Oh well... This rant has little sense and a lot of angriness. The phrase "The PC is over and PC sucks" appears several times with little explanation other than citing the grow of other markets. The true is there is no replacement for the PC and it doesn't seem to have a serious replacement any time soon.
People can't make movies, edit images properly, use a compiler, debug, use a nontrivial spreadsheet,etc in phones or tablets. Until that doesn't change the desktop PC won't die. They might not been as popular as before nor have the same upgrade cycle as before, they might had lost relevance as a growing market, but they are far from dead.
Well, that's a very popular position taken recently in the media. "the PC is dying... Tablets will replace everything we know... look, the sales are going up, it means it's a zero sum game and PC share will go down to ZERO!".
As you mentioned the future is fragmentation, certainly not a monolithic tablet-only future. There are still too many incentives to keep using PCs for many, many usages.
Also for me this is all very familiar. As a pc gamer for years, maybe a decade! I have been hearing about how pc gaming is dying or dead. All the while playing the best games which are usually not released on consoles with the best graphics and performance + controls and setup that I want.
Yeah, and playing on Full HD since a while, while all the consoles out there rely on crappy upscaling to fake Full HD. It's been a while I did not take my Xbox360 or PS3 out. And I'm far from being convinced by the PS4 and XboxOne even after playing with them in the last week.
I don't agree with the "people can't create" thing with tablets.
I do a podcast entirely on my iPad, I also record music on it - and in both cases significantly prefer it to doing the same on my computer.
I also sketch stuff (although a decent digitiser would help) and my daughter records and edits films on it as well (she says it's too fiddly editing video on the Mac). I write numerous blog posts and I've written one essay on it (using an external keyboard). I even used it for coding (well not really, just as an SSH client to a linux box, but the inbuilt 3G over MOSH made it extremely convenient for doing non-UI work).
I've not had to do any spreadsheet stuff on it, and I can see why that would be a weakness. Nor have I had to do any Photoshop-level image editing (I have done simple image editing).
But for most "creation" tasks I find the iPad to be competent, and in some cases (especially audio editing) to be superior to a "computer".
Of course, none of the stuff is "professional" level creation - but that still fits perfectly with Steve Jobs' cars vs trucks analogy - most people don't need that level of control.
Well, true all that. Except, my non-technical parents won't be buying any more PCs. They can do everything they want on their ipad. And I'm pretty sure they don't want media editors, compilers or complex spreadsheet editors either.
Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their board-level Maker-centric ilk. It's a viable flea-market ecosystem now that everybody already has at least a computer of some sort, so the learning machine doesn't have to be that do-all hub-of-activity machine, it just has to connect to it.
Having GPIO pins to play with also helps with the learning. The Boca Raton model of computing device was a bit stifling for homebrew hardware extension because of having to accommodate the de facto standards of the IBM PC/AT model (RS232 serial, Centronics parallel, CGA/EGA/VGA display, DIN5/PS2 kybd/mouse) to get a hackable connection going.
>The phrase "The PC is over and PC sucks" appears several times with little explanation other than citing the grow of other markets.
There are some non-market explanations in the article and I could personally think of many more.
The PC could be way better than it is in technical terms and mostly (but not only) on the software side. The main problem is that once Windows reached the de facto monopoly, it had little incentive to innovate and instead had reasons to stay backwards compatible.
People can't make movies, edit images properly, use a compiler, debug, use a nontrivial spreadsheet,etc in phones or tablets. Until that doesn't change the desktop PC won't die. They might not been as popular as before nor have the same upgrade cycle as before, they might had lost relevance as a growing market, but they are far from dead.