The Always Connected PC is the Future of the Platform (Premium)

The popularity of smartphones, and of mobile in general, has led to upheavals in the market. Microsoft and Intel, which dominated personal technology in the PC era, have fallen behind mobile companies—Google and Apple in software, plus Qualcomm and other ARM chipset makers in hardware—in market penetration. And that gap is only going to grow. By 2020, over 60 percent of the worldwide population, an estimated 4.8 billion people, will own smartphones.

The reasons are obvious: These devices are always connected, and always on, and always with us. They are highly personal, a “custodian of our lives,” as Qualcomm says.

Tied to this is a change in expectations. Once users are introduced to smaller, lighter, and more personal devices like smartphones, PCs seem clunkier and more old-fashioned. Likewise, the seamless always-connected nature of smartphones becomes more need than want. Why can we use our phones anywhere, but only use our PCs within range of Wi-Fi? It seems antiquated.

To their credit, companies like Microsoft and Apple have evolved their PC platforms over the past several years to meet users’s changing expectations. The Mac has taken on popular user experiences from iOS, Apple’s mobile platform. And Microsoft has long experimented with natural user interfaces like multi-touch and smart pens.

But the market for PCs has shrunk nonetheless. PCs, once the only digital tool available to consumers, is now competing with more useful and more personal devices. And so the evolution continues.

I’m not sure what, if anything, Apple plans for the Mac. There are rumors suggesting that the firm may adapt its ARM-based A-series chipsets, which power iOS devices today, for portable Macs. At the very least, it will continue to augment Macs with custom chipsets that debuted first on mobile, like the Touch ID sensor on the latest MacBook Pros.

But we do know what Microsoft is doing. It is a multi-pronged approach.

First, Microsoft is working to simplify Windows and slowly reject legacy technologies like Win32 and .NET. This effort, called Windows 10 S, has not gotten off to a great start, but it shows that Microsoft understands how things are changing and how it can adapt its aging OS platform for the future.

Second, Microsoft has created an Always Connected PC initiative that brings some of the best behaviors from mobile—always-available cellular data connectivity and long battery life—to the PC.

And third, Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm, maker of the best-selling ARM architecture, to port Windows 10 to the Snapdragon 835 chipset (and, later to subsequent chipsets). The resulting PCs will be Always Connected PCs, but running on ARM, not x86 chips. They will provide multi-day battery life, instant on capabilities, and a month of standby, differentiating them from Intel-based Always Connected PCs.

No, they will not perform as well as Intel-based PCs. especially at first. But this is not going to be an issue. Most certainly not in the long term.

Speaking at the Snapdragon Tech Summit today in Maui, Microsoft executive vice president Terry Myerson described the change wrought by these additional capabilities as a “cultural shift.” That is, users—and, in businesses, the IT shops that support them—will fundamentally reset their expectations with PCs now that these devices can last for days on a charge. It changes everything.

Likewise, these devices will move connectivity into the same assumed place in which we now place electricity. No longer will we wander from place to place looking for hotspots. We will wake up the PC and get to work. From anywhere. At any time.

This is a profound change. And while there will always be those who need—and argue for—more powerful PCs, more powerful Intel-based PCs, perhaps, it is inarguable that the majority of people who use PCs do not need such a thing. And that the benefits of Always Connected PCs will outweigh whatever performance negatives may exist.

Anytime we have a discussion like this, those with special needs will chime in to point out that their needs will never be addressed by such PCs. But this isn’t about a wholesale replacement of the PC market. Powerful PCs—gaming PCs, PCs aimed at power users of all kinds—will not disappear, any more than PCs will generally disappear just because mobile devices exist. They will continue to be a powerful and profitable niche.

But the reason Always Connected PCs—especially those based on ARM—are so important is that they represent a future in which a mainstream, large base of PCs can be popular and profitable. And when you consider where we are in time, with many users simply holding on to older PCs, many still running Windows 7, simply because they just don’t use them very often, there’s an opportunity here. Literally a billion PCs that could either disappear, or be upgraded to something new.

Always Connected PCs will help keep people in the fold. Keep them off Chromebook, or iPad Pro, or whatever. They will give users a reason to be excited by the PC again. To look at a workhorse productivity tool in a new light.

This is a good thing. We can quibble over specific devices or implementations, and I’m sure the first generation of ARM-based devices, in particular, won’t wow many power users. Performance will improve over time. But bringing the best of mobile to the PC now, and in such a fundamental way, is huge. It’s the best thing that’s happened to the PC in years.