“The PC is dead.”
For years following the launch of iPhones, Androids and tablets, we heard this notion intoned very seriously by pundits — including me. As the touchscreen reigned and the keyboard and mouse started to look pokey and ancient, we just assumed the PC represented the past.
So ready was I to buy into the hype, that as my MacBook aged out of being useful, I decided to replace it with an iPad.
As it turns out, we were all quite wrong.
Sales of laptop and desktops are up nearly 30 per cent versus 2019. Some 340 million of them were sold around the world in 2021. When Microsoft released its quarterly results this month, Windows revenue was up 25 per cent year-over-year. Far from dying out or even stagnating, the PC is a growing force in tech again.
The reasons should be obvious to anyone who has worked from home over the past couple of years. And eager as we were to proclaim the PC’s death, rumours of its demise were greatly exaggerated — and going forward, far from seeing the end of the PC, it is likely to stay around for the foreseeable future.
To be clear, in terms of importance, sales, and users, PCs are completely dwarfed by smartphones. Our pocket devices almost sell as much in a single quarter as PCs do in an entire year, and there are nearly five times as many users. Meanwhile, though tablets account for only a tenth or so of PC’s $250 billion annual revenue, the people making apps are spending far more time thinking about the iPad than they are your average Windows laptop.
It was that sense of momentum that led me to replace my laptop with an Apple’s mid-range iPad last year. Since I had a desktop Mac, I assumed the tablet would be fine for those times I was outside my home — which of course these days, isn’t that often.
But as enjoyable as the iPad is to use, it is in many ways still deeply constrained. Simple things — like being able to see the chat window while also using a video call, or being able to annotate a document in the margins — often prove either too cumbersome or simply impossible, a fact which can at times be maddening.
The appeal of the PC, especially in a post-COVID world, is thus obvious: not only is there significantly more screen real estate to do things like have a video chat and a document open at the same time, but they are built to do multiple things at once, and quickly, too.
Another factor is that core pieces of software are still hobbled or non-existent on mobile platforms. Despite enormous gains in computing power — the most recent iPad Pro, for example, is vastly more powerful than most full computers — key applications like Photoshop, Office, and other pro software are their best on Windows or Mac, not a tablet.
That’s why so many people still say that for “real work,” you need a PC.
Yet, part of what is happening here isn’t so much that the PC is inherently superior, as much as tablets are artificially constrained. Apple has almost no competition when it comes to the iPad, as both Google and Microsoft have let their tablet ambitions almost completely fall to the wayside.
As such, though the iPad can now do a lot more — say, connect to a monitor (if imperfectly), or use external storage — the lack of any real competitive aggression means it still has a long way to go before it is as fully functional as a traditional computer.
But the mere fact that one can make these comparisons suggests that, while the PC has made a surprising return, it will become more and more like a tablet as tablets become more and more like PCs.
As a key example, Microsoft has had some genuine success with its Surface line, which melds tablet and laptop functions to create a whole category of 2-in-1’s. Touch screens are now almost standard on Windows laptops. And meanwhile, Apple’s MacOS now shares more and more of its look and functionality with iOS.
Yes the PC isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to change, adapting to include the friendlier, more accessible dimensions of mobile devices while retaining that classic PC productivity.
The PC renaissance, like online shopping and remote work, has been another of those pandemic-induced tech changes, and like those other changes, it too seems likely to linger long after COVID is an immediate threat.
But a renaissance, whether in tech or art, is never simply a return to the past; it is a return to certain ideas, but modified to suit the present.
And consider: despite my regret, this column was written on that same iPad I consider to be a mistake. For now, you might need a PC to do most real work — but even with the return of the PC, that fact may not be true forever.
