This whole "post-PC" era is a market gymmic which Apple did not create, but used it to its benefit. It's purely Apple's sales pitch, because the Mac was never as popular as the PC and Apple tries hard to push to devices where it has leverage. It's marketing.
"Post-PC" is not so much a gimmick, but far more so appealing to notion that most folks don't separate form factors from actual function very well. "Post PC" is far more the notion are going past the notion that a "PC" looks like the classic IBM "box with slots" from the 80's form factor or even the clamshell laptop of the 90's. That it runs DOS/Windows like apps. The personal computer market is going past being stuck with just those two primary form factors and being benchmarked solely on the OS side against Windows. The notion of a personal computer never was suppose to be stuck to a small subset of form factors.
What the term had grown to mean was a x86+Windows+ classic form factor machine.
Should I consider myself tethered to an anachronistic method of working just I use a PC/Mac and prefer it over an iPad or any other of these so-called post-PC devices?
That isn't what the notion is about. The origins of the notion of Macintosh was as an appliance more so than a malleable box with slots. Has little to nothing to do with anachronism and more so to do with calcification of terminology.
I do have an iPad and I hardly use it because I think it doesn't do what I need. Yes, there are versions of Office and iWork for iPad. But these office suites lack the power features found in the office suites available for Windows and Mac.
Those limitation of feature length are far more artifacts of the those specific programs rather than the form factor and/or iOS.
There is Microsoft Office for Windows RT, but it won't support add-ons.
Again not particularly an issue of the new form factors and/or platforms that are new.
If Apple changes the processor to an ARM-based processor, the Mac will still be a PC, and not a post-PC device, just with a different processor. This is bad because it will break compatibility with every program written for Mac.
Not necessarily. Mac OS made two previous transitions and apps worked.
That is more so a question of whether Apple building a scaffolding emulator or not. Personally I don't think they want to put effort into that (they didn't on the last transition.... they bought access to a solution).
If Apple changes the processor to an ARM-based processor and make it a post-PC device such as the iPad, then it's even worse because the Mac will lose its power features.
Let me give you an example of what a post-PC device cannot do. A real-life example.
Last year, I finished my PhD thesis. It was a 250-page piece with over 1,000 footnotes and countless references.
It is impossible to write a 250 page document on an iPad plus keyboard?
Footnotes and references are just a matter of software and ease of entry.
To do this, I used Microsoft Word and Endnote. Both are available for Windows and Mac. The Endnote add-on was very useful, as I could manage my references easily and include citations in the Word file. Word was also very handy because I made use of features such as cross-references. I could have used different software, though.
This is kind of a chuckle since when Word first came out folks would same similar things of using Word versus the far more capable (especially for dissertations) TeX system (and other word processing programs they might be familiar with. e.g., Wangs text editor etc. ) [ Even early 90's Framemaker versus the then versions of Word would get very similar issues of cross link, indexing, citiations , etc support where Word "couldn't cut the mustard anywhere near as well". ]
Word has about what around 30 years of development time behind it on the Mac and Word for iPad came out with less than one year ago. Yeah sure they are going to be feature equal because the man years allocated to both is about the same. .... Errrrr
not.
One of the primary reasons iOS apps with the same name has less features is because they are younger than their siblings. It isn't an issue of cannot/impossible and far more so of not implemented. "I am not able to do this with this specific version" is dramatically different from cannot be done.
If actually trying to doom or implode Word for iPad one highly successful tactic would be to declare not to ship Word until it was 100% completely feature equal to Window for Windows. Saddle the project with unnecessary complexity and watch it implode under the issues that arise with the finite resources available.
"But Word for iPad can't do it right now"..... Guess what? These ARM based laptops and desktops aren't shipping right now either. Software that hasn't shipped yet really isn't a huge issue for hardware that hasn't shipped yet either. When the first iPad shipped some folks commented about how couldn't do Photoshop and Lightroom on them. Several years later that is not entirely true. It isn't about "cannot" (not capable).
Even if they did, what about integration with a reference manager? iOS doesn't support add-ons. I could not insert citations.
Two programs can't possibly work together on iOS. Not really.
The relatively (to modern CPUs/GPUs) computational requirements of generating a 250 page document with references is one of the primary what the classic PC market is stagnating. An A7 (or future A8) SoC has all the horsepower need to accomplish the task. Can trot out some exhaustive software feature set laundry list and start quibbling over some relatively small subset that is missing but "not capable of " is laughably unmotivated.
The problem the industry is trying to get to grips of is that hardware is far more capable than these limited mainstream workloads.
Can't do localize real time text to speech or some high computational horsepower app perhaps. However, do what software was doing in the early 90's? That is just an implementation priority issue not a capability issue.
