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The Always Approaching, Never Arrived "Post-PC Era"

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

Mark Lowenstein writing for Tech.Pinions

As we head toward Apple’s annual device announcement-palooza, it’s an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs’ vaunted, much quoted ‘Post-PC Era’. The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn’t look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future.

It would disingenuous of me to say I'm not a little disappointed with the glacial progress tablets have seen in the last few years. After years of explosive growth, things have cooled down quite a bit. The iPad is staying mostly level, with some growth over the past year, but Android tablets are turning to dust in the wind. In the Windows world, tablets are far more rare than laptops with touch screens.

But it's not all about the form factor for me. I prefer iOS to macOS as an operating system, and the fact that it's running only on portable touch screen-only devices right now is a restriction I hope is lifted soon so that iOS can break out of this "mobile OS" classification it's stuck in for most people.