Why the highly acclaimed post era has not arrived

Steve Jobs announced in 2007 that humanity had entered the post-PC era, and that the world would be fully mobile in the near future. Like many other things, it was marketing designed to look like Jobs' legendary vision while selling touchscreen smartphones. The post-PC era never came.

The big lie of the post-PC era

Tablet sales have declined and the smartphone has stabilized. Meanwhile, the PC is still with us, so there is less reason than ever to believe in the post-PC era. Tablets really made a dent in PC sales, but only in various segments. Although PC sales are not increasing, they are constant and there is no reason to think that they will be replaced in the medium term. Business people still carry a smartphone and laptop. Many times a tablet is used as an auxiliary device, which is mainly used for the consumption of media and content but not for work.

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Tablets and smartphones were never going to kill the PC. Jobs did a good job of convincing people that it would happen, but he really couldn't. People found a use for mobile devices along with their existing PCs. You still had to have PC capacity to do serious work and you needed bigger screens to see life's fine print. Mobile is good for communication, but it is not so good at these things and it will not be for long. Mobile devices require them to be small while, paradoxically, they can see the screen. This smallness prevents any possibility to do some of the things that users want.

If Steve Jobs didn't tell the truth, why did PC sales plummet and never bounce back?

The answer to that is partly economic and partly technological. From a technology point of view, PCs have been victims of their own success and brilliant design. They are essentially modular and if something goes wrong it can generally be replaced or upgraded without having to replace the entire PC. Laptops tend to have a harder life, and during the same period that you have a desktop, you can have two or three laptops.

The decline in PC sales began during the economic crisis. The companies decided that they would only update when necessary, which in the case of stationary PCs did not have to be at all. Some machines were updated with new GPUs and CPUs, but were not fully replaced and sales were not recorded. Meanwhile, the tablet and smartphone craze continued and seemed to fill in the gaps the update had left.