Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal has ditched his PC, and he thinks you should ditch yours as well. He hasn’t touched a PC in months and is more productive than ever, he writes in “You Can Ditch Your PC Now.”
He acknowledges that his Samsung Chromebook 2, with its keyboard and 13-inch screen, looks like a PC, but Gartner, which he describes as “the most influential company charged with determining what is and is not a personal computer,” says it is not. Mims quotes Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner’s lead PC analyst, as saying, “We define a PC as a device which is capable for both content consumption and creation, regardless of form factor.”
That’s pretty vague, and would make my Galaxy S5 a PC. Mims writes that IDC has a different dividing line between PC and non-PC—anything with a removable keyboard, like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3, is not a PC. (I guess desktop PCs aren’t PCs either).
Regardless of label, Mims contends that Chromebooks can do pretty much everything that the average PC user needs and that Apple CEO Tim Cook has said he does 80% of work on an iPad.
That may be about right, but what about the other 20%? Should I buy an iPad for 80% of my work and a MacBook Air for the other 20%? Tim Cook would probably say yes, but I don’t see that as a cost-effective alternative for me. One possibility would be to have businesses issue tablets or Chromebooks and reserve one centralized PC for every five employees.
Mims writes, “At this point in history, booting up a full-fledged operating system to write an e-mail is like using a nuclear sub to go on a weekend fishing trip.” I don’t know about that—my Thinkpad Ultrabook with its solid-state storage wakes up in a couple of seconds.
And of course connectivity is an issue—how useful is your tablet or Chromebook if you are on a long flight without Wi-Fi?
My “content creation” is mostly text—not requiring the compute power of circuit simulations, for example. Nevertheless, I have to multitask and rapidly switch between windows: the document I’m working on, notes, interview transcripts, audio recordings, and PowerPoint and video presentations. I don’t think I could do that efficiently on a Chromebook-class machine. And Mims acknowledges that if your are building 3-D models you might still need a PC.
There are useful engineering apps for iOS and Android devices, as we’ve been reporting on. And we will continue reporting on them throughout 2015.
Nevertheless, I don’t think Apple engineers, unlike Apple’s CEO, are doing 80% of their work on iPads. (Apple is very secretive when it comes to the press so I probably won’t find out for sure.)
