1. The
Cloud is Not Enough
As William Wallace once said, “they may take our Start
menus, but they’ll never take our freedom!” When Apple and IBM launched the
first real consumer and business PCs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they
ushered in a new era of electronic empowerment. If you wanted to use a real
computer (not a hobbyist kit) before 1977, you needed access to a system the
size of the Batcave, complete with switches, blinking lights and lots of
reel-to-reel tapes.
The PC allowed home users and small businesses who could
never afford a mainframe to perform key tasks like word processing, crunching
numbers and even gaming, without being tethered to a larger system. Now,
because of the ubiquity of the Internet and broadband services, many expect us
to turn back the clock to 1976 and rely on other people’s servers to do all the
heavy lifting. No way.
Cloud computing will be a key part of the future, but it
can’t replace the need for strong local hardware and software. When you want to
edit photos or videos, you don’t want to wait for them to upload first. When
you need your most precious data, you need it now, right in local storage. And
if your Internet connection goes down, your ability to perform key tasks
shouldn’t go with it.
Even mobile device makers are starting to realize the limitations
of cloud computing. Most new Android devices run on dual or even quad-core CPUs
and, in its latest OS, Google made its voice recognition available offline.
2.
Diversity of Form Factors
Like the Wonder Twins, the PC is constantly changing shapes.
While horizontal desktop cases were all the rage in the 1980s, today they are
sitting in the closet under a pile of CRT monitors. Whether you want a tiny
stationary computer the size of your hand, a giant tower, an all-in-one, a
notebook or the IdeaPad Yoga that folds into a tent shape, you can get a PC
that runs the same software and OS.
With Windows 8, launching this fall, we will see even more
PCs taking the form of a slate, but running the same OS at the same level of
power and productivity as clamshell or desktop forms. Meanwhile, in the Apple
ecosystem, if you want a tablet, you must use iOS, not OS X. You may be able to
an Android desktop or notebook if you look hard enough, but products like the
off-brand 7-inch Android 2.2 netbook are few and far between.
3. PCs
Are Best at Multitasking
Mobile operating systems are terrible at multitasking. iOS
and Windows Phone won’t even let you run some apps in the background and, even
on Android, you have to hit a number of keys (home or recent apps) to switch between
open tasks. But so-called desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS are
designed to help you look at different pieces of information at the same time.
Writing an email to the boss and need to look up some
numbers in a spreadsheet to send him? No problem. You can put the Excel and
Outlook windows right next to each other or switch seamlessly between them by
clicking on a taskbar or dock icon. You can even watch a video in another
window while monitoring a video transcode in a fourth and conducting an IM chat
in a fifth. Try that on your iPad!
Even with Windows 8′s tile-based Metro interface, you can
dock two apps next to each other for improved task switching. Microsoft also
seems to realize that Metro just won’t cut it for serious multitaskers as it
automatically puts the desktop on any second or third screens you attach.
4.
Keyboard and Mouse Beat Finger and Screen
Sure, it’s fun to swipe through photo galleries with a
finger or pinch the screen to zoom in and out on a web page, but when playtime
is over, you need a real physical keyboard and a pointing device to get work
done.
Looking for work? Try typing your resume on your tablet’s
virtual keyboard and see if you get the job after autocomplete changes your
master’s degree into a mistress degree.
Working on a term paper? How fast can you hunt and peck
through 3,500 words while looking down at the virtual buttons, rather than at
the text itself? Yes, you can get external keyboards for most slates, but they
just don’t measure up to the serious typing experience you get with a desktop
or notebook keyboard.
If you need to crop a picture, you can use your fingers to
draw a box around the area you want to include, but the minute you start
working with layers, masks and filters, you need to whip out the mouse or
touchpad.
And do you really want to edit your doctoral dissertation on
a 10-inch screen? By the time you attach a screen, keyboard and mouse to your
tablet, it takes up more room than the average notebook and becomes less
portable.
5.
Upgradability
Wish your tablet were faster? Throw it in the garbage and
buy a new one, because there’s nothing you can do about it. However, if you
want to upgrade your PC, chances are very good you’ll be able to dramatically
improve it through upgrades.
If you have a notebook, you can almost always get in to
change the storage drive and RAM, breathing new life into an older system. On a
desktop PC, you can change everything from the storage drive right down to the
motherboard and power supply. Imagine a business with 50 aging computers that
switches them to SSD in order to delay replacing them for another two years.
That’s huge.
In the ultimate upgrade, you can even build a new PC
entirely from parts, something I do for myself every year. You’ll pry the
screwdriver from my cold, dead, static-wrist-strapped hands.
6.
Hardware Compatibility
If you want to hook your iPad or Android tablet up to a
printer, you’ll find a number of wireless units you can connect to. But what
happens when your office still has a LaserJet 5P from the first Clinton
administration? And what if you need to connect to a scanner, point-of-sale
system, or ancient serial-port device? With a current PC you can connect to
even some of the oldest and most obscure devices through the miracle of
adapters and drivers.
7.
Developers Use Them
After a PC-pocalypse wipes desktop operating systems from
the land, where will all the apps come from? Try developing an app on your
tablet. I double Davlik dare you.
All of the development kits for Android, iOS, Windows Phone
and even BlackBerry OS run on the desktop, not phones or tablets. To program
for iOS, you must have a Mac, but a Windows PC is the best place to program for
all the other major mobile platforms. Besides, even if you could program
directly on your tablet, would you really want to page through a thousand lines
of code on a 10-inch screen?
8. Sales
Figures Don’t Tell the Story
This week, everyone’s groaning about the Gartner report,
which shows a microscopic drop of just 0.1 percent in PC sales from Q2 of 2011.
But, when you look beyond the headlines, you realize that PCs are still more
popular than tablets.
First of all, the tiny drop in sales would really be growth
if not for a few challenges that were unique to this spring’s market. Because
Intel delayed the release of its new Ivy Bridge platform until late in the
spring, most new notebooks and desktops were delayed as well. There were also a
number of users waiting for Windows 8.
Second, when you get past the percentages, you see that the
PC vendors still sold a whopping 87.5 million units worldwide last quarter.
That’s not exactly the mark of a dying technology
Finally, you have to realize that new PCs’ biggest
competition comes not from tablets but from older PCs. If you have a
three-year-old Core 2 Duo system running Windows 7 and it still runs all your
software competently, you probably don’t feel compelled to run out and buy that
new Core i5.
However, if you don’t have a tablet yet, there’s a much
bigger incentive for you to go out and buy a new gadget you don’t have yet than
make an incremental upgrade to something you already own.
