Comments on: 2010: the year we make tablets (and kill the PC!)

By: Josh Marinacci

Josh Marinacci — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:10:33 +0000

Hi Fatih. True, my title was a bit exaggerated, but the trend is clear. PCs are slowly going away. They will always be here, but they aren’t a growth market. Their marketshare is going to erode over time to be less than 10% of what we think of as ‘computers’. The cellphones have already started this trend.

For PC gaming, the future is consoles. The fact that you play serious games on the PC (something more than solitaire) says that you aren’t the average user. Again, PC gaming will always be here, but consoles + tablets + phones will be 90+% of the market in 10 years. (if it isn’t already, depending on how we count).

By: Fatih Coskun

Fatih Coskun — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 10:05:51 +0000

Yes, I am a software developer. And yes, I do have a powerful desktop PC at home. But I never use that PC for software development. I am not speaking as a developer here, I am speaking as a passionate PC gamer. Your post did not say anything about this use case for desktop PCs. The amount of desktop PCs used for gaming cannot be disregarded. Its true, that consoles may kill PC gaming, but that will definitely not happen 2010 and even not in the next few years. Stating that tablets will kill PCs is a bit exaggerated. “Tablets will kill PC browsing” could be a more appropriate title. The PC will remain as a multi purpose device used for more than just workstations for many years.

By: Kathryn Huxtable

Kathryn Huxtable — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:25:46 +0000

I own a Mac laptop and run a Windows entertainment system and a Linux server. I also own an iPhone and a Kindle 2.

Yes, I’m a software developer, so I’ll always have a reasonably powerful general purpose PC, which currently is my MacBook Pro.

But I *really* like reading books on the Kindle because of the e-Ink screen. There’s no eyestrain, the way there always seems to be even on the best LCD monitor. And the iPhone is too small to be a browsing computer.

I took a trip in early November and for the first time in many years, I didn’t take my laptop. I took my iPhone and my Kindle. It worked well. If I wanted to check out the world, I could do it with some pain on the iPhone, and if I wanted some reading to kill time, the Kindle worked very well, and packed smaller than two or three paperbacks.

I guess the point I’d like to make is that e-Ink really is a different experience from the backlit experience. Maybe OLED technology will replace everything, but I don’t see it for awhile. With that as background, I don’t see the Kindle or various other dedicated e-Book readers going away inside of a decade.

And making predictions about the end of something is always dangerous. I remember a humorous timeline published (I think) in CACM back in the mid-1980s. It was a timeline of computer hardware and software advances. Every other year was either “End of FORTRAN predicted” or “End of COBOL predicted”. Of course, people still use both languages over 20 years later, though not as much as at the time. A more accurate prediction would have been “languages with all-caps names will become less popular”.

Anyway, I have enjoyed what you write. Keep it up!