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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Tech Deck

The PC is dead. Er, actually…

ZOMG! The PC is dead! The PC is dead!

That's the battle cry of the masses of people sporting their smart phones, giant smart phones, ginormous smart phones, mini tablets, mid-sized tablets, big tablets and humongous tablets. (I am waiting for the moment when the biggest smart phone gets larger than the smallest tablet and... It would be bad… Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.)

Except for one thing: PCs aren't dead. They're still living. That's the problem.

The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones:

The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.

I noticed this personally with my 2005 Apple PowerBook (the final PowerPC computer that Apple ever made). When I purchased it, I bought the Adobe Creative Suite 4 and loaded up on all the goodies. I laughed and cried, went through college and entered life as a professional with that thing and it lasted until it was stolen sometime in 2010/2011. Even at the end, it's not like it didn't run Photoshop any slower than the day I bought it.

I've never been one to get all excited about computer or gadget specs (likely a result of my Apple fanboism), preferring instead to focus on what matters: 1) Does this thing work and 2) does this thing work when I turn it off and on when it stops working.

My last PC was good enough for what I needed, which is pretty much the same for every PC made since then. My current MacBook Air with bla bla bla specs is awesome, and I'll probably keep it forever because it will probably last forever.

The PC didn't die. It lived.



Daniel Gayle
Dan Gayle joined The Spokesman-Review in 2013. He is currently a Python/Django developer in the newsroom, primarily responsible for front end development and design of spokesman.com.

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