Dell Says Idea of Post-PC Era is "Complete Nonsense"

PCs can never go away completely. I mean tablets and smartphones are nice and all. I may even replace my old laptop with a smartphone, but for any serious work you still need a keyboard and mouse.

PCs are content creation devices and tablets, smartphones and the like are consumption devices, so until they can make a tablet with a better interface then the PC will remain king.

For once, I agree with Dell

I think once we can have super fast internet everything can be done by cloud computing. All you'd ever have to buy is basically a wireless card, a monitor and keyboard/mouse. With fast internet (with little latency) we would be able to stream application, games, movies anything we desire. Kind of like on live.

I will use a tablet for serious work when they are 46 inches across, like my two desktop monitors. Nothing prevents people from having *both* a desktop and tablet. They serve different purposes.

I love it, now the marketing pundits are reversing themselves by posting this article.

I guess their bosses finally realized that they would lose more sales than gain by trying to sell PCs users on the BS that a tablet is just as useful as the PC.

They need to fire these marketers because they failed miserably, not all consumers are THAT dumb!

Oh yeah! Michael Dell and his company have way better attitude than Gruener, HP and other tablet admirers... I only hope that this attitude won't cost Dell too much - I'd like PCs to remain, and not just as a "niche market".

... but I'm still not buying Dell products

Agreed. I'm sorry but who ever says PC's are 'dead' or soon to be are just plain wrong.

Maybe one day but we are just not there yet. It would take a vast improvement in tablet interfaces and hardware capabilities for them to replace the PC.

I don't buy DELL or ANY branded PC, I have built my own PC's for almost 20 years now and will keep building my own for many years to come.

So for my point of view PC's are not going anywhere, tablets on the other hand won't even get anywhere near me. If I need a portable computer then I use my laptop.

But for serious work.... er... GAMING nothing will replace my PC's.

I wonder why portable TVs didn't put a dent into the big-screen TV market... oh yeah, because small screen suck.

Tablets will soon go the way of the netbooks. Once everybody who needs a tablet buys one, they won't be needing a new one for a long time - after all it's only for Facebook, Twitter, video and web browsing. Even smartphones are headed towards market saturation. If you have a top-of-the-line smartphone now, what else will you really need in a phone? A screen bigger than 4.3"? A 0.1" thinner body? Finer resolution than 960x640? Or do you long to play Crysis on a 4.3" screen so you'd like a 6870 GPU in your pocket?

No, now it's all about viewing content (video, websites, etc) and for most people, current top smartphones will be fine for years to come.

My wishlist for a new phone: streamlined wireless connectivity to HD+ displays, keyboards, mice, etc. Then and only then will multicore monster phones be really useful for any kind of work.

post-pc is a joke for now. Instead post-laptop is happening fast...

I am sure most governments would like to think that the PC would go away in favor of just consumption based systems such as tablets and smartphones.

Not happening either; most people still want/need a portable PC with the ability to type properly and tablets can't do it.




They'd love it. I guess we're lucky that the market controls the government and not the other way around

The EeePad Transformer is awesome; I think that with a Tegra 3 and better sound it would be a must buy. For Asus, instead of concentrating on emulating the look of competitors, they have excelled at bringing on new devices that fill in the nooks and crannies of the tablet market. I believe the ultimate goal for a product should be one that complements and utilizes other devices instead of shunning them.

Totally agree with this article, content creation is on the 'PC', performance is on the 'PC'; content consumption is on Tablets, so their real market is aimed at TVs and portable gaming devices.

Does anyone else remember when electronic pocket organizers where all the rage; and over time those capabilities integrated with smart phones.

I hope your right Mr Dell but your Average Joe's say laptops are cool and are considered the "thang".

I believe it was the all knowing Steve Jobs that first started that rumor, by proclaiming we are in a post-pc era.

I believe it was the all knowing Steve Jobs that first started that rumor, by proclaiming we are in a post-pc era.

I believe it was the all knowing Steve Jobs that first started that rumor, by proclaiming we are in a post-pc era.

As soon as a tablet is more powerful then its PC counterpart AT THE SAME TIME at a "reasonable" price the PC will be dead...don't hold your breath for it though.

For a tech website-- the posters here seem to have very little vision.

My desktop machine is a box on my desk, plugged into a monitor with the capability of communicating wirelessly to a keyboard and mouse.

At some point computer hardware will be fast enough and storage small enough [or remote] that it stops making sense to build large desktop machines and they'll get smaller.

At some point, a device the size of a phone [probably still with a phone in it] will be as powerful as necessary for 99% of all computer users and then still powerful enough for 90%+ of the tasks of that top 1%.

Those devices will almost certainly be able to connect, wirelessly and seamlessly, to the monitor, keyboard, mouse, internet, power, external storage, etc sitting on your desk [at home, work, the hotel business center, etc]. At that point, sitting at your desk, it is no different than a desktop computer. Except that when you're leaving for work you pick it up and put it in your pocket.

Between docking stations, you'll surely get by with touch and voice interfaces as well-- perfectly fine for the light work you do between desks.

I will NEVER use cloud storage for my personal information. I love my privacy and my families privacy. Cloud will be a hackers dream! The PC will not die in the foreseeable future.

Post pc era will not happen in near future because pc will be definitely faster than a tablet or smartphone at anytime.Pc can work comfortably 24*7 .but working on tablet or smartphone 24*7 wont be comfortable .Again tablets or smartphone wont defeat pc in performance and hardware and reliablity.

If you use web mail or IMAP mail access, you're already storing your personal information in a "cloud". If you're using POP3 mail access, then your personal information is in a cloud before you download it to your computer. Either way, most stuff about most people is "out there" already, might as well use it for your own convenience.

The "cloud" is just a fancy name for something ancient used back in the days of the computers birth - Client/Mainframe solution, a weak-ass terminal connected to a mainframe that did all the work.

Who wants the old era back under a fancy name where your gear only need the power of a average toaster? I'm sure not one of em!

why don't dell branch out and make the motherboards GPUs and stuff (nah...). but I'd like to see more not made in china things and more of... let's say U.S.A.
The PC will never die because of these mobile devices if they can cram performance and efficiency on those devices they can cram the heck a lot more on desktops even laptops. the only thing lagging behind is the software side of the industry.

Wrong. The companies pumping out smartphones and tablets right now know their devices has a lifespan of around 18months before people refresh it. For example, people who either own a iphone1-3 will probably refresh to the iphone 5 while the people with the iphone 4 is on the fence about it. Samsung also knows that by 2015, most people who use some sort of mobile device will own a smartphone, tablet or both. They know this because in S.Korea already 80% of people own and use a smartphone on a daily basis. Then again, S.Korea is known for their internet connectivity and speed. Basically, everyone will own a smartphone, and people will refresh it every ~2 years. Technology is really never a sound investment especially mobile technology. Sure, the HD TV you bought will probably last you 10 years, but technology such as TVs are built to do one thing and to do that job well, while smartphones and tablets are constantly upgraded to open up new multitasking jobs.

Phones and tablets are specific in that there is a maximum practical screen size and maximum practical resolution. The other specific thing is that people do a limited number of things with their phones/tablets (what tech journalists like to call "content consumption"). Once we reach reasonable hardware specs and reasonable performance for what most people do, the tablet/smartphoone market will either stagnate (kinda like what's happening to desktops) or be commoditized (like USB thumb drives that are mostly given away). In either case, tablets will be yesterday's news by 2014 and phones will become proper computers that can interface with any screen and any control interface (even then, most people will buy what's good enough for simple things because they mostly do simple things) so the market will stagnate as for every other tech product ever.

People who say "PCs are over" surely forget people WORK. You know, some good ol' Office, CAD, even Internet contente-creating? Well, try to do it on a portable, even most laptops and see if you can survive. Portables are mostly for emails, youtube and facebook, for pretty much everything else they suck.

IMO what is vanishing in market is the branded PCs like Dell's. They cost like twice what one would spend building himself a rig.

it doesnt matter if it is a smartphone a tablet a notebook or a pc... THEY ARE ALL COMPUTERS, they all have a CPU RAM HDD GPU MOBO SOFTWARE ETC, computer WILL NEVER DIE, MAYBE the format in wich the come MIGHT change, but to stop its production? never

Who wants to lose thousands/millions of dollars of data when their hard drive fails or their house burns down with all the backups, or they get burglared? Cloud is where it's at, already your medical/criminal records, shopping habits, and electronic communications are somewhere out there.

And if you look at burglary statistics, your data is safer on a secure server than wherever it is you keep your backups.

You're short-sighted. Who says desktops can't utilise the same advances in hardware? Go on and jump on your stupid tablet that you'll carry from screen to screen; we're gonna be playing holographic games or some other crazy stuff meanwhile

No, I'm still not the short-sighted one since I gave no timeframe. When desktops can handle holographic games and phones can't yet, it isn't quite as far into the future as I am suggesting.

And, right now, most of my work is being done remotely. the box on my deak is handling some small local things like email and file management. But the queries and code I'm running are all on a remote desktop session connected to a server that is 800 miles away. maybe that's how you will play your holographic games in 2050 or whenever; on your toaster connected to a super computer somewhere.