Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Post-PC era? Not quite
- Thread starter TheSideshow
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I beg to differ. I think WP7 is a very competitive operating system. For once, Microsoft took a different path than what everyone else is doing, and came up with something very slick and nice to use; not only that, but they've also established a major agreement with a major player in mobile phones - granted, not like they used to be, but Nokia is still a company that knows what it's doing and is capable of making nice handsets.
Thank you.*LTD* said:
This is an excellent point.
Whether we use the Post-PC or some other label is pretty irrelevant, though I prefer to use the one espoused by those who actually know wtf they're doing (ie., Apple.)
What *is* going on is that the industry is playing by the terms (or rather, attempting to) that Apple has dictated.
Let's take MS as an example. They're quite a case study in unpreparedness.
MS is now adrift. They can't continue to implement the same business model that they've used for the past 20 years. As far as marketing power and buzz goes, they're pretty much zero. The only truly desirable and interesting MS products are (ironically) those that don't carry Windows branding on them. Xbox. LOL it's too funny. Windows as a brand has some really lousy associations attached to it. They need to dump it. No cool factor. No buzz. No lineups.
What MS is doing is trying with all their might to fight Apple - when Apple has already instituted new market realities based on their vision. Too late to change that.
MS isn't creating new markets. They aren't capturing the first-mover crown with products that delight and excite, but instead have resorted to playing the game the wrong way. Again.
MS problems run very, very deep. It all starts with brand image. Theirs absolutely sucks.
You actually need sales to be competitive.
The industry is not playing by terms Apple has dictated, it is playing by terms the consumer has dictated. I don't care how much you love Steve, if you don't know that the consumer is the leader here then I can't take very much of what you say seriously.
I don't know where you get your information but Windows phones, and their operating system (Win7, forget the rest) are actually pretty popular. WP7 was late to the game, it takes time to build up marketshare (yes, even Apple had to) and with a very saturated market it will take time, but they are getting there. As for Windows having bad connotations, Apple has some pretty poor ones too.
I'd love to see where your information is from.
Probably from the fact that it's been in the market for nearly a year and it has continually lost MS share. Consumers care about it even less now than they did a few months ago. It even finished behind Bada last quarter.
Last quarter, Samsung sold 2 million Bada smartphones, while all Windows Phone partners combined sold 1.7 million. And it's been a year.
Something is very wrong.
At present WP7 is a non-starter. We can surmise that if manufactures turn away from Google (in light of recent events) that WP7 will gain traction. However, the result from more units for sale might simply result in more units of something no one really wants. We're witnessing that with Apple's competition in the tablet segment.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Refusing to acknowledge competitive features in other mobile operating systems doesn't make you right; it makes you blind.
Well let me ask you this, what does "portability" mean to you? I don't think you quite understand :/
It is, but the phones aren't selling. There's now "wow" factor. There's no... zinger. With Android, you get all of the super awesome phones that have dual cores, big screens, and high tech specs. We all knwo this. Want to record, play back, and stream 1080p video? Android. Want to play HD games, do everything, well basically, the fastest? Open system? Rooting, overclocking, undervolting? Android.
Simple? Quick? Easy to use? Great applications, innovative? Powerful? Apple's iPhone.
What does WP7 have that iOS doesn't? There arne't any applications and they sell it like it's for the technology illiterate. You pick it up and you say 'wow, this is smooth and sexy". I did that 2 months ago. However, that still doesn't give the consumer a reason to buy it.
It's like selling a luxury car when all of the economy cars and performance cars are just as nice. Why bother? You can get something cheaper with better gas or something more powerful for about the same price but the selling point of the luxury car is undermined by the benefits of the others.
Because it is relevant? Mobile is the "next frontier" to sound cliche. That's the freaking topic title: Post PC. What comes after the PC? Mobile. If you just read what these people are posting, you'd realize that we are moving towards being more mobile. Phones, tablets, smaller laptops; it's blatantly obvious why phones would get brought up.
----------
I have never seen a WP7 phone in person. I think one time from a girl at my college last semester. That's it. Other than that, it's ALL iPhones, flip/feature phones, or Android. At college? All feature, iPhone, or Android.
I understand what you're saying and I agree: WP7 might/will gain traction, but as I stated in my previous post, they dont' have the right image.
---
Average consumer line of thought: Windows phone? Like, the same thing as Windows 7? But I always wanted a Mac.... the iPhone is by Apple! And the commercials are so cool; edit videos... what can the Windows phone 7 phone do?
*watches commercial* so it gets me in and out.. but in and out of doing what?
---
The commercials don't show anything, to be honest, and just show technology illiterate people doing nothing while other people doing something stupid. It's an ad hominem and, if memory serves me correctly, that's an invalid argument.
They need to change their model.
Im well aware of phone's being a large portion of people's computing life at this point, but phones will NEVER create a "Post-PC" era and dont try to. Thats why they shouldnt be discussed here.
Anyways, this thread is not to discuss Apple's iPhone ads so why are you bringing it up?
... oh my. You... really have no idea what's going on do you?
That's a shame. And no I'm not just being an ass either. You should read more. Like, tech blogs and stuff. Good ones, not the crap like Engadget or ~BGR either.
You do know next year we will have quad core phones right? And tablets? Just by knowing that alone you would be able to see how wrong you are.
You're kidding right? Who cares what hardware specs phones will have if they are always the size of a phone? I dont come close to replacing my PC with my 4.3" phone. Even it ran a Core i7 it wouldnt come close.
Answer this question. Will you ever replace your PC with a phone?
Im not telling you to stop talking about tablets, Im telling you to stop bringing up phones and their marketing tactics.
The idea is not that 4.3" phone becomes your main input device. The idea is that you have a smartphone which is your computer and it can then be attached to various devices, such as external monitor. How does that make it any different from a regular desktop PC? Other than the fact that you can fit the same device into your pocket when you leave and possibly connect it to other devices (e.g. laptop dock to turn it into a laptop).
So essentially its still a PC world, no?
And again, this thread is whether we are in a post-PC era at this point in time (current software and hardware). The answer according to the OP is "No".
Well, I never really got the post-PC era thing in the first place. A smartphone can still be a personal computer (i.e. PC), it's just a different form factor. A smartphone is made out of similar components as every PC sold today, there is no magic behind it.
It isn't exactly a literal translation. It isn't "we are moving to where we dont' have personal computers".
I think it has to do with the culmination of moving towards mobile. Post PC is just a snappy, catchy, innovative way of saying it. (Sounded awesome when Jobs said it at the keynote didn't it?)
We can do 80 percent of what we do on the computer, on the phone. Yes it might take you a little longer until you get used to it, but last semester I just surfed the net, sent emails, and did a lot on my phone itself.
Calendar, media, mail, these are some of the simplest and most important things phones do now, and it will only get bigger.
You can easily just look at Apple and what they're doing. Aside form the aggregation of iOS and OS X, they're rolling out iCloud and the iMessage thing. Just putting two and two together, you can see they're going to expand on that model and, eventually, allow the iPhone to sync to the laptop to share texts (iMessage), voice (like with Google voice but tighter integration), video, data, and much more.
I think that you just fall into the standard consumer category (no offense) and I do as well. However, I read blogs like Giga OM, This is My next, All things D, and this is how I can draw these conclusions.
It's obvious if you read the right material. Very. Yea it's a crazy thought now if you don't follow the news but that applies to anything. What? Water in space?!? Water on Mars? Water shooting as steam from two stars? It's crazy if you don't follow and hear it on the local news but to everybody who reads extensively online, it's last week's story.
You can see it all fall into place now, you just have to know where to look.
That's because the post-PC era is not about form factors or specs or even what you can do with your personal computing device, it's about the software that runs in the middle.
iOS, webOS, WP7, Android, ChromeOS. Post-PC era OSes, low maintenance, low flexibility but intuitive and easy to use. It's about enabling users to do tasks rather than focus on maintaining a device in proper function. These new OSes enable that, much more than OS X or Windows or even any distribution of Linux does.
The user is left with a simple device which while not quite as flexible as the PCs of yore, enable him to do all his tasks (web browsing, e-mail, productivity, entertainment). It's still personal computing, as in you're using a computing device to accomplish personal tasks, but it's the post-PC era, as in the post Personal Computer era that was dominated by Windows/OS X and other high-maintenance offerings.
The powerful OSes of yore will be relegated to geeks and corporations for big lifting, while the mass consumer will finally get a device that doesn't get in his way but rather enables him.
Anyone thinking this is somehow linked to Tablets just doesn't understand. This is laptops, desktops, set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, anything.
No it's about Apple's offerings, because regarding "post-PC" stuff only they are selling.
I do know what portability means, but in this situation it's important to acknowledge that it's not good having something portable if it's broken. A piece of glass is pretty portable, but you have to be extremely careful with it. The same applies to the iPad.
More FUD. Apple is gonna sell 120 million iPhones the next year. 70 million iPads.
Eh?
In the last quarter, Apple sold 20m iPhones and 9m iPads.
Multiplied by 4, that's 80m and 36m respectively. Even with growth factored in, we're still a long way from the numbers you claim.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/07/19Apple-Reports-Third-Quarter-Results.html
Based on Apple growth rates of the last 3-4 years, 120 million iPhones & 70 million iPads from Sep 2011 to Sep 2012 is very realistic.
The Motorola Atrix is much closer to what the "Post-PC" era is. One big personal computing appliance that can become whatever the user needs it to become. TV set-top box, Laptop, Desktop, Smartphone. Apple is paving the way for users to realise they don't want PCs, they want appliances that let them do all the same tasks with none of the maintenance.
Once in sinks in, look for iOS latops, Android/Chrome OS laptops, desktops. Look for tablets, netbooks, all running limited task based OSes that either sync with the cloud or with the single family PC. Instead of all your kids, your wife and yourself having a laptop, only 1 computer per household will be required to manage the appliances and that is only if you do not wish to pay a service provider to do it for you (through Internet based services, marketed as the cloud).
I don't like it, but that's the vision being offered not just by Apple, but by Google, HP (see DeWitt's recent interview with Engadget) and even Microsoft.
The dumbing down of personal computing is upon us, and it's called the Post-PC era.
And, as I stated before, if you don't treat the thing like a chunk of metal, you shouldn't have that problem. What, do you subject your bag to drops, bangs, and serious bumps throughout the day? If so, I don't think you need to be using something like the iPad in the first place, not for your line of work.
The iPad is more portable. Trying to find some arbitrary rebuttal is pointless. If you have some sort of legitimate argument, I'd love to hear it.
----------
*shakes head*
Data-centric computing
I have a different interpretation of all these death-of-the-pc articles. For a long time, companies like, in the mainframe world IBM, and then on desktops, Microsoft, were able to use their operating systems and associated application software to create a situation where they "owned" their users. While Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" made sense to early open source programmers, only recently has "The Cloud" become everyone's favorite catch-phrase.
I don't see "The PC", or, "The Mac", or, "The Server", or, "The Smart-Phone" "dying".
I do see that people will maintain their data in standard formats, and will care more about their data than the desktop, laptop, notebook, pad, or smart-phone that they happen to be using at the time, or, what operating system it happens to be running. More often than not, copies of the data will live in "The Cloud" -- that is, on networked servers somewhere, backed-up somewhere else, with credible security.
The transformation to standard data types is not yet complete. Microsoft still seems to be fighting it with respect to Office. Yet, nobody today would seriously consider the camera in a cell phone useful unless it supports JPEG. MP3 and AAC are standardized and MP3 support is universal. MPEG-2 and MPEG4/AVC are extremely widely available, although not (yet) "free". We can debate how far this trend has progressed to date, but, at this point in time, there is no going back.
So, yes, "The PC" is dead as a data monopoly, but, it wouldn't surprise me to see Windows around for a long time.
I have a different interpretation of all these death-of-the-pc articles. For a long time, companies like, in the mainframe world IBM, and then on desktops, Microsoft, were able to use their operating systems and associated application software to create a situation where they "owned" their users. While Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" made sense to early open source programmers, only recently has "The Cloud" become everyone's favorite catch-phrase.
I don't see "The PC", or, "The Mac", or, "The Server", or, "The Smart-Phone" "dying".
I do see that people will maintain their data in standard formats, and will care more about their data than the desktop, laptop, notebook, pad, or smart-phone that they happen to be using at the time, or, what operating system it happens to be running. More often than not, copies of the data will live in "The Cloud" -- that is, on networked servers somewhere, backed-up somewhere else, with credible security.
The transformation to standard data types is not yet complete. Microsoft still seems to be fighting it with respect to Office. Yet, nobody today would seriously consider the camera in a cell phone useful unless it supports JPEG. MP3 and AAC are standardized and MP3 support is universal. MPEG-2 and MPEG4/AVC are extremely widely available, although not (yet) "free". We can debate how far this trend has progressed to date, but, at this point in time, there is no going back.
So, yes, "The PC" is dead as a data monopoly, but, it wouldn't surprise me to see Windows around for a long time.