Yeah smartphones and tablets are great for play, but at the end everyone still needs to be doing some work and the PC is the only way to do that.
What everyone used to mean when they said that, is "it seems inconvenient to work on a small screen without a physical keyboard."
So (as Crispy saliently pointed out) they put USB and HDMI ports on the things.
Now people say "it seems inconvenient to be bound, necessarily, to a bunch of heavy and awkwardly-shaped objects" which is a bigger hurdle. You'd have to, like, make PCs a lot smaller and lighter, take a serious look at power consumption, and have their own screens and ideally some kind of system for (passable) input without peripherals.
I, for one, just don't foresee that ever happening. And if they ever did, marketing would probably call it a "Flubgump" or something -- ipso facto it's obviously not a computer.
all of the free-to-play bullshit gaming is a bubble waiting to pop, mostly due to Tablet(s) flooding the market. Using that metric to measure the future is silly.
Fixed; half-points awarded. This plays into what
JarlFrank said, touching on install base, entrenchment, and the "why not"-factor that comes with owning a multipurpose multimedia device.
This is what sustained PC gaming through all of the fads, inbreeding, market-hijinks, and hardware-wars that characterized the previous "peak" of PC gaming. It is what will sustain Flubgump gaming as well.
Probably not a popular opinion to hold here, but frankly I like my odds on a widespread technology in as many diverse hands as possible, than on a purpose-built gaming machine. The devices built for "gamers" are built, and marketed to, people whose idea of gaming is very different than mine. With the exception of a smattering of releases, it has been for a very long time.
That's the very reason I'm a PC gamer. I'd rather be pleased by the ability to install a fun game, than buy a set-top box and gradually lower my purchasing standards to justify a lock-in purchase. I think that's why the games I like are on PC.
I look at the "non-gamer" gamers I know, they have better taste by far. Non-gamer who was intrigued by Thief or HoMM, beats Grandma that DGAF killing time with Candy Crush, beats X-Bro convinced the latest whatever-just-like-the-last-one is the best thing on earth since whenever-the-last-one-was.
Where does "Codex-Bro whose tastes partially overlap with mine" fall on that chart?
Maybe it's a little unfair, but that depends on their perspective: if they pretend that hardware-turnover in the consumer market is a good thing, if they believe that the additional barrier of a "dedicated" gaming purchase (read: "you must be this passionate to ride") could ever again, in the least, foster a decent atmosphere for someone fucking
sick of mainstream gaming, that sort of thing.
The hobbyism aspect was fun, when I was younger and it was all new and exciting. Now, spending a day flipping through reviews, spec sheets, marketing fluff, and all points between, in preparation to slide a pre-assembled part into its specially-shaped slot and click through a driver installation...
I still remember it fondly, but I can make it sound as boring as it actually is. It was only ever exciting because of the games waiting for me at the end of it... and I think gaming, even of the type I want,
especially of the type I want, will survive without that.
Crispy's going to have to find a better way to get by, though -- now EVERYONE sells GPUs to your poor old Grandma, but now the bastards assemble it on-site and bake it into MSRP so cracka can't even get a mark-up
It's the same across the board for all-things-computing... the basics and generalities are widespread enough now, that now you actually have to be
good at something (and even that's no guarantee.)
So
Crispy to wrap this up with a bit of back-seat driving advice: the only computer-service person I know to escape with their business and lifestyle "intact-ish" now charges an arm-and-a-leg for "critical systems recovery," meaning roughly, "saves your ass when you didn't make a back-up; also willing to fish through the hard-drive and registry for configuration stuff." And even then, I heard that his day-job is now consultancy and training.
Essentially, the stuff that either:
a) takes talent and insight beyond the minimum required to operate the tools of the trade
or b) still requires enough patience that nobody else can be arsed to do it themselves
