But we’ve already experienced steps towards this future. Today, most people use smartphones for communications, social networking, and games, and for music, audiobooks, podcasts, videos, and other content. This frees up the PC to return to its roots, so to speak, as a productivity device, where content creation using Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and other similar products is more prevalent.

One side-effect of that change corresponded with the move from traditional hard drives (HDDs) to solid-state storage (SSDs) for PC storage. SSDs are smaller, faster, quieter, and more power-efficient than HDDs, but in the beginning of this shift, especially, they also provided smaller storage allotments. So there was a period of time in which you might have gone from a laptop with a 1 TB HDD to a 64 or 128 GB SSD.