Welcome to the Beginning of the End of the PC Era
Harry McCracken, 06/09/11
Tech pundits have a bizarre habit of declaring products dead long before they're actually goners. (Here, for instance, is an article that says that Facebook is toast — from 2008.) Me, I do my darndest to avoid the temptation to play premature coroner. I will say this, though: If the PC does end up mortally wounded someday, we may look back at early June of 2011 as the moment when its death warrant was signed.
In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective operating systems. Their plans differ in fundamental respects, but both companies are looking past the PC era we've lived in for the past three decades. They're building software for an age in which people do their computing and communicating on all kinds of gadgets — ones which are simpler, more portable, and more Internet-centric than PCs as we've known them for all these years. (Read a wish list of what consumers want in Windows 8.)
First, the Microsoft news. At the Wall Street Journal's D9 conference in Rancho Palo Verdes, California last week, Windows honcho Steven Sinofsky presided over the first public demo of Windows 7's successor, which for now is going under the sensible code name of "Windows 8." (Microsoft posted a similar preview as an online video.)
The demo really showed only one aspect of Windows 8, but it was a lulu. Windows is getting its most dramatic makeover since at least Windows 95, with an all-new interface that looks a lot like Windows Phone 7 rather than anything that currently runs on a desktop PC or laptop. It's clever, colorful, and designed to be navigated with fingers rather than a keyboard and mouse, showing plenty of iPhone/iPad influence without being a mere knockoff.
The old-school Windows interface isn't gone; existing software will still run. But Microsoft is prepping for a transition similar to the migration from DOS to Windows that happened a couple of decades ago. It may take a while to complete, but it's underway.
Coming to any definitive conclusions about Windows 8 based on last week's demos would be like reviewing a movie based on one of those teaser trailers that comes out a year and a half before the film does. (Microsoft isn't saying when the software will ship, but mid-to-late 2012 is a good bet.) The sneak peek was enough to leave me asking lots of questions, though:
Will Windows 8's dual interface feel like the best of both worlds rather than a disjointed mess? Making it make sense will be a massive challenge. (I'm keeping an open mind until I get some hands-on time.)
What sort of computers will run it best? I suspect that Microsoft has iPad-style tablets and all-in-one PCs akin to HP's TouchSmarts in mind. But Windows 8 will also need to run well on hundreds of millions of garden-variety computers. (Watch TIME's video of Windows 7 phone tips and tricks.)
How will software evolve to reflect the new interface? Popular apps such as e-mail and spreadsheets will need more than a minor rethinking to go touch-only. And without a critical mass of software tailored to take advantage of Windows 8's new features, there will be no reason to make the upgrade.
Windows users are such a conservative bunch that ten-year-old Windows XP remains the world's favorite operating system — will they be willing to take a giant step into the post-PC age? We'll see!
The fact that Microsoft didn't share any details on these and other major issues doesn't mean that it doesn't have coherent answers. It might just be waiting to spill the beans until September, when it will release more information about Windows 8 — and probably release a preview version — at a developer conference called "Build."
As for Apple, Steve Jobs and friends spent a couple of densely-packed hours last Monday morning at its WWDC conference in San Francisco walking through the next versions of OS X (the operating system used by Macs) and iOS (the one that powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad), as well as a new Internet service called iCloud. Scarcity of information wasn't a problem: If anything, the company unloaded so much new stuff that figuring it all out is going to take a while. (OS X 10.7 Lion is scheduled to arrive in July; iOS 5 and most of iCloud are due "this fall.")
The part of the Appleverse that's changing the least is the one most directly comparable to Windows: OS X. The WWDC preview it got was mostly a recap of an event Apple held last October, and focused on tweaks that make the operating system feel a bit more like its glamorous young cousin, iOS, without scrapping the existing interface. (Apple says it has no plans to make touch-screen Macs.) Lion will make better use of Apple's oversized touchpads, letting you supplement keyboard input with gestures to perform tasks such as bopping between programs. It will get "Launchpad," an optional home for your apps that mimics the iPhone and iPad home screens. And the Mac App Store that opened for business in January will be built right into the operating system.
Lion mostly looks like an appealing traditional software upgrade, not a departure — and a deal at just $29 for a copy that can be installed on all the Macs associated with one Apple ID. For the first time, Apple is distributing an OS X upgrade as a download through its Mac App Store; no DVD will be required (or even available).
iOS, on the other hand, is going to change in ways that may shift the tectonic plates of the computing world at least a teensy bit. For one thing, it's gaining autonomy. For the first time, you'll be able to use an iPhone or iPad without ever connecting it to a Mac or Windows PC with an archaic old USB cable — or, for that matter, owning a Mac or Windows PC at all. It's also getting a bunch of meaty new features, such as a revised notification system, a more desktop-like Safari browser, and the ability to search the contents of all your e-mail.
Just as Microsoft probably won't use the term "post-PC" when describing Windows 8, Apple isn't going to describe iOS 5 as a PC operating system. In a real sense, however, that's what it's trying to be: a software platform so comprehensive and self-contained that it won't have to play second fiddle to anything else. Nobody reading this article is going to scrap his or her PC for an iPad-style tablet in the short-term future, but the day is going to arrive when that won't be a wacky notion — and this upgrade will help Apple get there.
And then there's iCloud. I said earlier that it's an Internet service, but that's oversimplifying matters. It's really a suite of services for storing and shuttling information of all sorts between iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, Macs, and/or Windows PCs, including e-mail, calendars, contacts, documents, presentations, photos, music you bought from Apple, music you acquired elsewhere, apps, and more. It'll replace the company's MobileMe service and act rather like an Internet-based version of iTunes. It's all very, very ambitious. Much of iCloud will be free, but you'll pay for some options, such as more than 5GB of cloud-based storage space — and, of course, for music and movies, paid apps, and other content.
iCloud has the potential to evolve into a replacement for one of the PC's defining components: a local hard disk with vast amounts of data stored on it. I suspect Apple is already looking forward to the day when it can eliminate hard disks across the Mac line, much as the original iMac did away with the floppy drive back in the late 1990s.
But even if you're not the type to bristle at the notion of depositing massive amounts of your data on Apple servers in North Carolina, you may be cautious about assuming that an offering with so many moving parts will, in Steve Jobs' oft-repeated words, "just work." Jobs admitted as much at WWDC when he brought up the less ambitious, occasionally erratic MobileMe and didn't deny its shortcomings. The only way to render a meaningful verdict on iCloud is to wait until it's available, use it, and see if it does, indeed, just work.
Microsoft's Windows 8 news — so far — is about one overwhelming change: the new interface. Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud are about a jillion small ones that aren't a huge whoop on an individual basis. Most of them feel familiar, in fact: They already exist in third-party iOS apps or on competing platforms such as Android. Apple's core competency isn't doing unprecedented things; it's doing existing things better than other companies, doing them itself on its own terms, and stitching them together as seamlessly as possible. With its new software and services, it aims to do more of that seamless stitching than ever before.
Did I mention that Apple and Google aren't the only tech behemoths trying to figure out what comes after traditional PCs? Google is also in the game with upcoming "Chromebooks" based on its Chrome OS. They're basically minimalist laptops that run only a Web browser — and they provide a third distinct vision of the post-PC device.
Even with all this change in the air, preparing a eulogy for traditional PCs is silly: It's going to be many, many years before the last one gets powered down for the final time. But while technologies rarely die, they frequently shuffle off into semi-retirement to make way for new ways of doing things. We already knew that Apple and Google were eager to see classic PCs start to make way for upstart devices; now it's clear that Microsoft is also preparing itself for that eventuality. It's going to be fascinating to watch them duke it out — and to see how consumers, who ultimately call the shots, respond to all this.
McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he's @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every Thursday onTIME.com.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2076571,00.html
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