Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The market is saying the iPad is "post-pc" It is? How?
Do you not do all your coding, photo editing, FPS fragging, word processing, and spreadsheets on an iPad yet? Don't you have one sitting in your basement acting as a home media and web server? I'm not even going to get into how much more upgradable they are than PCs. How could you ever possibly need more than the few hundred megs of ram that an iPad has? Dell might as well announce liquidation right now. ($75 on crai…
The reality is that for most users (non-gamers) the power of computers long ago exceeded what they need. Does is really matter if a computer is 3X or 10X faster than you need?
This is a classic market transition where once performance hits some level, other product attributes become important to consumers because they no longer see any material benefit from marginal performance increases.
If you're mostly using your computer to check email and facebook, you don't need a quad core.
(This applies to even fairly tech-heavy folks - I used to replace my desktop like clockwork every two years for almost 15 years, but I'm typing on this on a 4+-year-old MacBook black that's still plenty fast for coding, image processing and web browsing. I expect I'll use it at least another year and I only paid $1500 for it to start with. I'll prob replace it with a 13" MacBook Air, which won't be much of a performance bump - it will be a form factor bump.)
I remember the days when it was all about having the 386/33 or whatever the latest top-of-the-line Mhz was. Now I doubt if you asked most folks, they could even tell you how fast the processor is in their system. It just doesn't matter much any more, same as only car folks really care what BHP their engine delivers these days.