I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices.
I like to fall back on this Steve Jobs quote, employing a car/truck metaphor for computers:
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 … 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’ve always thought PCs will become business workstations. Meaning you use them for office work but everything else will be “cars” as your quote put it. Meaning internet browsing, social media, view/edit photos, and the like will be done on some mobile device. Windows is alresdy the de facto business workstation and I don’t see it going away.
There’s already a whole generation or two who will likely have little to no experience with PCs.
Communication is also work, especially as you go up the management value chain. I think maybe people should refer to the thing that PCs do and mobiles don't as "typing".
It isn't just the keyboard which PCs hold as an advantage, it's the mouse as well. There are a lot of tasks that workers do on PCs with a mouse that can't be done reliably with a touchscreen.
Maybe an iPad Pro with its stylus could perform a lot of those mouse-driven tasks, but using the stylus for long periods of time is going to be exhausting and injury-prone. By using a mouse your arm can rest comfortably and allow you to work for long periods of time with minimal effort and no strain.
We've known about Fitz's Law since the dawn of the GUI and have decades of study on it. It's not any more efficient to need to "headshot" everything you need in an application 100% of the time, and in fact it is often rather the opposite that it gets in the way of actual efficiency.
Mousing through most "mobile" applications is great, whether "first class" or not.
Desktop and mobile OSes don't need to remain separate, and it's really past time that a lot of super-cramped "desktop apps" got the death they deserved for their decades old RSI problems, accessibility issues, and garbage UX.
It's friendly but it's not space efficient. For applications with a huge number of features, a touch UI can't handle them. Touch screens don't have right click, so you can't get context menus.
It's more than that, though. A touch screen UI for the iPhone makes zero sense on a 32" display. I'd much rather have a true multiwindow, multitasking operating system than that. Really, I wouldn't use a 32" iOS device at all. That's probably why Apple doesn't make them.
User studies from the dawn of the GUI continue to harp that user efficiency is inversely correlated to space efficiency. It doesn't matter if an application can show a million details to the individual pixel level if the user can't process a million details or even recognize individual pixels.
> Touch screens don't have right click, so you can't get context menus.
You don't need "right click" for context menus.
Touch applications have supported long-press for years as context menu. Not to mention that macOS has always been that way traditionally because Apple never liked two+ button mice.
Then there's touch applications that have explored more interesting variations of context menus such as slide gestures and something of a return to relevance of Pie Menus (which it is dumb that those never took dominance in the mouse world and probably proof again that mice are too accurate for their own good when it comes to real efficiency over easy inefficiency).
> I'd much rather have a true multiwindow, multitasking operating system
Those have never been mutually exclusive from touch friendly. It's not touch friendliness that keeps touch/mobile OSes from being "true multiwindow/multitasking", it's other factors in play such as hardware limitations and the fact that tiling window managers and "one thing at a time" are better user experiences more often than not, and iOS if anything in particular wants to be an "easy user experience" more than an OS.
(I use touch all the time on Windows in true multiwindow/multitasking scenarios. It absolutely isn't mutually exclusive.)
Sure they can, but why bother? When I use Windows, I use real Windows applications with desktop UIs. The touch UI mobile apps are a joke on a desktop monitor.
Very few people are primarily messaging as their job. Even outside developers, designers and other creatives, the majority of people work on some mix of spreadsheets, presentations and traditional docs on a daily basis. I guess you can do a little bit of word processing on a phone but it gets ugly pretty fast.
I would expand “reading” to “consumption” because mobile devices are frequently used for audio and video in addition to reading (which is probably more “browsing” than long-form reading).
I'm genuinely very sorry for missing this comment (9 hours ago as I write this) because I think it's a really important and interesting next area of development. Since this article is still front page though, I hope I'm not too late to have some discussion here particularly since none of the other replies have taken the analysis approach I do.
If we're trying to predict the future, I think one effective approach to try to not be trapped in the present paradigm is to try to extrapolate from foundations of physics and biology that we can count on remaining constant over the considered period. Trying to really get down to the most fundamental question of end user computing, I think it's arguable that the core is "how do we do IO between the human brain and a CPU?" With improving technology, effectively everything else ultimately falls out of the solution to creating a two-way bridge between those two systems. The primary natural information channel to the human brain is our visual system with audio as secondary and minimal use of touch, and the primary general purpose output we've found are our hands and sometimes feet, with voice now an ever more solid secondary and gestures/eye movements very niche. Short of transhumanism (direct bioelectric links say) those inputs/outputs define the limits of out information and control channels to computers, and the most defining of all is the visual input.
Up until now, the screen has defined much of the rest, and a lot of computer can be thought of "a screen, and then supporting stuff depending on the size of the screen." A really big screen is just not portable at all, so the "supporting stuff" can also be not portable which means expansive space, power, and thermal limits as well as having the screen itself able to be modularized (but even desktop AIOs can pack fairly heavy duty hardware). Human input devices can also be modularized. Get into the largest portable screen size and now the supporting gear must be attached, though it can still have its own space separate from the screen. But already the screen is defining how big that space is and we're losing modularity. That's notebooks. Going more portable then that, we immediately move to "screen with stuff on the back as thin and light as feasible" for all subsequent designs, be it tablets, smartphones, or watches. The screen directly dictates how much physical space is available and in turn how much power and how much room to dissipate heat. And that covers nearly the entire modern direct user computing market.
Wearable displays, capping out at direct retinal projection, represent a "screen" that can hit the limits of human visual acuity while also being mobile, omnipresent, and modularized. I'm really actually kind of surprised how more people don't seem to think this represents a pretty seismic change. If we literally have the exact same maximalized (no further improvements possible) visual interface device everywhere, and the supporting compute/memory/storage/networking hardware need not be integrated, how will that not result in dramatic changes? It's hard to see how "Mobile" and "PC" won't blur in that case. Yeah, entering your local LAN or sitting at your desk may seamlessly result in new access and additional power becoming available as a standalone box(es) with hundreds of watts/kilowatts becomes directly available vs the TDP that can be handled by your belt or watches or whatever form mobile support hardware takes when it no longer is constrained to "back of slab", but the interfaces don't need to necessarily change. Interfaces seem like they'll depend more on human output options then input, but that seems likely to see major changes with WDs too, because it will also no longer be stuck in integrated form factor.
WDs definitely look like they're getting into the initial steeper part of the S-curve at last. Retinal projection has been demoed, as well as improvements in other wearables. We're not talking next year I don't think or even necessarily the year after, but it certainly feels like we're getting into territory where it wouldn't be a total shock either. And initial efforts like always will no doubt be expensive and have compromises, but refinement will be driven pretty hard like always too. I don't think the disruptive potential can possibly be ignored, nobody should have forgotten what happened the last few such inflection points.
>I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices.
This line of reasoning though is fantastically unconvincing. Heck even ignoring the real work mobiles are absolutely being used for, and given the context of this article, I pretty much heard what you said repeated word for word in the 90s except that it was "SGI and Sun systems are tools for getting real work done, PCs are mostly communication and entertainment devices".
I don't see this happening. PCs are tools for getting real work done. Mobiles are mostly communication and entertainment devices.
I like to fall back on this Steve Jobs quote, employing a car/truck metaphor for computers:
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 … 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.