ShareThisWe gather together this week to celebrate the life of the desktop PC, born in 1975 with MITS and murdered in 2010 by mobile computing and the iPad. Desktop PC, we enjoyed you while we had you.
My first desktop, if you can call it that, was a Commodore 64. It gave me years of fun before I moved up to an Intel 386, then a 486 and a series of Pentiums. Sure, laptops were around. When I was a full-time reporter, I proudly carried a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, which boasted, I think, 24K of RAM and acoustic couplers for the 300-baud modem. It displayed six whole lines of text. I have had a parade of desktops, many of which I remember fondly. I took one Zeos apart so many times I still remember every configuration of its motherboard.
But all things must come to an end. Now, almost no one wants to have a big, clunky desktop in the house, dorm room or office. Even a laptop is too big for many computer users, who are moving to tablet computers and cellular phones for their mobile needs.
In its latest annual consumer electronics survey, the global management firm Accenture polled more than 8,000 people in the United States and seven other countries (Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan and Russia). Only 17 percent of respondents said they planned to buy a desktop or laptop computer in 2011 -- a 39 percent drop from the previous year.
Who is this good news for? Apple, of course, which is hitting it out of the park with the iPad. It could be good news for any of the 50 other tablets displayed at this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas -- if any of them take off now that Google is releasing a new version of the Android operating system designed for tablets.
It is profoundly bad news for Microsoft, which has staked its claim on the PC and so far has made no impact on the tablet market. It seems to have missed the boat.
Now, there are a few places where desktops will survive. Gamers will need something because they will require serious video power. Some business users still will need them for computer-aided design and drafting. Some cool, all-in-one units like the Apple iMac will survive as kitchen units. And a few desktops will still float around. But overall, stick a fork in them.
As for laptops, they are the transitional technology as tablets get faster, better and cheaper. Give them another decade before we tire of typing and refine our voice-recognition software. Meanwhile, laptops will get smaller and smaller, and netbooks will account for more and more laptop sales. In other words, get used to typing on a tiny keyboard when you get your next laptop.
But for the overwhelming majority of us, our next computer will be flat.
(James Derk, a tech columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, owns CyberDads, a computer services firm in Evansville, Ind. E-mail him at jim(at)cyberdads.com.)
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