1. August 22, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
HP Or No HP: The PC Lives | Technology
News
HP Or No HP: The PC Lives | Technology First of all, despite falling growth in PCs this year,
News IDC also predicts PC sales will rebound in 2012 dri-
ven by laptop sales. Shoppers are expected to opt
Suggestions that the PC is dead are greatly exaggera- for PCs next year thanks to devices with thinner
ted. Flexibility, innovation and users’ storage needs designs, longer battery life, instant on, and touch.
will keep it around a good long while.
But it’s not just sales that will keep the PC afloat,
The signs to the contra- there also are practical reasons to keep the PC alive
ry are everywhere, ha- for the foreseeable future.
ven’t you seen them?
We All Drive Trucks For A Living
• Hewlett-Packard,
the largest computer Steve Jobs in 2010 famously compared PCs to trucks.
maker in the world, The argument goes that more people will gravitate
said Wednesday it’s looking to get out of toward using tablets while PCs will be used by people
the consumer PC business. HP believes its who need some serious horsepower to drive down
fortunes lie in a business similar to IBM the digital highway such as graphic designers and
that focuses on supporting large enterprises video editors. The premise of this argument is that
instead of trying to profit off the razor-thin people largely use PCs for doing email and other
margins of Pavilion PCs. light typing, checking Facebook, watching videos
• Also recently, Mark Dean, IBM’s chief tech- and playing games.
nology officer for the Middle East and Africa
and an engineer who worked on the IBM’s The problem is a n
first PC, the 5150, declared the end of the untold number of
PC. Dean argued the traditional mouse-and- people still need
keyboard computer was going the way of to use PCs at work, be -
the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records cause tablets ( a t
and a number of other extinct or outmoded least as they stand now) simply aren’t up to the job.
technologies. The IBM exec says he now
uses a tablet as his primary computing Consider a secretary needing to simultaneously
device. enter data into a spreadsheet, update a contacts
• Market research firm IDC recently cut its PC database, create a mail merge document to send to
growth forecast for 2011 by nearly 3 per- 1000 clients, and search online for a restaurant for
joliprint
centage points from 7.1 to 4.2 percent (IDC the next office party. Or what about this recent quote
and PC World are both owned by Interna- from a PC World reader who works as a teacher: “I
tional Data Group). do so many things with my PCs . . . Just a short time
ago I had Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Thunderbird,
Printed with
Clearly, the PC is dead, right? Well, no. Firefox, Notepad ++, Irfanview, Dreamweaver, and
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/hp-or-no-hp-the-pc-lives-technology-news/
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2. August 22, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
HP Or No HP: The PC Lives | Technology News
NXT-G running simultaneously. This is typical for at a desktop PC or laptop clamshell. But consider
me on any given day.” this: the standard automobile has had four wheels,
an engine, and a steering wheel for more than 100
Even lowly writers are better off using a PC, as PC years, yet that hardly means that automotive tech-
World’s Tony Bradley recently discovered during nology is standing still.
amonth-long bender with an iPad.
PCs with integrated touchscreens such as the Acer
PCs Are Flexible Aspire Z5610 are evolving, voice control is getting
better, and Microsoft’s Kinect Windows SDK may
Unless you own a Mac, you can adapt your PC to open up a whole new world of interaction for the
your situation with relative ease. Need more RAM? PC. Who knows? Maybe those wall-sized PC displays
Just open your PC up and plug in a new stick. Want predicted by tech luminaries and sci-fi writers may
to swap out your 320GB HDD for a 512GB SSD? No become a standard part of most people’s homes
problem. Tired of Windows and want to give Ubuntu before the decade is out.
a try? It’s only a download away.
You Need To Store Your Stuff
Tablets aren’t even close to being this flexible. You
might be able to jailbreak the iPad to get unautho- Right now, tablets have puny storage capabilities
rized software to run on it, but that’s much more compared to a PC, where 500GB drives are standard
involved than inserting a bootable thumb drive. and 1TB drives are easy to come by.
Tablets are also designed to be replaced year after
year because the hardware is largely static and un- But what about “the cloud,” you say? “We’ll just
changeable, while PCs can change as your needs store all that stuff online.” Maybe. But the future of
change and are typically serviceable for at least 3-5 the cloud is currently up for debate. Amazon and
years. Google want you to use the cloud as if it were a
hard drive accessible from anywhere you have an
Internet connection.
Apple’s iCloud, meanwhile, is designed to sync your
stuff across all your devices. If Apple’s vision wins
out, you’ll still need a device with a large amount
of storage in your home as a central repository for
stuff that’s not being stored online such as older
photos. One day, tablets may fit that bill, but for now
Innovation Is Out There
joliprint
Sure, the basic look and feel of a PC hasn’t changed
that much over the years. The basic set of compo-
nents including a display, keyboard, CPU, and mouse
Printed with
have remained largely static whether you’re looking
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/hp-or-no-hp-the-pc-lives-technology-news/
Page 2

3. August 22, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
HP Or No HP: The PC Lives | Technology News
PCs are still a better place to keep your files. 100+ Online Resources That Are Transforming Edu-
cation by batteryfast.co.uk
6 Excelent Products that Could Come from the
Google-Motorola Deal
NFC: Quick Guide to the Future of Mobile by bat-
teryfast.co.uk
How Today’s Students Use Technology
What a student’s major is important to consider
when choosing a laptop
Help Tips: Do Your Eyes Have Computer Vision Syn-
Tablets are a great tool for using on the go, and it’s drome?
a fair comment to say we’re living in the Post-PC
era or PC-plus era as Microsoft calls it, but the PC has Lose Your Laptop? Change all Passwords, Quickly
a lot of life left in it and tablets are no replacement
for my Lenovo X220. To read more good posts, please follow us on Twit-
ter: http://twitter.com/batteryfastuk
Other Business News: Thank you!
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Printed with
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