There’s no real secret about the state of the PC market these days. Gartner has found that the market has contracted by 14% for the last 5 years and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down or stopping. Sure they’re still the biggest selling types of tech, but it’s all relative. PC has had some 10 years head start on the Mobile market.
Having said that, the tablet market has been advancing at a fair clip over the last few years, and when looking at the trends, by Q2 next year tablets will be outselling PCs.
UPDATE 2017: In an interesting twist since this article was written, tablet sales began dropping as younger users preferred to use laptops for their computing needs.
The numbers behind this certainly support this view. In Q2 2012 tablets were selling 36.1 million, this year Q2 they sold 51.7 million units. That’s a jump of almost 20 million more units sold in only a year. In comparison, last estimates of PC sales put it at around 75-76 million units. If we assume that tablets will continue growing at the same rate as they have been and that PC shrinks as it has been, we could easily see tablet sales surpassing the home computer for the first time.
So what does this mean? Well that we’re probably looking at reaching the “post-PC” area sooner than we had predicted. But are we really surprised?
This has been coming for a while, essentially ever since the iPhone came along and proved that the world had been crying out for something new and different. Mobile is so successful because most people don’t need or want the sheer power and complexity that a full on PC offers. Most just want a device that they can watch videos on, play simple games, browse the internet and keep tabs on their various e-social circles. Tablets allow consumers to do that with the added benefit of a screen that doesn’t require you to squint so much when watching something small or reading something.
In comparison, PCs are likely to become a more and more niche market, but it’s highly unlikely they will ever properly disappear. Despite the huge advances in mobile power capability, if you want to do something that requires real computational power, or if you want to do any real work, the PC is still where it’s at.
It will be interesting to see where the PC and Mobile markets go after their respective sales lines cross over. Will we see new form factor tablets arriving hoping to coax the working PC users away? Will PCs continue their march into all-in-one form factors with touchscreens?
Whatever the case, this is a great time to be involved in the mobile market, and as an app developer, there’s no better time than now to be thinking about making an app for tablets. So if you’re an app developer looking to make an app for tablets, regardless of the OS, Kumulos have you covered with our Mobile backend as a Service that we can promise will make creating a Mobile Backend for your app the easiest thing you’ve done since dreaming up that app idea.
