Can Tablets Replace PCs in the Office?

It will be an uphill battle for tablets to replace PCs, and another technology may get there first. However, Apple thinks its new iPad Pro would make a great replacement for the 600 million or more ageing PCs out there. Wow a pretty ambitious target and one that it's unlikely to hit, especially when it comes to business PCs. 

Apple might think that its new iPad Pro is "the ultimate PC replacement" but it may find it hard to persuade PC users. There was a time when it genuinely looked as if tablets were going to replace PCs everywhere. They were sleeker, finer, and cheaper than PCs, which hadn't changed for years, typified by the beige box on your desk and that heavy slab of laptop in your bag. It looked as if the tablet would sweep all of this away and lead us all to an elegant, touchscreen utopia.

It took a while but the PC has fought back, and was surprisingly effective. As such, the challenge to the enterprise PC from tablets has now largely subsided. 

Largely the PC makers have done this by redesigning, absorbing and neutralizing what made tablets attractive in the first place. Detachable keyboards on hybrid PCs now mean that instead of choosing a tablet or a laptop, you can have both. So does that mean the PC will last forever, swallowing up every new form factor that comes along? What workers need are keyboard, a mouse and a fixed screen, and not so bothered about touch. So what does the next evolution of the desktop look like, if it's not a tablet? 

Perhaps the answer is already in your pocket. If you've got a new smartphone then its performance won't lag much behind the five year old PCs that Apple wants to replace. It's likely that in a few years a smartphone will pack enough processing power that it can do most of the work the average user will need to do, at least most of the time. Connecting one up to those extra bits of hardware workers like; the keyboard, mouse and big screen could be a really intriguing way of replacing the PC.

 

Microsoft's Continuum is one example of how this might start filtering through to the mainstream (other companies have talked about similar ideas) although it's early days. Of course data or processor intensive jobs will be done on more powerful devices as is always the case.

Certainly it will be a few years, another five perhaps (if at all) before such technology starts to take hold. But just because tablets haven't defeated the PC, that doesn't mean the PC will be around forever.