The shape of personal things to come

We frequently hear pundits or corporate voice pieces declaring that we are in a post-PC or PC-plus era.  Some want to say that the PC is dead.  Others say the PC is an essential part of a home or business ecosystem.  Part of the argument is that smartphone and tablet sales have dramatically taken off while PC sales are flat or even dipped slightly.  Some say these mobile devices will replace the PC.  Others say they personally will always want a keyboard and a large screen, and therefore the PC must stay.

Strangely, I have a different vision from all of them.  Before getting to it, it is useful to make some basic observations about computing technology.¹

1. Smartphones and tablets are useful because there are servers on the other end. The servers deliver e-mail, maps, videos, backend speech recognition, etc. If you didn't have them, there would be no smart mobile devices.
   
2. Servers are largely a variation of PC technology (although there are significant permutations like blade technology). The CPUs can be the same as used in high end-gaming machines. What makes them different is they are usually headless, and dozens of them sit in a rack. The thousands of racks of servers are what make Google, YouTube, Yahoo, or Amazon AWS what they are. They are also at the heart of the nation's fastest supercomputers. They have an enormous energy footprint, and making a carbon neutral server farm is a major challenge.
   
3. Some smartphones already have HDMI capability in the form of MHL-HDMI (MHL = Mobile High-Definition Link). This allows them to be plugged into some HDTVs. This is already in consumer hands, but a lot of people just might not know they have it.  (Here is an MHL device list.)
   
4. Your vacuum machine or washing machine probably compute.  But not like smartphones and tablets, which are architecturally very similar to PCs and servers. These have at least 32-bit CPUs, demand paged memory, and can host a variety of applications. They also usually come with a fairly powerful graphics accelerator on the same chip as the CPU, which makes sophisticated games and flight simulators possible. No one would do that to a vacuum machine or washing machine because it will add $100 or $200 to the price tag for questionable added functionality.

So what should we expect about personal computers in the home or business? In my estimation, the personal computer has to lose it head. That is, no display. Its function will be to serve up information to mobile or large screen devices on the same network. It might not even have a keyboard, which may become an adjunct to the mobile device. PCs for high-end first-person games may be replaced by large screen TVs that come with powerful graphics accelerators the way PCs and smart mobile devices have them now. Because they will be stationary and plugged into a power outlet, these can be more powerful than the ones currently in PCs. In effect, PCs will be replaced by distributed computing elements including one or more servers, advanced rendering display, and personal smart devices that accept keyboards, joysticks, etc.

I don't know why this hasn't happened yet. There seems to be an aversion to headless home servers.  Possibly some companies can see this coming and want to stop it from happening.  But yet, there is nothing technically impossible about it. When headless home servers and advanced graphics-accelerated HD display happen, the PC will be dead.

Footnotes:

1. I originally wrote these comments in a rougher form in a discussion following an article on whether the PC is dead or not.  In that forum, I go by the name "FoolishDIY".  If these points seem strangely familiar to you and they were posted under that name, it was probably me.