If you use the term “Post-PC Era”, I hate you.
So this term “Post-PC era” has been thrown around a lot recently and I don’t think it has any merit. It was something some blogger randomly pulled from the deep recesses of his Microsoft hating ass in a frantic moment to remain relevant in a world drowning in blogs and people who will write for free. The problem is, no one ever defined or described a PC era. If we want to do this arbitrarily, which most periodization is, we could say that it started with Windows, but that would be to impose our understanding of the PC onto an older generation of technology. To go ahead and shed some collective perspective on you, the wonderful readership, I share this. Now with this understanding of the PC, it doesn’t just fall to Mac OS versus IBM-compatible or even windows, unless you believe the Apple brand computer falls under the original sales price being too high to be useful for the individual for which I couldn’t really blame you. Either way, armed with this knowledge and understanding of this definition I seek to lay down a new periodization paradigm on you excellently intelligent folks. I want to promote the idea of the “Mobile-PC Era”.
If you actually read the definition in my link earlier you have a better understanding of my argument. A personal computer is just a device that is feasibly owned by the average consumer and does not require remote server support to operate. By this definition tablets, smartphones, laptops, and some wristwatches fall under the category of the PC. Now traditionally these devices, once only immobile desktop type products, began to be mobile in the age of laptops. As processor technology and solid state memory devices advanced we were suddenly able to take these products on the go with us everywhere. Does this sudden change in the geolocation of your Personal Computer or PC make this product suddenly fall outside the category of PC? I don’t think so. Apple computers are PCs too. No matter how much you argue, with nothing but marketing to back up said argument, you will still be wrong and your Apple computer will still be nothing more than an overpriced, underspec’d PC. Either way the only fundamental change that has occurred on the PC market has been miniturization and mobilization of the personal computer.
To this end, I endorse the term “Mobile-PC Era” despite what the uninformed blogosphere will have you believing. Buzz words get popular because of what they imply and not necessarily their inherent accuracy. So please, for my sake and the respect of your peers, the next time someone uses the term “Post-PC” punch them square in the throat so hard their grandchildren will struggle to breathe for the first few months of life, and use the time they are gasping desperately for air to explain to them exactly why they are a douche bag and are undeserving of the right to speak in public without proper nomenclature. This has been a public service announcement by Mobility Digest and Me on not being a complete idiot when talking in public about technology. Thank you for improving your intellect to acceptable standards and good day.
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Good stuff. Mobile-PC is a much more accurate term. I think the first to publicly champion the ridiculous “post-PC” term was Apple. Started at a time when they were dominating the mobile apace with the iPhone and had just introduced the iPad. Nevermind the fact the iPad is in fact a personal computer, just a gimped one that is a tradeoff for the mobility it brings.
Now Microsoft is certainly countering this post-PC misnomer with the hybrids emerging and the Surface devices.
Okay, but when you put a comma on the outside of the closing quotation mark, while I won’t necessarily hate you, I might be tempted to skip reading your article to snidely advise you that you always, always put commas and periods inside the closing quotation mark. Want to put something on the outside? Okay, you can use semicolons, colons, asterisks and dashes. Learn that now.
As for exclamation points and question mark quotation mark ordering, that requires some thought, but the rest is pretty cut and dry. No exceptions Matt.
Man, right in the title?
@Simmons – Thank you for your attempt at correcting what appears to be reckless punctuation at first, but may, upon further research just be due to having too many European professors in college where the rule is much more flexible based on usage.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/marks/quotation.htm
I see. That link attributes our adoption of this rule to technological limitations and our opting not to revert to what may have been the original way as a lack of impetus to do so, sort of like the double spacing you do after periods. So for consistency in doing things the way they’re supposed to be done now that we don’t have technological limitations, maybe phase out the double spacing?
Or punctuate like an American.