Tablets to outship desktops this year, notebooks next year

[anuseems]

According to the latest data from IDC, global shipments of smart connected devices exceeded a billion units in 2012, an increase of 29.1% from the previous year and representing a value of $576.9 billion. Although plenty of smartphones and other "smart" electronics were moved last year, the researcher notes that the market's growth was largely thanks to a 78.4% on-year boost in tablet shipments, which topped 128 million units.

That's a pretty significant slice of the computing pie if you exclude smartphones from the billion devices and IDC expects interest in slates to continue for the foreseeable future. Tablets are due to outship desktops in 2013 and notebooks in 2014, while both of those PC segments will either lose ground or see relatively flat growth. The desktop market is expected to shrink consistently through 2017, when growth is expected to be -1%.

All told, IDC forecasts that companies will shift 190 million tablets worldwide this year, which would mark an annual growth of 48.7%, while smartphones shipments are expected to swell by 27.2% to 918.5 million units. Looking further ahead, the researcher says smart connected devices will reach shipments of 2.2 billion units and revenues of $814.3 billion in 2017, with tablet and smartphone growth tapering to 9.8% and 8.5%.

The analyst firm also touched on the latest market share rankings of Apple and Samsung. The iDevice maker is said to have "significantly closed the gap" with Samsung in the last quarter of 2012 after moving plenty of iPhone 5s and iPad Minis, which pushed Apple's unit shipment share up to 20.3% -- just behind Samsung's 21.2% cut. However, Apple represented a larger slice of the quarter's revenue at 30.7% versus 20.4%.

@ http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130326005216/en/Worldwide-Smart-Connected-Device-Market-Crossed-1

[cyberber]

Maybe that way people will understand why Microsoft has choosen the Windows 8 path instead of criticizing the lack of start button.

[MidnightDistortions]

^ what by killing the desktop more?

[Marik]

>playing wow on a tablet while getting my ass handed to me by an npc or a noob who still rotates his char with the left/right arrow cause I'm on a tablet and he's on a desktop

>goodtimes.jpg

[DKT27]

I would take this analysis with a handful of salt.

Maybe that way people will understand why Microsoft has choosen the Windows 8 path instead of criticizing the lack of start button.

Understand sure. However, how many of these sold tablets are Microsoft Windows based? Infact, Windows tablets are doing so bad that Samsung is pulling back their tabs from the markets.

[DKT27]

Tablets may eclipse laptops in 2014, but there's no post-PC future on the horizon

After Apple launched the iPad in 2010, it didn’t take critics long to start asking if this new breed of one-panel touch tablets would kill the PC market as people opted for slates over clamshells. Now, more than three years, four iPads, and a gazillion Android tablets later, the answer to that question is finally taking shape.

Worldwide tablet shipments are expected to overtake desktop PCs in 2013 and laptops will suffer the same fate one year later, according to market research firm IDC. (IDC and PCWorld are both owned by International Data Group). That would seem to be a pretty definitive case that PCs are about to be replaced by tablets—but on closer inspection that’s not what IDC's numbers are truly saying.

Tablets rising

There’s little question the market for tablets is exploding. In 2012, IDC said global tablet shipments grew by 78.4 percent compared to the year previous. Meanwhile the market share of desktop and portable PCs (laptops, Ultrabooks, etc.) dropped by 4.1 and 3.4 percent, respectively. And that's just the start of the bleeding: IDC predicts the desktop market will drop another 4.3 percent in 2013, while laptops are expected to stay relatively flat at a growth rate of just 0.9 percent.

But percentages can be deceiving and they tell only half the tale of IDC’s predictions. Peering ahead to the future, IDC’s numbers suggest that while the overall market share for PCs will decline, shipments will still increase, if only by a hair. In other words, the demand for PCs isn't dying down—it’s just that the thirst for mobile devices is exploding.

IDC's estimates for connected device sales.

By 2017, PCs will account for 17 percent of the smart connected device market—PCs, tablets, and smartphones—worldwide, but manufacturers are still expected to ship more than 380 million computers that year, according to IDC. PC shipments in 2012, by comparison, were just over 350 million, giving a net shipment increase of about 30 million comparing year-to-year. That’s anemic growth to be sure, but it also means PC shipments will remain relatively steady and are only shrinking in comparison to everything else.

While PC growth stagnates, tablet shipments will nearly triple between 2012 and 2017 going from 128.3 million to 352.3 million devices worldwide. By 2017, IDC predicts that tablet and PC shipments should be almost equally ubiquitous across the globe.

To infinity and beyond

But what happens after 2017? Will PCs continue on the same trajectory, maintaining the same market size, while becoming a smaller and smaller part of a larger connected device universe? Chances are good that the demand for PCs will begin shrinking in a more significant way, but it’s also not clear what will happen to tablets beyond the next four years.

Beyond that, will the tablets of 2018 have the same basic capabilities as modern-day Android and iOS slates, or will they be more PC-like? Will 10-inch tablets merge with Ultrabooks, as some industry watchers predict? Or perhaps, as a recent Amazon patent suggests, cloud computing will turn the devices on your desk and in your pocket to nothing more than a dumb display that relies on remote servers for both processing and battery power.

It’s impossible to know what to expect on the distant horizon, but in the near future, the world will continue breathing life into PCs even while tablets sales surge. Are we living in a post-PC era? Ha.

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