Post-PC era

The Post-PC era is a market trend observed during the late 2000s and early 2010s involving a decline in the sales of personal computers in favor of post-PC devices; which include mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers as well as other mobile computers such as wearable and ubiquitous ones. These devices emphasize portability and connectivity, including the use of cloud-based services, more focused "apps" to perform tasks, and the ability to synchronize information between multiple devices seamlessly.

The term was first coined by MIT scientist David D. Clark. While both Microsoft's and Apple's former CEOs' Bill Gates and Steve Jobs also predicted a shift towards mobile devices as the primary method of computing, as a complement to the PC, Jobs popularized the term "post-PC" in 2007 (the launch of the first iPhone), and in 2011 launched iCloud, a service enabling Apple's product line to synchronize data with PCs through cloud services, freeing their iOS devices from dependency on a PC.

Towards the middle of the 2010s, media sources began to question the existence of the post-PC era, at least as conventionally defined.

The term "post PC" was first used by David D. Clark in 1999; considering the future of computing to be "inevitably heterogeneous" and a "network full of services". Clark described a world where "everything" would be able to connect to the internet (including watches and toasters), computing would primarily be done through information appliances, and data would be stored by centralized hosting services instead of on physical disks.

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