post-pc

Although some claim the rapid adoption of tablets has ushered in a so-called post-PC era, one HP executive begs to differ.

HP printing and personal systems group executive vice president Todd Bradley said in an interview with PC World that the notion PCs are declining as tablets take over is plain nonsense.

"Look, it's just wrong. Just think of the decision when your child is going off to college," Bradley said. "What's a requirement? A PC. Or you run a business and need your employees to be productive. You need a PC. The size of … Read more

Everything is copacetic in the post-PC era, according to Michael Dell.

Speaking at VMware 2012, Dell's founder and CEO cited the fact that 380 million PCs were sold last year, adding that "the post-PC era has been pretty good for PCs so far," according to a report at Citeworld.

And as is typical at many PC-centric events, the iPad -- despite its growing popularity as a client device -- and smartphones didn't garner much attention, Citeworld said.

That is, until poll results showed the rise of "post-PC" devices as the No. 1 trend in … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Marty Wolf's bio below.

With the recent announcement of Microsoft's new Surface tablet, the decades-old network of partners that Microsoft and Intel built just got a formidable new asset-rich competitor: Microsoft.

Like all successful partner networks, Wintel thrived because all of the players -- the two principals, OEMs, the channel and other stakeholders -- benefited individually from the association while contributing to the growth of the network itself. The Wintel platform is still the dominant desktop and laptop computing architecture.

But with smartphones, tablets and the cloud replacing desktops and … Read more

Steve Jobs is gone, but he would be happy to hear about the death of the PC, the desktops and clunky laptops that were the face of computing for decades.

He spent the last decade of his career seeking to make digital devices that would supplant the beasts and feed the growing appetite for sleek, connected devices in the Internet era of computing.

Jobs sought to emulate the revolutionary spirit and impact of the 1984 Macintosh, but garner the sales and market share that Microsoft's Windows spawned in the same era. It was a quest for a kind of … Read more

Don't like playing by Apple's rules? Tough beans.

Because for the foreseeable future, Apple's financial power and customer appeal gives it a powerful command over the industry--everything from component suppliers to programmers. That poses all kinds of problems, but it also means we'll be moving much faster into the future of computing--call it the post-post-PC era.

Yesterday's launch of the new iPad shows just how complete that power is. Sure, we'll still have Windows PCs, Android phones, and even MacBooks, but the iPad is on a steady trajectory that leads from entertaining toward essential. … Read more

Are we in a post-PC era as the late Steve Jobs famously claimed? Not really, says IDC.

This ivory-tower debate resurfaced this week when market researcher Canalys said Apple had become the world's largest PC supplier in the fourth quarter with about 17 percent of the worldwide market.

So, how did reigning PC king Hewlett-Packard suddenly drop to a distant No. 2 with only 12.7 percent? The iPad, of course. Apple shipped more than 15 million of those in the quarter, dwarfing any other so-called "client PC" device.

"We're going through the biggest shift … Read more

LAS VEGAS--VMware Chief Executive Paul Maritz, who once ran Microsoft's Windows empire, told the 19,000 attendees at the VMworld conference here this afternoon that the computing industry is entering the post-PC era.

Maritz, who in the late 1990s was Microsoft's third most power executive behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and oversaw the company's rise to PC operating system hegemony, embraced the vision of a longtime nemesis of the software giant.

"Steve Jobs likes to say we're entering the post-PC era," Maritz said during his keynote address. "We agree with that."… Read more

In the wake of comments from an IBM executive who said that his "primary computer now is a tablet," I wondered how closely my own experience mirrored that statement.

Mark Dean,who was chief engineer for the development of the IBM PC/AT, prefaced the above remark by saying he has "moved beyond the PC.."

That second statement is probably the most significant, as it implies that, for him, the traditional PC paradigm is dead.

Indeed, I've witnessed this change in friends and family. People who already spend a disproportionate amount of screen time on … Read more

Steve Jobs and other Apple executives had a lot more to say about the "Post-PC" era, as the iCloud replaces the Mac and PC as the "digital hub."

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference today, Apple executives picked up the gait--you might even call it the start of a sprint--toward the "Post-PC" era. And some of the biggest strides toward this future are happening in iOS 5 and iCloud.

Over the years, "Post-PC" has meant different things to different people. But here's the way Apple seems to describe it: increasingly, you will be using devices like the iPhone and iPad as your personal computer, giving them at least equal weight with the traditional personal computer. And the gravitation to those high-mobility products will be facilitated by technologies like the iCloud which, in effect, serves as a common hard drive, accessible by--and automatically syncing--all of your devices.

That's the idea, at least, of an iCloud utopia. Google's version of this can be seen in the Android operating environment on smartphones and tablets and the Chrome OS on upcoming Chromebooks. Not to mention apps like Google Docs on the PC.

Below is a quick rundown of Post-PC-related statements made today by Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone Software… Read more