Article highlights reasons for the decline in PC business and growing popularity of tablets.
The article on The Guardian notes the decline of the traditional PC business over recent years, with IDC predicting this to continue with shipments estimated to drop 10.1 percent in 2013 compared to 2012 from 349.2 million to 314 million, and its 2017 estimate seeing shipments reduced to 305 million.
The rise in popularity of tablets has been attributed to the decline in PCs, with the article claiming that “people have discovered that tablets can do pretty much all the computing jobs they want done” and describing tablets as “neat, focused, and its battery life lasts longer than a laptop”.
Horace Dediu, who runs his own Asymco consultancy, explained that people purchase technology as “hiring [things] for a job to be done”, with PCs performing a number of jobs but being vulnerable to having these “peeled away” by other devices.
“The PC is a strange beast in that it seems to be a complicated, multi-dimensional product that was hired for different jobs throughout its life,” Dediu said. “It seems to depend on new jobs to keep going and these jobs are peeled off by other devices over time. Once it runs out of new jobs it will inevitably decline. At least that’s my hypothesis.”
Despite initial scepticism at the concept of tablets following the first rumours of Apple’s iPad in January 2010, sales of tablets have rapidly increased and are now soaring worldwide, with the devices set to outsell PCs in the three months leading to and including Christmas and tablets expected to be “seriously outselling” PCs throughout the whole of 2016.
The article notes that people began to realise that despite there being “no physical keyboard, no slot for USB sticks or SD cards […] no camera, no HDMI port for TV-out”, tablets “were mobile and really handy: you could pick one up and do a task […] in a moment and then put it down and get on with something else. Tablets brought us what you could call three-second computing”.
However, Dediu points out that adoption rates of PCs “lagged behind other technologies” like colour TV, microwaves, mobile phones and tablets, suggesting that they were never as popular as we might think. He also adds that manufacturing PCs “has never been a particularly profitable business” for PC companies, with an average profit five years ago of $25 (€18) per PC on machines sold for an average of $640 (€468).