“‘Post-PC’ has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from ‘post-PC devices,’ including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named ‘Apple Computer,'” Sarah Rotman Epps blogs for Forrester.
“So what does ‘post-PC’ mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly,” Epps writes. “Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million).”
Computing is shifting from:
• Stationary to ubiquitous.
• Formal to casual.
• Arms-length to intimate.
• Abstracted to physical
Epps writes, “In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people… I think that we’re embarked on that… You know, people laugh at me because I use the phrase “magical” to describe the iPad. But it’s what I really think. You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the Internet and media, your apps, your content. It’s like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010