Not all that long ago, tech pundits were convinced that by 2020 the personal computer as we know it would be extinct. You can even mark the date and time of the PC’s death: January 27, 2010, at 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time, when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad. The precise moment was documented by noted Big Thinker Nicholas Carr in The New Republic with this memorable headline: “The PC Officially Died Today.”
A few months later, CNN Money added their own obituary, complete with charts and graphs: “The end of the desktop PC (seriously).”
Fast-forward to April 2013, when Forbes was still looking for a pulse: “The Death of the PC Has Not Been Exaggerated.” At the midpoint of the decade Wired was using the same clichéd headline (based on the most famous thing Mark Twain never said) but qualifying it with a wobbly adverb: “The Death of the PC Has Not Been Greatly Exaggerated.”
And by 2017 The Inquirer, never one to shrink from a controversial topic, had conceded that the patient was apparently alive and well: “The PC still isn’t dead and the market is ‘stabilising’,”they wrote.
And so, here we are, a full decade after the PC’s untimely death, and the industry is still selling more than a quarter-billion-with-a-B personal computers every year. Which is pretty good for an industry that has been living on borrowed time for ten years.
Maybe the reason the PC industry hasn’t suffered a mass extinction event yet is because they adapted, and because those competing platforms weren’t able to take over every PC-centric task.
So what’s different as we approach 2020? To get a proper before-and-after picture, I climbed into the Wayback Machine and traveled back to 2010.
THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
You didn’t have to be a Big Thinker with a book contract to see the beginnings of a Pretty Big Trend in 2010. Increasingly powerful mobile devices made it possible for people to quickly complete a variety of tasks that used to require a PC. That tech transition drained away much of the demand for PCs from consumers, although it made only the slightest dent on business demand.
The first casualty was the netbook, a category of cheap PCs that used underpowered Atom processors and smaller screens than you’d typically find on an entry-level laptop, on the theory that mere consumers wouldn’t notice the difference.
By Ed Bott | December 26, 2019
