The PC: Suddenly, Surprisingly Alive

What you're looking at in the picture above is the $149 Intel Compute Stick. It's plugged into the HDMI port on the back of an HDTV. It comes loaded with Windows 10, an Atom processor, 2 gigabytes of memory, and 32 GB of storage with a Micro SD slot for expansion. It's a little bigger than a pack of gum.

This, my friends, is Exhibit A in this year's edition of "Why the PC isn't dead."

Much like the nine-lived cat and '60s TV Batman, the PC should be dead. The tablet was supposed to have killed it years ago. In 2010, after the launch of the iPad, Steve Jobs said that in the computing world of the future, PCs would be like trucks. They'd still be around, but few people would own them. The implication: tablets like the iPad might be the cars of the new computing world.

Jobs was right, but not in the way most people thought. PCs are trucks, like, SUVs. Smartphones are the cars. Tablets, however, are bicycles: Most people buy one and use it for fun, but not for taking the kids to school, commuting to work, or helping a friend move. Unless you're a computing hipster, tablets aren't for the heavy lifting of productivity. 

PCs are trucks, like, SUVs. Smartphones are the cars. Tablets, however, are bicycles ....

Case in point, look at some shipment numbers for the summer. Worldwide PC shipments were down 11% according to IDC, the market data firm. Not pretty, right? Well, look over at Apple, the world's biggest tablet maker. Over the summer, iPad shipments were down a whopping 20%. That's not new, either. As you can see in the chart below, iPad sales have been shrinking since the spring of 2014.

Which brings us back to the personal computer. Apple CEO Tim Cook was quoted this week, ahead of the launch of the iPad Pro, dissing the PC:

"I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?" he said to The Telegraph. "Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones."

Not often that I say this, but: Wrong, Tim. I've been using an iPad as a primary computing device for the past two years. I started out doing it because I hoped it would work. The iPad is lighter, thinner, and simpler than a laptop. My wife started using one similarly. We both have bluetooth keyboards that we keep with the iPads at all times. For a lot of basic things, they work. More and more, though, they fail.

They fail at anything beyond the most lightweight productivity tasks. For example, the version of the Safari browser in the iPad doesn't work with the web-based system my employer uses to show me my pay statement and access tax-related documents. It fails at handling LinkedIn's system for posting pieces like this one, especially when it comes to cropping and placing photos, and hitting the "publish" button. The iPad fails at ingesting and managing anything but the most basic photos and video from a GoPro camera. Spreadsheets are a better experience since Microsoft brought full Office to iOS, but they're still not as good as they are on a PC.

And then there's the schoolwork. I have a second-grader who needs to access web-based services like XtraMath and Storia at home. They don't work correctly in the iPad's browser.

For all these reasons, I'd been thinking about getting a computer later this year. That's when I found out about the latest Intel Compute Stick with Windows 10. For $150, plus $20 for a wireless USB mouse and keyboard, it succeeds at every task listed above where the iPad fails. And it does it with a lot less computing power under the hood. (It's not powerful enough to do serious photo editing or gaming, but it illuminates the potential of a sub-$500 PC.)

So, a funny thing happened on the way to the morgue. Far from dead, the PC is evolving. A slew of touch-based devices out from Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, Microsoft, Intel and others are becoming like tablets a lot more quickly than iPads are becoming like PCs. And they're sometimes doing it at a fraction of the price.