Bevil Wood­ing

Just when it seemed like the em­bat­tled Per­son­al Com­put­er was en­joy­ing a re­prieve from it dra­mat­ic de­cline to near ir­rel­e­vance, world­wide PC ship­ments saw their biggest drop in near­ly two years, ac­cord­ing mar­ket re­ports re­leased this month.

The same re­ports reaf­firm the as­cen­dan­cy of small­er, more con­ve­nient com­put­ing de­vices, such as smart­phones, tablets and wear­ables. Com­put­ing is fast be­com­ing more mo­bile and more per­son­al.

Falling PC Sales

Re­search out­fit Gart­ner re­port­ed that 68.4 mil­lion units shipped in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2015, a 9.5 per­cent de­cline com­pared to the same pe­ri­od a year ago. Mean­while, re­searchers at IDC, which doesn't count tablets in its re­port, cal­cu­lat­ed an 11.8 per­cent drop year-over-year to 66.1 mil­lion PCs shipped.

To put that num­ber in­to con­text, Ap­ple said in its most re­cent earn­ings re­port that it had sold 61 mil­lion iPhones dur­ing the same quar­ter. That's just one smart­phone from one (al­beit very spe­cial) com­pa­ny.

PC man­u­fac­tur­ers ex­pe­ri­enced de­clines across the board, glob­al­ly, with one no­table ex­cep­tion. Ap­ple saw year-over-year growth of 16.1 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to. Ap­ple's growth was like­ly helped by the re­lease of the new Mac­Book Air and the Mac­Book Pro in March. But Ap­ple's fig­ures have to be put in­to a larg­er con­text. Macs over­all ac­count­ed for less than 10 per­cent of Ap­ple's rev­enue for that quar­ter, while the iPhone ac­count­ed for al­most 70 per­cent.

This lat­est new of de­cline in the once dom­i­nant glob­al PC mar­ket is re­al­ly no sur­prise. Tech­nol­o­gy head­lines have been filled with pro­nounce­ments of the death of the PC for some time now. The irony is that the de­cline of the Per­son­al Com­put­er comes as we en­ter what can be con­sid­ered a re­nais­sance of per­son­al com­put­ing.

Mo­bile In­creas­ing­ly Pop­u­lar

To­day's smart­phones, tablets and ph­ablets al­low users can car­ry out many of the tasks that were once the ex­clu­sive pre­serve of desk­top or lap­top PCs. Run­ning busi­ness apps, check­ing email, man­ag­ing mul­ti­me­dia such as pho­tos and mu­sic, once re­quired users to be bound to desks or lap­tops. Now the com­bi­na­tion of mo­bile de­vices, broad­band in­ter­net ac­cess and cloud com­put­ing has rad­i­cal­ly and per­ma­nent­ly re­de­fined how we use com­put­ing de­vices.

With mo­bile de­vices tra­di­tion­al com­put­ing tasks can be more con­ve­nient­ly per­formed on the go. Mo­bile al­so bet­ter sup­ports new, more per­son­al ac­tiv­i­ties. To­day's mo­bile de­vices al­low us to man­age our so­cial me­dia pro­file on sites like Face­book and Twit­ter; search and surf the web; is­sue voice com­mands for tasks that can range from play­ing mu­sic to find­ing di­rec­tions. Us­ing our mo­bile de­vices, we can now watch videos, play games, send email and more; any­where, any­time. Com­put­ing has nev­er been as mo­bile, or as per­son­al.

Google's re­cent reengi­neer­ing of its search en­gine to pri­or­i­tize mo­bile-friend­ly sites is con­fir­ma­tion of this. The search-gi­ant its con­tin­ued rel­e­vance and prof­itabil­i­ty de­pends on how well it con­tin­ues to per­form on the de­vices peo­ple are ac­tu­al­ly us­ing for search­es. Oth­er ma­jor tech­nol­o­gy play­ers such as Mi­crosoft, Ap­ple, Ama­zon and Face­book–are al­so putting sig­nif­i­cant re­sources to­ward op­ti­miz­ing their busi­ness­es for mo­bile. No one has got­ten it com­plete­ly per­fect as yet, but it is clear that they all see mo­bile as the fu­ture of com­put­ing.

Still, sev­er­al ex­pla­na­tions have been posit­ed for the PCs re­cent sharp de­cline. Gart­ner not­ed that be­cause Mi­crosoft's Win­dows 10 launch isim­mi­nent, busi­ness­es may have opt­ed to wait to up­grade their PCs. IDC al­so point­ed out the de­cline might look es­pe­cial­ly bad this time around be­cause busi­ness­es on­ly re­cent­ly com­plet­ed ma­jor PC up­grades fol­low­ing Mi­crosoft pulling of the plug on Win­dows XP last year.

With­er Goeth The PC?

So where does this all leave the ven­er­a­ble PC? The role of the PC may be ir­re­versibly di­min­ish­ing in to­day com­put­ing hi­er­ar­chy, how­ev­er, PCs will be with us for some time to come.

Some tasks such as de­sign, an­i­ma­tion, soft­ware de­vel­op­ment and ac­count­ing are still bet­ter per­formed by PCs. The PC's larg­er screens and more pow­er­ful processers than would be prac­ti­cal for a mo­bile de­vice still make them the go-to de­vice choice for cor­po­rate en­vi­ron­ments. Fur­ther­more, on­go­ing in­no­va­tions in mi­cro­proces­sors, hard­ware de­sign, op­er­at­ing sys­tem func­tion­al­i­ty as well as falling prices will al­so help se­cure a niche for the PCs in homes, of­fices and schools around the world.

Even so, the tra­jec­to­ry is still clear and un­con­testable: PC sales are go­ing down. Even if, as some an­a­lysts be­lieve, the sharp dip ex­pe­ri­enced last quar­ter is tem­po­rary, the gen­er­al down­ward trend of PC sales is per­ma­nent.

The PCs de­cline is as clear as the as­cen­den­cy of mo­bile. Mo­bile de­vices will dom­i­nate both the busi­ness and per­son­al com­put­ing land­scape of the fu­ture. In the process mo­bile de­vices will con­tin­ue to make com­put­ing more ubiq­ui­tous and more per­son­al than ever be­fore.

Bevil Wood­ing is the Chief Knowl­edge Of­fi­cer at Con­gress WBN (C-WBN) a val­ues-based in­ter­na­tion­al non-prof­it or­ga­ni­za­tion and Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor at Bright­Path Foun­da­tion, re­spon­si­ble for C-WBN's tech­nol­o­gy ed­u­ca­tion and out­reach ini­tia­tives. Fol­low on Twit­ter: @bevil­wood­ing and In­sta­gram: abright­path