What's a Post-PC device?

Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are <i>clearly</i> post-PC devices. Why?<p>The filesystem has gone away.<p>Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care?<p>This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music.<p>Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music.<p>On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder.<p>On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor.<p>To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."

I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve.<p>The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.

Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone &#38; iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand.<p>Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline.<p>We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment.<p>The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.

"Post-PC device" is Newspeak for "Personal Digital Assistant."

I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device?<p>People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data.<p>Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose.<p>As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created.<p>Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250.<p>The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with.<p>Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC).<p>PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden).<p>Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.

I would actually say that Microsoft's tunnel-vision on everything being a Windows powered "pc" is why they have always failed in the tablet market over the years.

A Post-PC Device is a Marketing Term used to refer to a iPad, and as far as apple are concerned, Only an iPad.<p>Personal implies choice, customization, and individuality, and these are precisely the things apple strives to remove from it's devices and services. The ability to choose one of seven particular colors and three price-range specific models is a laughable substitute.<p>The iPad is the first Computer which is post-Personal.

I actually believe that PCs are so == Computers for most of humanity that its perfectly fine to discuss post-PC devices<p>I personally think that a Post-PC device is simply a device that for some (and later many) people replaces a PC in their day-to-day computer-related tasks. So if whatever they used to do on a PC they now mostly do on say an iPad then an iPad would be a post-PC device.

While it's not fair to define a new generation of computing by its isolation and exclusion of the previous generation, people have been taking a pop at the iPad because a PC (or a Mac) is required before your iPad will work. At all. I'm pretty certain that the Apple II didn't need to be sync-ed up to a minicomputer via iTunes before you could turn the thing on.

Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken.<p>Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.

&#62;...allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply.<p>More cheaply? I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.<p>There is so much hot air expended on essential meaningless PR terms such as this, especially when it comes to Apple.<p>All of this is just posturing for the media and general public and does not hold up to technical scrutiny more than the previous claim about the iPhone running the 'full OS X'.<p>I am more worried about the 30% tax on services that seems to tag along with the so called Post-PC devices.