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Suggestions that the PC is dead are greatly exaggerated. Flexibility, innovation and users’ storage needs will keep it around a good long while. The signs to the contrary are everywhere, haven't you seen them? •Hewlett-Packard, the largest Acer Aspire 7741 Battery computer maker in the world, said Wednesday it's looking to get out of the consumer PC business. HP believes its fortunes lie in a business similar to IBM that focuses on supporting large enterprises instead of trying to profit off the razor-thin margins of Pavilion PCs.
•Also recently, Mark Dean, IBM's Aspire 7741G Battery chief technology officer for the Middle East and Africa and an engineer who worked on the IBM's first PC, the 5150, declared the end of the PC. Dean argued the traditional mouse-and-keyboard computer was going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records and a number of other extinct or outmoded technologies. The IBM exec says he now uses a tablet as his Acer Aspire 7551 Battery primary computing device.
•Market research firm IDC recently cut its PC growth forecast for 2011 by nearly 3 percentage points from 7.1 to 4.2 percent (IDC and PC World are both owned by International Data Group).
Clearly, the PC is dead, right? Well, no. First of all, despite falling growth in Aspire 5742 Battery PCs this year, IDC also predicts PC sales will rebound in 2012 driven by laptop sales. Shoppers are expected to opt for PCs next year thanks to devices with thinner designs, longer AS10D71 battery life, instant on, and touch. But it's not just sales that will keep the PC afloat, there also are practical reasons to keep the PC alive for the foreseeable future. We All Drive Trucks For A Living
Steve Jobs in 2010 famously compared PCs to trucks. The argument goes that more Acer Aspire 5742G Battery people will gravitate toward using tablets while PCs will be used by people who need Aspire 5741 Battery some serious horsepower to drive down the digital highway such as graphic designers and video editors. The premise of this argument is that people largely use PCs for doing email and other light typing, Aspire 5741G Battery checking Facebook, watching videos and playing games.
The problem is an untold number of people still need to use PCs at work, because tablets (at least as they stand now) simply aren't up to the job. Consider a secretary needing to Aspire 5736Z Battery simultaneously enter data into a spreadsheet, update a contacts database, create a mail merge Aspire 5552 Battery document to send to 1000 clients, and search online for a restaurant for the next office party. Or what about this recent quote from a PC World reader who works as a teacher: "I do so many things with my PCs . . . Just a short time Aspire 5552G Battery ago I had Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Thunderbird, Firefox, Notepad ++, Irfanview, Dreamweaver, and NXT-G running simultaneously. This is typical for me on any given day." Even lowly writers are better off using a HP KS526AA Battery PC, as PC World's Tony Bradley recently discovered during a month-long bender with an iPad. PCs Are Flexible
Unless you own a Mac, you can adapt your PC to your Aspire 5551 Battery situation with relative ease. Need more RAM? Just open your PC up and plug in a new stick. Want to swap out Aspire 5253 Battery your 320GB HDD for a 512GB SSD? No problem. Tired of Windows and want to give Aspire 5336 Battery Ubuntu a try? It's only a download away. Tablets aren't even close to being this flexible. You might be able to Aspire 5251 Battery jailbreak the iPad to get unauthorized software to run on it, but that's much more involved than inserting a BT.00604.049 bootable thumb drive. Tablets are also designed to be replaced year after year because the BT.00603.111 hardware is largely static and unchangeable, while PCs can change as your needs change and are typically serviceable for at least 3-5 years.
Innovation Is Out There
Sure, the basic look and feel of a PC hasn't changed ACER AS10D75 that much over the years. The basic set of components including a display, keyboard, CPU, and mouse have remained largely static AS10D73 Battery whether you're looking at a desktop PC or laptop AS10D61 clamshell. But consider this: the standard automobile has had four wheels, an engine, and a steering wheel for more than 100 years, yet that hardly means that automotive technology is standing still. PCs with integrated touchscreens such as ACER AS10D51 Battery the Acer Aspire Z5610 are evolving, voice control is getting better, and Microsoft's Kinect Windows SDK may open up a AS10D41 whole new world of interaction for the PC. Who knows? Maybe those wall-sized PC displays predicted by tech luminaries and sci-fi writers may become a standard part of most people's homes before the decade is out. You Need To Store Your Stuff
Right now, tablets have puny storage AK.006BT.080 capabilities compared to a PC, where 500GB drives are standard and 1TB drives are easy to come by. But what about "the cloud," you say? "We'll just store all that AS10D3E stuff online." Maybe. But the future of the cloud is currently up for debate. Amazon and Google want you to use the cloud as if it were a hard drive accessible from ACER AS10D Battery anywhere you have an Internet connection. Apple's iCloud, meanwhile, is AS10D31 designed to sync your stuff across all your devices. If Apple's vision wins out, you'll still Gateway NV53A Battery need a device with a large amount of storage in your home as a central repository for stuff that's not being stored online such as older photos. One day, tablets may fit that bill, but for now PCs are still a better place to KS526AA Battery 12 Cell keep your files.
Tablets are a great tool for using on the go, and it's a fair comment to say we're living in the Post-PC era or PC-plus era as Microsoft calls it, but the PC has a lot of life left in it and tablets are no replacement for my Lenovo X220.
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