The Misconception That the PC Is Dead Is Harming Children

Let's start with a dare: Give up your computer for a month. Or, if you have 12- to 18-year-old kids, turn their computers off for the year and see how they do in school.?

The computer is still the primary device for work and study. Those of us who are lucky enough to have a PC sit down in homes and schools and offices every day to do our work. Not everyone has that privilege.?

We are working to solve that gap. But first, I want to convince you that it needs to be solved.

What Is An “Adequate Distance Learning Device?”

I often hear people in the privileged corners of the world say that smartphones are enough.?

It was only during COVID that it became clear how untrue that was. When COVID hit, a seminal BCG and Common Sense Media report found that 15 million American kids didn’t have access to a computer and/or internet. That included one in three kids of color and 40% of rural kids. When I spoke with teachers, asking them about their greatest challenge teaching during the pandemic, they said, unquestionably, digital access (i.e. PC and internet access). Their students were simply unable to learn without an internet-connected computer.?

COVID made it clear that there won’t be any equitable education in this world until there is equitable access to computers. As the BCG report put it, “while it is possible to engage in distance learning via a mobile device, there are several notable challenges, including: (1) incompatibility with existing homework and learning applications with mobile operating systems, (2) difficulty in using small screens to read and digest information, as well as typing and producing assignments, and (3) higher likelihood of distraction on a mobile versus other device. Given these challenges, students with only a cellular device (mobile phone) are not considered to have an adequate distance learning device.”?

So yes, a smartphone is insufficient. Why is that? Let’s go deeper into it.

Screen, Keyboard and Mouse

The size of a screen, the speed of typing on a keyboard and the precision control of a mouse all matter. The efficiency of those tools makes a meaningful difference in what we can do on our devices.

Screen: There’s a reason that the most popular laptop size is 15 inches. There’s no question that a bigger screen offers more capabilities than a 4 inch screen: you can navigate between multiple browser tabs, compare windows side-by-side, drag content where you want it. More space allows for bigger toolbars with more buttons, which unlocks more features in PC software. Have you ever tried to run a financial model or build a powerpoint on a smartphone??

Keyboard: On average, users type 25% slower with two thumbs on a smartphone than on a physical keyboard. In our own research, we found that users tire more quickly with touch typing. Physical keyboards bring endless shortcuts for advanced productivity software.?

Mouse: As one designer put it, “the biggest weakness of your fingers is that they’re too fat... Apple recommends a minimum button size of 44px x 44px. A mouse cursor could dance around in that space, but your finger will take it all.” That precision matters, especially for creating stuff. It also matters when selecting text and clicking between letters. Mouse hover states and right clicks are also an important design paradigms for many applications. And on a large screen, using a trackpad or mouse is far easier than moving your arm for hours on end.?

These three input/output form factors of a PC unlock entirely different classes of software suites, including full-featured office suites, design suites like Photoshop, game engines, 3D modeling editors, photo/video editors, spreadsheets, and project management software. The workflow of the student and office worker is a tour through this sort of software. We build presentations and spreadsheets and reports on our computers. We code on our computers, build and play games on them. We do deep dive research on our computers. The computer is our powerhouse.

As a final point on this, when our games team at Endless Studios designs our game editor , we try to make everything run on mobile. Despite trying, there is so much that still needs a full PC. If you want the full experience of learning how to code, building full games and making money in Endless Studios, we can only deliver all of that on a PC. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.?

What does the data show?

The PC is far from dead. In fact, PC usage has increased since the launch of the smartphone. There are two ways of measuring PC usage. One is how much people use their PC. The second is how many people use it. Let’s look at both of these stats in detail:

Hours Per Day: When people claim that the PC is dead, they cite statistics like the fact that the percentage of time people use smartphones to access digital media has gone from 0% to 59% ! But people are still using a PC the other nearly half of the time. If PC usager were dead, that number would have gone down to zero. But it basically hasn’t changed since the smartphone launched.

What about people in emerging markets? It turns out that many emerging market users spend more time on their computers than Americans. Look at how light America is compared to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and Thailand. “The biggest desktop screen time consumers are South Africans who average 5 hours and 37 minutes of screen time on their computers each day. This is over half an hour longer than the second-biggest computer screen time consumers in Brazil and Colombia.” Source

Number of PC Users: There were over one billion PCs in use worldwide by the end of 2008, the year after the iPhone launched. Within 7 years, that doubled to 2 billion , as users in emerging markets bought their first computers. There are more PC users now than ever in history.?

The real tragedy is that more people across the globe can’t have computers. There are 6.6 billion smartphones in the world. There are a third as many PCs. That is an injustice.

But PC Sales Are Declining!

PC sales had been in decline prior to the pandemic, but does this mean that the PC is dead? Car sales are down. Are cars dying, too? Of course not. When housing declines, does that mean people don’t need houses? No. Sales decline in mature industries.?

On average, a quarter billion PCs are sold every year. In 2021, 340 million computers were sold. That doesn’t feel like a dying product to me. So why did PC sales decline for a few years? Because better tech means we don’t have to replace computers as often. People used to replace their PCs every 3 years. Now it’s every 6 years . Doubling the average replacement cycles should cut sales in half. So, why haven’t PC sales been slashed in half? Because more people are buying their first PC. The number of users is growing.

Oh, and by the way, smartphone sales are down. Why? Because it’s now a mature industry.

What About Tablets?!

I’m often asked about the semantics of whether a tablet with a keyboard and mouse is a PC. I'm not here to debate what a PC is. I'm here to say that if one child has a device with a keyboard, a mouse, a full screen and a full suite of PC applications, that child will be afforded advantages that a kid who is forever editing school reports on a tiny touch screen will never have.

Nonetheless, in the early years of the tablet, people projected that sales would increase to half a billion tablets per year. Actual sales peaked at half that. Today they have declined to a third. There were twice as many PCs as tablets sold last year. If you care about usage numbers, tablets accounted for about 2.3% of web traffic last year. By both yardsticks, the answer is clear.?

The PC Industry Is Dead!

The PC industry is actually a great industry to be in, for a few players! Apple sells 20 million PCs a year , generating $250 billion in PC sales. Microsoft makes more than $57 billion a year with Windows and Office. Intel had its best year ever , making $75 billion. Two companies, Microsoft and Intel, make about 85% of the profit in the industry. Apple takes another big chunk. Everyone else shares the rest. Computer manufacturers make low single digit margins fighting for scraps. They often only make a few dollars on a PC sale. The industry is commoditized. So yes, if you make a few dollars per device and your sales decline, it’s a starving industry. Unfortunately, a starving industry doesn’t have any room for innovation.?

The big companies themselves seem to believe that the PC has died. Windows did a reorg to focus on cloud and mobile. In a Stratechery post called The End of Windows , Ben Thompson writes “last week’s reorganization…left the company without a division devoted to personal computer operating systems …” That is stunning! They ship 321 million Windows devices a year and generate $22 billion from its sales and still demoted its oversight!

Apple doesn't care about computers much anymore either. Their computer sales accounted for only 7% of revenue, dwarfed by the $191.9 billion that they made selling 242 million iPhones. Apple even ran an ad asking, “What’s a computer?” implying that the PC is dead. I'm not surprised that MacOS hasn't seen any real product innovation since its sequence of wildly innovative iPhone launches. The computer isn't dead; innovation on the computer is dead.?

There is a second, deeper tragedy: half the planet doesn’t have a computer. People in emerging markets, the people who live beyond the reach of quality education and jobs, who arguably need it most, are unable to have a PC. Do you think they don’t want their kids to access the devices that we send our kids to school with? The data shows that they do.

Saying the computer is dead directly impacts those kids. Their future rests in the opportunity that a PC can give them. This misconception is preventing people at places like Microsoft from solving the challenges that prevent billions of people from accessing these tools. Microsoft focuses on the wealthy, on high-margin growth businesses. Meanwhile, billions of people are left behind. Emerging market PC sales have been demoted to a third-tier priority. But the stakes are so high. Every child that gets a computer is a future adult who can participate in the knowledge economy. Somebody needs to solve this. If not Microsoft, if not Apple, then who?

What if we could make the most potent educational device in history available to every child??

The Beautiful Potential

Might it be possible that the developed world is misunderstanding why people in emerging markets haven’t bought computers? What if people here realized that people there want them? What if that meant that the PC industry started solving the barriers to widespread adoption??

We have spent years connecting with people in these communities on virtually every continent and we have heard their voices loud and clear. They want them. They will pay for them. When we present an Endless computer with financing to people in emerging markets, we often have half of people purchase it. It happened again last week. When half of people are willing to spend a month’s worth of income for something, it says something about how important it is to them.

So, if four billion more people want a PC, just like you and me, why haven’t they bought them? There are two main reasons. First, the cost of a computer is too high. The second is that a computer needs broadband, and billions of people can’t get broadband. Connecting billions of rural homes with fiber costs too much. But, with a little innovation, these two problems can be solved. We’ll talk more about how to solve them in other posts.?

I have a controversial claim: the PC industry could be one of the biggest tech growth industries. Bill Gates succeeded in getting a computer on every desk and in every home of the wealthy. What if that were true globally? There are 4 - 5 billion people who would buy. That is almost 20 times the annual PC market. The company that cracks the barriers to selling to this market will have a good business. If that company can increase PC penetration by 3%, to 50%, they will sell 240 million devices. And we believe that this is possible.

I would guess that you won’t take me up on my dare to take away your or your child’s computer. Why? If those same reasons apply to the parents of children around the world, we have one of the world’s greatest solvable tragedies—and one of the greatest opportunities of our time.