As our computing lives move onto the cloud, raw computing power becomes less and less important. The intense computing is happening on the server side and not on your home computer.
This is indeed turning our computing world upside down. But in an ever more interconnected society, is it all that surprising?
By no means will people stop using personal computers. Rather, how they use them, and for what purposes, is always evolving and changing. The need to buy a desktop has fallen away for a lot of people, who choose to store their data and do their daily business on laptops -- both at home and in the office environment.
Users of Windows, Mac, and Linux, all still use computers to produce something. The vision that people who declare "the end of the PC" have is a belief that portable, Internet-enabled devices will begin to take up the roles normally associated with a PC. Processor power and RAM have become less important, according to proponents of this idea, because those hardware factors become less and less important the more we rely on downloaded data from the Internet.
However, very few individuals currently have Internet access that exceeds or even reaches 100Mbit/s. This is roughly the connection type that was associated with home networks not too long ago using Cat5 wiring. Home networks can now achieve gigabit access speeds using Cat6 and newer network interface cards or wireless-N routers. However, there is a big difference between 100Mbit/s and DDR3 - 8,500MB/s - lets not even talk about FSB.
It is my belief that people will still need desktop PC's and now, strong laptops with dedicated graphics and a high-end chipset, in order to produce and deliver content to the web, as well as continuing to enjoy high end video streaming, games, and so on. There is no reason to spell out the extinction of the personal computer, other than for marketing purposes.
It is interesting that it was Apple that decided the era of the PC is over, when they are in fact using Intel and IBM-based computers with fancy aesthetics to sell their home consumer line of computers. That is right - MacBooks and nearly every computer not yet powered by ARM-architecture is using the PC model. PowerPC, the design that was used by Apple, was completely abandoned, and you can still see elements of UNIX design in MacOS even though it is proprietary software.
What is interesting, in my view, is how people are going to be using computers over the next decade. Will people continue to rely on the mouse and keyboard? (A seemingly unstoppable human interface device) Or will people be willing to adopt the touch screen mentality that is about to hit the market with the release of Windows 8 and newer operating systems? I have no doubt that people will continue to use Microsoft Windows for their daily business, and it is just a matter of software catching up to a lot of hardware development.
Programmers have found ways to scale back system requirements for nearly everything: powerful games can run with minimal settings and still use DirectX 9, even though they could make use of DX11 for a better experience. You can thank gaming consoles like XBox and Playstation 3 for these limitations in the gaming world. As far as productivity suites go, it is still important to have a lot of memory, CPU power, and graphics: for professional photo editing, video editing, virtual machine testing, programming, and more.
So, as it has always been, it is my opinion that PCs will still be needed by anyone who uses a computer for more purposes than e-mail, browsing the web, or watching videos.