The Farmer File: RIP for the desktop computer in this 'post PC era'

Are you an early adopter? You know, a person who must have the latest gadget first?

Were you the first in high school to have a princess phone or a poodle skirt? Or a black leather jacket before the Fonz got his? Do you pester friends to put you first on their speed dials?

Do you chortle at troglodytes like me who flipped off Facebook, tut-tutted at Twitter, laughed at LinkedIn, shunned the iPad and dissed the Droid? Have you already made a deposit on the iPad 12, which will be capable of flying short distances and cooking a first rate risotto?

If so you may know that Apple CEO Tim Cook, confirming his predecessor Steve Jobs' 2010 prediction, declared this the "post PC era." So I guess my desktop computer is but a byte away from becoming a doorstop.

I got this revelation from my friend and digital guru, Patrick Junkroski, a member of the Apple Consultants Network via his Naples-based company, Technology Pros. Patrick mentioned that the "post PC era" declaration was given by Cook while introducing the latest iPad.

"The numbers back up his claim," Junkroski says. "The iPad out-shipped any individual PC manufacturer last quarter. Consumers want portability and immediacy." He notes the impact on the workplace.

"Tech savvy generations in the workforce will continue to reject the idea of a traditional office setting. Working 9-to-5 with 60-mile roundtrip commutes is becoming a thing of the past.

"Why wake up 90 minutes early to drive for an hour when you can walk across the room to your laptop or tablet and start working right there?

"Furthermore, workers of all ages are shunning the concept of paying high gas prices only to watch their money burn up while at a standstill in traffic. In the increasingly rare event that a tablet can't do what we need, a laptop computer, equally portable and remote, does the trick.

"For better or worse, most of us can now work from anywhere. Tablets like the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab are capable of running not just games, media and email, but full business-level apps like word processing and spreadsheets. They allow us to connect remotely to our networks via secure connections to work on virtual desktops that can be halfway around the world.

"Project deadlines are still met, but on a timeline that often makes more sense for the employees meeting them. Modern companies of all sizes have become aware that their workers are capable of scheduling their own time to meet deadlines while still making room to, say, have an extended lunch with a family member or take a long weekend. Several studies have shown that worker productivity actually increases for telecommuters with flextime schedules.

"So yes, the post PC era is upon us. Of course, time will tell if the human psyche is capable of handling this lack of structure over the span of an entire career."

Knowing that Junkroski knows his stuff, I asked him a while back why they call the computer-related rage these days, "the cloud."

"When network engineers used to draw diagrams to explain how things were connected to each other on a network, and some part of the network left the building, you drew a line that went outside of that building and drew a cloud at the end of the line. That represented the Internet — anything outside of your office or your network. One of my instructors used to mark his clouds with the words, 'Internet (not to scale)'."

A cloud hasn't created this much hubbub since Jerome Kern and B.G. DeSylva wrote the famous song, "Look for the Silver Lining," in 1919.

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