Thinking back to my teen, and even early adult years, very few people had a PC (defined on this site as a traditional desktop or laptop computer, be it a Windows PC or a Mac) in their homes. Over the years this has changed of course, and it’s hard to imagine any home on any given street here in the western world without at least one PC sitting on a desk somewhere, with many households having at least one PC per person living there.
The interesting thing is, I can see us returning to the old ways of most homes having no PCs at all, and I can see this happening in the very near future. This is because, simply put, most people just don’t need a PC at home.
The PC was, and still is, a wonderful tool for many people, and until recently a completely necessary tool, considering it was the only one available for our computing needs. If you wanted to quickly type a letter or look up a fact or find a location, the all-in-one, Internet-connected PC was generally the best tool for the job.
The truth is, however, that most people just don’t need all the horsepower and abilities of a traditional computer at home anymore. Really, most of us will never write a computer program, design a new device in AutoCAD, alter images in Photoshop, or create a complicated spreadsheet in Excel, at least not while we’re at home (and, honestly, probably not even at work as far as the majority of people go).
That said, most of us still want to be able to read and write emails, chat with our friends online, update our resumes, watch videos, quickly look things up, and just surf the web in general while at home. Up until a few years ago, the traditional PC was the only way to do all of these things, which is why we all have at least one laptop or desktop somewhere in our homes. Today, however, an expensive PC is no longer necessary to accomplish any of the simple digital tasks that most of us want or need to do. A $349 iPad is all you need in order to do any of these things, and some people don’t even need a tablet computer to live a perfectly satisfactory digital lifestyle outside of the office if they have a decent smartphone.
For the vast majority of people, today’s Post-PC technology really is more than enough to do everything they want or need to do online, and the few times they might really need a PC outside of work, there’s generally a local library or other location they can pop into for a few minutes of desktop computer time. But even that will become less necessary as time goes on, as there’s almost always “an app for that” these days.
If you think this sounds unrealistic, consider the fact that I’ve built multiple websites using only my iPad and iPhone over the last decade or so, which means a traditional computer often just isn’t needed, even for some of the seemingly more complicated computing you might want to do from home. Not only that, I’ve been basically 100% iPad-only since 2017, both at home and at work (100% at home since then, and the last time I needed a PC at work was probably around 2020).
Of course I fully realize that many of the people who would read an article like this are probably the sorts of people who do require more powerful computers for their jobs than an iPad, and might even need that computing power at home more often than not (especially gamers, which I am admittedly not much of one). Still, even among those of us who are power users when it comes to technology, many of us are finding that we’d prefer a better adjusted work-life balance than what we’ve become accustomed to, and not having a PC at home to tempt us to do “just a little more work before bed” might be a good thing for some of us.
As for the rest of society, more and more people are already realizing that they don’t need to spend their money on a traditional computer, after discovering that the computer in their pocket (the one that also makes phone calls) is more than enough for what they need to do on a day to day basis. And many of the people who might want a bigger screen than a smartphone has will likely go for a tablet computer rather than a more bulky PC they just don’t need anymore, which is what this website is all about.