The PC as an Appliance.

We often forget that the idea of a personal computer is an extremely modern one, considering how ingrained in our lives they have become. Indeed the first personal computers appeared around 40 years ago and it took decades for them to become a fixture as common as the television in modern households. The last 2 decades have seen an explosion in the adoption rate of personal computers growing at double digit rates nearly every year. Still even though today’s personal computers are leaps and bounds above their predecessors in terms of functionality they still share the common keyboard, monitor and mouse configuration that’s been present for decades despite many attempts to reinvent them.

There does however seem to be a market for curated computing devices that, whilst lacking the power of their bigger brethren, are capable of performing a subset of their tasks. I first began to notice this trend way back when I was still working in retail as many customer’s requirements for a PC rarely amounted to more than “email, web surfing and writing a few documents”. Even back then (2000~2006) even the most rudimentary of the PC line I had to sell would cover this off quite aptly and more often than not I’d send them home with the cheapest PC available, leaving the computing beasts to gather dust in the corner. To me it seemed that unless you were doing photo/video editing or gaming you could buy a PC that would last the better part of 5 years before having to think about upgrading, and even then only because it would be so cheap to do so.

The trend towards such devices began about 4 years ago with the creation of the netbook class of personal computing devices. Whilst still retaining much of the functionality of their ancestors netbooks opted for a small form factor and low specifications in order to keep costs down. I, like many geeks of the time, saw them as nothing more than a distraction as they filled a need that didn’t exist failing to remember the lessons I had learned many years before. The netbook form factor proved to be a wild success with many people replacing their PCs in favor of the smaller platform. They were however still fully fledged PCs.

Then along came Apple with their vision of creating yet another niche and filling it with their product. I am of course talking about the iPad which has enjoyed wild success and created the very niche that Apple dreamed of creating. Like with netbooks I struggled with the idea that there could be a place in my home for yet another computing device since I could already do whatever I wanted. However just like the netbooks before them I finally came around to the idea of having a tablet in my house and that got me thinking, maybe the curated experience is all most people need.

Perhaps the PC is better off as an appliance, at least for most people.

For the everyman their requirements for a computing device outside the workplace don’t usually extend past the typical “email, web and document editing” holy trinity. Tablets, whilst being far from an ideal platform to do all those tasks aptly (well, in my opinion anyway) they’re good enough to replace a PC for most people outright. Indeed the other Steve behind Apple, Mr Wozniak, has said that tablets are PCs for everyone else:

“The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room,” Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. “It’s for the normal people in the world,” Wozniak said.

“I think Steve Jobs had that intention from the day we started Apple, but it was just hard to get there, because we had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do … normal consumer appliance things,” Wozniak said.

If you consider the PC as a household appliance then the tablet form factor starts to make a lot of sense. Sure it can’t do everything but it can do a good chunk of those tasks very well and the barrier to using them is a whole lot lower than that of a fully fledged PC. Plus unlike a desktop or laptop they don’t seem out of place when used in a social situation or simply lying around on the coffee table. Tablets really do seem to be a good device for the large majority of people who’s computing needs barely stress today’s incredibly powerful PCs.

Does that mean tablets should replace PCs outright? Hell no, there’s still many tasks that are far more aptly done on PC and the features that make a tablet convenient (small size, curated experience) are also its most limiting factors. Indeed the power of tablets is built on the foundations that the PC has laid before it with many tablets still relying on their PC brethren to provide certain capabilities. I think regular users will gravitate more towards the tablet platform but it will still be a long time before the good old keyboard, monitor and mouse are gone.