Apple thinks its new iPad Pro would make a great replacement for the 600 million or so ageing PCs out there. That's a pretty ambitious target and one that it's unlikely to hit, especially when it comes to the business PCs.
There was a time, maybe four or five years ago when it genuinely looked as if tablets were going to replace PCs everywhere. They were sleeker, cooler and cheaper than dull PCs, which hadn't changed for years, typified by the beige box on your desk and that heavy slab of laptop in your bag. It looked as if the tablet would sweep all of this away and lead us all to an elegant, touchscreen utopia.
It took a while but the PC has fought back, and surprisingly effectively. As such, the challenge to the enterprise PC from tablets has now largely subsided (the consumer story is very different, of course).
Hardly: but the defeat of tablets does perhaps is clarify a few things: that content creation is much more of a priority for workers (like me typing this) than someone slumped on a sofa watching videos. Which means that right now workers (and just as importantly, the applications they use) need keyboard and a mouse and a fixed screen, and aren't so bothered about touch.
So what does the next evolution of the desktop look like, if it's not a tablet?
Perhaps the answer is already in your pocket. If you've got a new smartphone then its performance won't lag much behind the five year old PCs that Apple wants to replace. It's likely that in a few years a smartphone will pack enough processing power that it can do most of the work the average user will need to do, at least most of the time. Connecting one up to those extra bits of hardware workers like; the keyboard, mouse and big screen could be a really intriguing way of replacing the PC.
Certainly it will be a few years, another five perhaps (if at all) before such technology starts to take hold. But just because tablets haven't defeated the PC, that doesn't mean the PC will be around forever.