Does the average person need a PC?

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I think a major convenience about a tablet or a phone is the ability to easily carry it with you. It would be a major pain to move a desktop system or sometimes even a laptop when moving around in your home or leaving your home to run errands or spend a few nights somewhere else. Plus with tablets & phones you can get mobile data through your cellphone company instead of needing to rely on public wifi while your out. You could possibly have mobile data on a laptop or link it to your cellphone to use your cell's mobile data but that could be a pain too.Also some people don't have game systems & mostly watch TV shows online on their mobile devices so they can save money by not having home cable & internet service.

I think your challenge is in two phrases.

1) Average person
2) PC

What is an average person? There is no such thing. Moreover, what an average person needs depends on use case. For example, someone who only reads content can do with little more than a screen like pad device. But, someone who produces content will need more input options, keyboard, etc.

PC ... That typically means a desktop, laptop, or virtual workstation running Microsoft Windows. Whether an average person needs one is a matter of choice. A lot will choose a PC. But, Mac is popular. Chromebooks are popular. Lately I've grown fond of my daughter's Chromebook. Linux is still out there for that type, but I wouldn't call them average people. There are also devices like Surfaces which are typically not thought of as PCs but serve the same purpose.

It also depends on the games you play. For many games, console is easier. For some of the bigger ones, a large chunk of people want a mouse or to mod them.

To directly answer your binary question, "No." An "average person" does not "need" a PC.

I would nuance that by advising that a person should first ask themselves what they want an electronic device to do for them, and then pick a device that best meets their use case.

I think the average person especially in the US or western europe would need a computer, especially if they do not have a smart phone, tablet, or easily accessible computer at a library or something.

It is very useful for looking for jobs, doing work if necessary, using social media, reading news and learning.

It isn't like these things cannot be done without easy internet access and desktop layout but it is much easier with a computer today.

I am a university student studying Agriculture and Food Science. Most of my assignments and studying for school require a computer. I have not had a physical textbook since 2019. And I have not had a written assignment since then either. The only physical submissions for my classes have been drawings or physical projects.

I don't know where I'd be without a "proper" computer. I'm used to Windows and don't want the learning curve of anything else. I can do all kinds of clever and useful things with a PC. I presume PC includes laptops. Don't see why it shouldn't.

I've no idea what the average person needs. I would think that as time goes by anybody without a smartphone will get more and more disenfranchised from all kinds of important services, but I'm still holding out against getting one. I don't want to pay a regular subscription and I don't want a big learning curve, especially if it turns out I can't become really good at using a smartphone. I hate touchscreens. They keep firing things off that I don't want to fire off, and they don't fire off things I do want to fire off. I can't even pick up a smartphone without it thinking I've "tapped" something.

I really observed this phenomenon here, ordinary people play Tik Tok, send emails, and play online games.This is their whole life, and extra mastery of the PC is not necessary

Pc's are not necessary for the average person

A lot of people can manage fine with just a smartphone or tablet

However, more complex tasks like school work, research, tax returns are more convenient on a pc.

I have a pc, that I rarely use. It's nice to have it there when I need it.

I would think it may be more than inconvenient to try to do important, time-critical work such as school work, research and tax returns on a smartphone. I guess the inconvenience comes from the tiny touch-based keyboard and the tiny screen. But additionally, at least with a PC it's still just about possible to block updates to the OS and to the program until the job is done. Sudden updates have been known to wreak havoc. I don't know if it's possible to block updates to a smartphone.

OTOH, my sticking to a PC nearly ruined a very important and urgent financial pound-to-dollar transfer recently. The service provider decided to go smartphone-only. They gave me a bit of warning, but there wasn't time to choose, buy, and learn to use a smartphone before the hammer fell, and it would have been a big price to pay just to keep the provider working for me. My wife has a smartphone, but although she can do non-critical stuff on it quite well, she finds it too temperamental for important financial work. I found an alternative PC-friendly service provider, but getting that to work was another can of worms. So I was very close to dollar bankruptcy in the USA where I'm currently living, and my stress levels were sky-high until I finally got the job done.

It depends on what the average person is doing.

A pad is convenient for consuming content.
A laptop is better for generating content.

That may explain my preference for a PC. I'm an anti-consumer, and I'm rarely happy just watching, listening or experiencing. I feel much more alive when I'm doing something. But many people seem a lot more content to consume, especially during their leisure hours.

i would not be able to do the degree of audio restoration that i do on a pc now, with anything else such as an tablet or smart phone.

I can not imagine switching to a tablet entirely. I have one, I've hardly used it. The PC is what I've been using for like 25+ years in my life now. While I can adjust to some things I haven't before, I don't think that I'll ever stop using PCs. It's just the most intuitive way for me to do things, like post on this forum! (I technically could on my phone, but I find that to be far less convenient).

It's interesting. I'm not that old. Many here have years on me. And yet, within my lifetime, PCs have gone from a novel luxury item that most people didn't have or even think were necessary, to slowly becoming as commonplace as a TV, radio, or refrigerator in the home, to now being seen as "unnecessary" by a younger generation (not b/c we've given up on tech or gone back to the stone ages, but because new tech has replaced the PC for many).

But there's an ease-of-use on a PC that isn't as practical on portable devices. Not knocking portable tablets and phones, but there are many, many times I've thought, "this would be much easier to do at a desktop computer with a keyboard and mouse."

And maybe it is generational, because I couldn't imagine word processing on a tablet or phone. PC is still the digital link to the analog typewriter.

Any new projects you'd care to share?

since meeting a very special person on WP i have not had time to do anything in this regard. but i should make a time-space to get back into it, there are oh so many projects that need to get done before i push up the daisies, nobody coming after me to keep up the work. mainly i take imperfect recordings and make them sound less perfect, more full-bodied, get rid of extraneous noises and sometimes fluffed notes as well. if they are in monophonic sound i stereoize them with a variety of techniques including Digitally Extracted Stereo where i edit the FFT spectrogram to put certain sounds at different stereophonic pan points. i really like taking old 78 rpm recordings and bringing them back to life this way. my goal is to make them sound like they were recorded 50 years ago and not 90 years ago.

That's what I was thinking, when smartphones were new, they lacked the processing power to be taken seriously as a desktop replacment. Even I thought of them as a novelty.

Now they have caught up, and the only thing that distinguishes pc from smartphones is the peripherals. Which in itself makes the computer 100% more competitive.

My desktop is so old that my phone probably has a more powerful processor & I upgraded my processor to the most powerful I could get while meeting all the other specs my old processor had. My phone plays 4K vids just fine while on my desktop those vids step for a second after each frame. I have aLOT more storage on my computer thou.