Pandemic boosted the “phone-ization” of PCs, which are adopting power efficient CPUs and thin designs, a trend which will accelerate with broader adoption of 5G
only bigger, more powerful and more capable. #tech #digital cc @ChristopherIsak @ChrisGGarrod https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @mims Partho Dasgupta / @parthodasgupta : Phones have long been more sophisticated than our PCs. But now our PCs are borrowing their best tricks—and the tech that makes them possible. https://www.wsj.com/... @onelinders : Why your next laptop will me more like a super sized smartphone #5G #VibrantDeviceEcosystem #Laptop #Tablet #FutureOfWork https://www.wsj.com/... Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Why PCs Are Turning Into Giant Phones // early is often the same as wrong https://www.wsj.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : 🧵As our phones got all the cool new tech, laptops lagged, and saw a nearly 10-year decline in sales. But last quarter sales of notebooks were up 50% from a year ago, and a major reason why is that more and more, they do all the things our phones do. https://www.wsj.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : Lots of people — including me — thought the PC was dead or dying. But now that phone sales have plateaued & people need to work from anywhere, a funny thing has happened: plain old PCs are where all the growth is. And a surprising amount of innovation. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Christopher Mims's argument lands a decade after the debate it settles: back when pundits were proclaiming the death of the PC post-iPad, the device was flat but still shipping 250M+ units a year. The intervening insight, articulated by Benedict Evans in his 'mobile isn't about screen size' essay, was that phones won on ease-of-use, security, power consumption, and ecosystem scale — not form factor.
Mims's point is that the pandemic pulled those four traits into the PC itself: power-efficient CPUs, thin designs, and eventually 5G radios. Steven Sinofsky's caveat in his own share of the piece — that being early is often the same as being wrong — frames whether this convergence is a redesign or a relabeling.
First-order effects
- PC buyers get machines built around smartphone-derived silicon and industrial design, shifting vendor competition from raw clock speeds toward battery life and thinness — exactly the axes Evans identified as mobile's real advantages.
Second-order effects
- Desktops don't disappear: IDC found some remote workers who started pandemic life on laptops switched back to desktops in 2021, so vendors must run two playbooks at once — phone-like portables and stationary power machines.
Third-order effects
- The efficient-CPU foundation Mims describes is what later makes AI-capable PCs viable, and by 2024 CIOs are weighing an enterprise replacement cycle around them while waiting for prices to fall — the phone-ization thesis maturing into a procurement decision.
The trend: Mobile-first engineering — power-efficient silicon, thin designs, cellular connectivity — is migrating into the PC category faster than PC sales themselves grow, with IDC's Q1 2024 uptick to 59.8M shipments marking stabilization rather than resurgence.