The PC was supposed to die a decade ago. Instead, this happened

The PC is an extremely refined instrument with excellent flexibility. Billions of hours have been spent training users in how to type and click with a mouse/trackpad/trackball and navigate operating systems. It will take something vastly superior to replace them.

With respect to productivity and usefulness, touch screen devices are mostly inferior, aside from being very mobile. They have little to no tactile feedback, are laggy, and controls can change even as you are inputting them. I've very often tried to click a button/hyperlink on a touch screen and had it change at the last half second.

Mobile devices are locked-down way too hard. From the hardware, to the OS, to the SDK, to the walled-garden store. There's just no room for innvoation, and where there is, there's no way to count on what little bit the manufacturer has provide will even exist next month. And keeping "old" devices around to contiue doing work the way you wanted is near impossible.

The real problem with "the death of the PC" is that Apple ruined their own promise of the iPad. It has turned into a great tool for graphic designers (Pencil, Affinity, Photoshop, etc) but merely okay bordering on useless for everything else.

Their sluggishness to bring a mouse, how long it took to get a file browser and support for USB storage, and especially for this forum, lack of support for programming apps. Play.js and Pythonista isn't good enough... it needs to be first class. You need to be able to make an iPad app on an iPad.

And with iOS13 it's even gotten worse: the extra judicious killing of background apps they've introduced means it's gotten a lot harder to multitask. Apps like Termius need to track your location in order to keep your SSH connection alive, which is ridiculous.

And the crippled browser doesn't seem to be getting better... I use AWS Cloud 9 IDE for almost all of my work. It's a browser-based IDE and should work on an iPad. But Safari won't let it. iOS12 and prior didn't have support for keyboard shortcuts the IDE needs, and iOS13's third party cookies policy won't allow it to work either.

If you're a graphic designer, the iPad is a dream come true. If you do anything else (especially coding), well... we haven't moved much beyond this article [1] from eight years ago.

[1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook...

Beyond that, as the article mentions the promise of the "post-PC era" is actually alive and well in the PC world. The iPad didn't learn from the PC market like it should have, so the PC market learned from the iPad instead. 2-in-1 devices are what the iPad should be by now, but isn't. And since it's being done by someone other than Apple, the user experience is secondary to checklists of features and bean-counting cost savings.

Apple ruined their own vision.

I'm not a typical customer, but I have purchased more PCs in the last decade than in all the decades prior. The cost/benefit of them is pretty hard to beat.

I've said this a couple times before, but my hope is that it's worth repeating here. For a device to eschew the PC it must support direct development.

Web development is great and remote compilation is straight magic; I'm not trying to minimize either. However, if I can't build software for my device on my device then I'll need a PC to supplement the device claiming to be the PC replacement.

To me a PC is an obvious choice - you can build your own based on your requirements and do it at a fraction of the cost of a laptop.

Having said that, my Linux Mint tower is now gathering dust as I had to make the switch to a Macbook due to the lack of decent design apps. The only reason I went with a laptop in this instance is due to the outrageous prices for Mac towers!

I still need my computer despite doing more of my computing on my phone and tablet. I do more consumption on the phone and tablet than on the computer. However, I have moved beyond consumption to more to“work” and productivity with the introduction of split screen and multitasking on the iPad. And I now do short travel trips without the computer.