PC that lasts 5 or more years, and for which the OS gets support for 10 years or more.
When it comes to people doing “more” on their smartphones, it depends on what “more” is defined as. Recent surveys still point to internet traffic still being done mostly from PCs, by a large margin. That margin is considerably larger than the combined traffic from smartphones and tablets.
When one considers the overall cost for the lifespan of the PC, it’s a many times less than the cost of using a smartphone or tablet; and that includes the cost of the OS in the PC, which is supported for a lot longer than the OSes on Android devices or in iOS devices; in fact, there are iOS devices which aren’t being supported by Apple after 3 years; compare that to the support that XP and Windows 7 users get, which is for more than a decade. When the mobile OS stops being supported, most users will feel the need to go get the latest mobile device out there.
So, the reality is still that, neither smartphones nor any of the OSes, come even close to offering any real competition to PS or Windows devices.
You and I must be reading vastly different surveys. Everything I've been reading from research firms such as Gartner and Forrester for example, indicate that more and more internet traffic is being generated by Smartphone and 4G enabled tablets than PC's.
Those studies are backed up by more and more people dropping their internet service @ home and relying on their SmartPhones and their data plans for their internet needs. (Case in point: Comcast is hemorraging both TV and Internet subscribers.)
When it comes down to it, what are people using their Smartphones for? eMail is one, purpose/task built apps is another (task lists, reminders, online banking) listening to music and watching videos for example. Most of these tasks were previously done on PC's, however as people have looked to consolidate costs during this never-ending recession, they've opted to keep their smartphone data plan and dump the internet connection (and cable tv...) connections at home.
I commute via train into/out of Chicago on a daily basis -- you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the train car I sit in that isn't using their smartphone in some way during the commute. Not that I spy on people but there's a whole lotta video's being watched and occasional email being answered.
“However, smartphones become obsolete a lot quicker than PCs, and thus, people might end up purchasing 2 or 3 or more smartphones, as opposed to just a single PC that lasts 5 or more years, and for which the OS gets support for 10 years or more.“
PCs hang around a lot longer than that. The computer I am using is 13 years old and is still running XP. It’s a dual core. Only had to reinstall XP once back about six years ago. So this installation is pushing 7 years old without reinstall.
The only problem I have seen so far is it’s stuck at IE8. firefox and chrome run perfectly fine.
It is still powerful enough to run win 8 if I wanted to install it. That is a testament to the staying power of PCs in the field. It’s 13 years old and can still run the most modern OS available. That is also partially caused by the fact that resource requirements for desktop operating systems has kind of plateaued for a while now.
I have the license and installation disk for win 7 but I have never seen a reason to upgrade.
I also have a computer on the work bench in the back of the house that I still regularly use that is still running Windows ME. It’s 20 years old. I use it for basic dos/win electronics related programs. I use it to browse the web once in a while, but I am stuck with using the Opera browser because it’s the most recent browser that supported ME.
I have one computer under the workbench that is around 25 years old. It’s set up for win 3.11. I sometime fire it up and surf the web with IE5 just for grins and giggles. It makes the sys admins scratch their head when they see a win 3.11 user agent string in their log files.