Days Are Numbered for Laptops, PCs

A survey of the Consumer Electronics Show and a host of other technological and cultural factors all point to one inescapable conclusion: "The era of the personal computer is drawing to a close," write Mike Malone and Tom Hayes in the Wall Street Journal. Laptops and desktops aren't going to disappear completely, but the explosion of smartphones, tablets, and apps all herald "the age of mobile computing."

The authors round up a bevy of stats—the number of smartphones is expected to surpass PCs by 2013, and the percentage of those accessing the web via such phones has more than doubled in the past year—along with factors from the rise of cloud computing to social networking to back up their case. "There is a strong undercurrent to all this," they write. "We live in the physical world, where limitations on space and attention perpetually push us toward adopting a few essential and irreplaceable devices in our lives." (More Consumer Electronics Show stories.)