Sales of personal computers — including laptops and desktops — are at a record low. According to research firm IDC, global shipments dropped 14% last quarter — nearly double the decline that analysts expected — mainly because of the failure of Microsoft’s Windows 8 to gain traction among consumers and skyrocketing tablet sales.

So is the death of the PC imminent? According to several Wharton faculty informally surveyed by K@W Today about changes in their PC usage, the answer is no. As academics, some — including operations and information management professor Gerard Cachon, accounting professor Karthik Balakrishnan and real estate professor Maisy Wong — indicated that PCs are still the best tool for conducting research or analyzing datasets. “Tablets are useful, but I will ultimately still have to [connect one] to my PC/a server to do data analysis,” Wong says. “I think PCs are the same as servers. So, as long as I need to analyze big datasets, I’ll still need PCs.”

Balakrishnan adds: “For work like mine that involves extensive data analysis with quick speed, user-friendliness and reliability, the PC still dominates. The cloud/network system is good, but connection reliability and portability of data are still an issue. It is unlikely that my work can entirely be done using a mobile device like an iPad because of issues like typing, even if I move to a cloud system for processing and data storage.”

Several others indicated that using smaller keyboards and screens on mobile devices can be problematic. “My own PC usage has not declined at all,” says management professor Sigal Barsade. “The speed, efficiency, versatility and power the PC gives me can’t [be matched by] the other options. In addition, from a physical perspective, the smaller screens and keyboards vastly slow me down.”

“I have an iPad, and I like it, but the laptop is still my primary computer at home, and the desktop at work,” notes legal studies and business ethics professor David Zaring. “For us slow adopters, with predilections for typing and big screens, the PC has a great deal of staying power.”

Although her PC use has declined slightly, legal studies and business ethics professor Amy Sepinwall admits that “I loathe doing any extensive email writing, word processing or power point work on my iPad, and find even web surfing easier on my PC than on a tablet.” She adds, however, that her iPad now takes precedence in one area: travel. “Even though my laptop is a Macbook Air, and so very small and light, it is still bulkier than my iPad. And my iPad has 3G capability, so I am never without Internet access, whereas my laptop allows me access only where wireless is available.”

Others, including operations and information management professor Noah Gans, mentioned their use of mobile devices — such as the iPhone — outside the office, where Gans notes that his PC usage has not declined. Business economics and public policy professor Katja Seim also says that her PC usage has not declined in the office, where she does “heavy computing” involving statistics and programs like Excel. And although she is using her home PC less frequently, she doesn’t think that tablets and smartphones “are currently in a position to compete with PCs for such [computing applications], so at least in the short- to intermediate-run, PCs won’t become irrelevant.”

But for management professor Olivier Chatain, the balance is now tipping in favor of mobile devices. “My use of a PC has definitely declined,” he says. “Activities that do not require multiple or specialized software and a very large screen are more and more done on a tablet. For example: reading, email, note taking. PCs will ultimately become a niche product relative to mobile computing.”

Balakrishnan agrees that beyond the “extensive coding and data analysis” done by academics and other specialists, PCs will continue to lose some ground against mobile devices. For “web-browsing, Internet banking, word processing and presentations, I can see a move towards mobile devices and hence an overall PC sales decline. The decline can be exacerbated if the file storage structure/interface with the cloud in mobile devices improves.”

But will the humble PC ever become obsolete? “Yes, but mostly because ‘ever’ is so vague,” says marketing professor Christophe Van den Bulte. “I am confident that the PC will be irrelevant 1,000 years from now. The more relevant — and much harder — question is: ‘By how much by what time?’ Of course, that’s the kind of question that pundits make sure to avoid.”

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow in a class action lawsuit filed by women who claim that Wal-Mart discriminated against them in the areas of pay and promotions. According to the women, men were routinely paid more money for the same or lesser work, and they were given more chances than women to be promoted.

The Supreme Court will not rule on the merits of the case but instead on whether the court can treat all women who might have been discriminated against as a single class. If not, then women would have to file separate, smaller lawsuits.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars that Wal-Mart would have to pay to more than one million women should the company lose the case.

Amy Sepinwall, Wharton professor of legal studies and ethics, suggests that this is “a classic case in which the law and common sense diverge: Suppose we learned that women constituted two-thirds of Wal-Mart’s low-level shift employees, but only 14% of its managers, who are generally promoted from the ranks of the shift employees. The disparity would at least raise a presumption of discrimination.” Those statistics, she notes, are provided by the plaintiffs and are contested by the company.

“Why weren’t more women being promoted, we might ask,” Sepinwall says, adding that “discrimination — however subconscious — would surely be a plausible response. If that way of thinking doesn’t seem compelling enough, substitute ‘African Americans’ for ‘women’ in the statistics quoted, and the intuitive force of the thought that there is at least a presumption of discrimination should be clearer still.” But the Supreme Court, she adds, “largely at Wal-Mart’s behest, has asked the parties whether the bald statistics are enough. Wal-Mart argues that it is misleading to generalize over employment practices at the company’s 3400 stores” where the women who are part of the lawsuit held a number of different kinds of positions.

Will the conservative tilt of the Supreme Court — a tilt which generally favors employers — be a factor in this case? “Conservative members of the court stand to be hostile to the contention that the class certification should be sustained,” says Sepinwall, citing two lines of precedent that provide an indication for how the court might view the current case.

First, notes Sepinwall, these Supreme Court justices “have [voiced] opposition to any kind of race-based classifications, whether these were intended to thwart or promote the interests of a racial minority. ‘Our Constitution is color-blind,’ Justice Scalia famously intoned, and one imagines that he would approach sweeping gender-based classifications in the same way.”

A second precedent for “divining the perspective of the Court’s conservative justices” is the Lilly Ledbetter case, according to Sepinwall. In that case, the plaintiff learned in 1998 that “her salary was on average $1,000 less per month than the salary of men who held the same position and were hired at the same time as her, in 1979. The five conservative justices on the Court denied Ledbetter’s employment discrimination claim on the grounds that it was untimely — the relevant employment decisions were made more than 180 days before she filed her discrimination complaint, and the applicable statute required that the adverse decision be made within 180 days of the filing of the complaint.”

The dissent argued that the Court “could instead have found that, with every pay period, [the company] carried its discrimination forward. In that way, the Court could have held that Ledbetter satisfied the 180-day requirement,” Sepinwall says, adding that President Obama apparently agreed with the dissent: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which overturned the Court’s decision, was the first bill he signed into law.

The Ledbetter case is relevant here, she goes on, “because the majority’s ‘cramped’ reading of the statute — to quote the characterization Justice Ruth Ginsburg offered in her dissent — might well be indicative of a more general hostility to employment discrimination suits.”  

The women in the case, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, are seeking back pay and punitive damages from the company.