Tablets are the New PC's

Joshua Topolsky said that Steve Jobs’ famous “the post-PC era” comment was partly a marketing strategy, not just about a technological shift:

“In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to…In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It's not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.”

And so, said Topolsky:

“Apple need only delight consumers and tell them that specs and speed are the domain of a dinosaur called the PC…Apple isn't claiming victory in the Space Race -- it's ceding space to the competition…But guess who gets Earth all to itself?”

And Jobs was proven right. While PC sales flattened and even fell, tablet sales soared. As MG Siegler wrote this year:

“As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad would be in the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. Think about that for a second. The iPad alone is bigger than almost all Fortune 500 companies.”

But have tablets not only displaced PC’s but become PC’s, wonders Peter Bright.

Here’s what he means. How often do people replace their PC, he asks? A decade back, it was fairly frequent since performance improvements were significant; or you needed more memory and RAM. Today, those things hardly matter. And so:

“Replacements were driven by necessity rather than any sense that the new machines would be better than the old ones.”

And the tablet has already gone the same way, says Bright:

“Screen resolution, at least on existing "retina" devices, is as good as it needs to be. Battery life is at the level of "good enough." Shaving a bit of weight off is nice, especially for the non-Air owners, but not so nice as to justify buying a whole new tablet. It's not like any of them are heavy. Fast processors? What for?”

Even worse, unlike PC’s, the tablet competes against the (larger) phone:

“A large screen smartphone can do all the things a smartphone does (including important things like fit in your pocket and make phone calls) and it can do all the things a tablet can do... just with a slightly smaller screen.”

Boy, did the wheel come full circle at warp speed? Or as Alphonse Karr said:

“The more things change, the more they are the same.”