The odds are your next PC will be an iPad

I’m a big fan of the iPad, for both personal enjoyment and work use. Though I can do a lot with it, I still need a PC (in my case, a Mac) for heavy-duty jobs or simply to command multiple screens as I multitask and move data among apps and services. So I was surprised this last week by how many people asked me if an iPad could be their next PC, as they contemplated not adopting Windows 8 when their current (usually Windows 7) PCs got too old.

No one was asking about replacing a PC with an iPad right now; these people were thinking a few years out. Nonetheless, they were investigating the iPad and iOS — not OS X (which could replace Windows today in many situations). A few also inquired about Android, a platform that finally seems to be maturing.

Also last week, I noticed in a national retail chain’s back-to-school Sunday circular a curious photo for a student desktop setup: Instead of the usual monitor or laptop, the desk had just an iPad and a digital photo frame on it.

These are all anecdotes, but they suggest that people are making the post-PC mental leap, that computing in the future will not be a new version of the entrenched, 25-plus-year-old Windows PCs and Macs. Instead, it will be iOS or Android. That’s profound, especially as I didn’t hear the question, “Should I consider a Mac instead?”

Why iOS? The extreme popularity of the iPad is surely one reason. But it’s the most logical alternative platform for the post-PC era, at least given the current state of it and its main competitors: Android and Windows RT, the Metro-only version of Windows for ARM-based tablets.

iOS has many of the capabilities of a traditional PC: You can print from it, you can use an external keyboard and monitor, you can tap into online storage, and you have the everyday apps already available, such as email and browser. In some industries, such as music, the iPad is already a mainstay computer for everything but pro-level mixing. For broad office use, iOS has several office suites available (iWork, Quickoffice, Documents to Go, and Office2HD), and the latest version of Office2HD fills in a major hole in iPad editing: It supports revisions tracking in Office files.

In other words, many day-to-day bases are already covered in the platform, and the ones that are missing (for example, external pointing device support, scalable display on larger monitors, and mail filtering) are not technically difficult. Given that iOS and OS X are based on the same core and Apple regularly migrates capabilties from one to the other, it’s a matter of time — and increased hardware capabilities — before Apple could imbue the iPad with some of these PC features, should it want to.

Android has the same potential, but it’s less cohesive a platform and doesn’t have the rich app catalog or rich app capabilities that iOS does; its ability to serve as a PC replacement in the near term just isn’t plausible. It also lacks some PC capabilities, such as printing, that iOS offers, and the technologies it uses for connecting to displays is poorly implemented and inconsistent.

Android’s bigger problem, though, is Chrome OS. Google’s Web-only PC platform (delivered on Chromebook laptops and Chromebox PCs) is less capable than any mobile platform, relying on Web apps to do real apps’ work. And they simply can’t. There’s been no progress in Web apps for years, despite Google’s championing of the concept. Its own Google Docs, for example, remains essentially stuck. But as long as one part of Google promotes the Web PC vision and another the Android mobile device vision, there’s no cohesive post-PC platform at Google for users to count on.

Then there’s Windows RT, Microsoft’s attempt to leave traditional Windows behind. Well, almost — it’ll run in a protected x86-like environment Office 2013 and Internet Explorer 10, proof that Metro isn’t likely to be the post-PC platform in which you can place your trust. Metro’s apps are very primitive compared to what’s available on iOS and even Android, and the fact that Microsoft basically has to run its core business software outside of Metro on an otherwise Metro-only device shows how unlikely Metro can evolve quickly as a general-purpose platform.

Of course, Google and Microsoft could pull some rabbits out of their hats and change the equation. Maybe iOS won’t be the only obvious post-PC platform to begin anticipating a switch to. No matter, what’s key is that people are now anticipating a post-PC switch. That’s a revolution in the making.

This article, “The odds are your next PC will be an iPad,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.