IDC: Tablets To Outpace PCs - The PC Is Dead, Long Live The PC!

A new forecast out from market analysis firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has tablets outgrowing laptops and other portable PCs this year, and exceeding the entire PC market, including desktop computers, by 2015. This forecast comes after a dismal first quarter of 2013 saw PC shipments drop over 13 percent worldwide.

IDC's new numbers have the PC market declining by a total of 7.8 percent, up from the previously estimated 1.3 percent, which was thought to be followed by a gradual uptick in shipments. At the same time, IDC expects tablet shipments to grow from 144.5 million total last year to up to 229.3 million units this year—a ridiculous increase of 58.7 percent this year. By 2015, IDC expects tablets to outpace the entire PC market - desktop computer and laptops, combined.

What's driving the trend? Mobility, cost, and people getting used to smaller screen sizes, says IDC. At the beginning of the tablet revolution, Apple was offering a 9.7-inch iPad for a base price of $499. The worldwide average selling price for tablets in 2013 is now expected to decrease this year by over 10 percent to $381. This, compared to the worldwide average selling price of PCs, which is almost double, at $635.

The price decrease has to do with increasingly popular low-cost tablets, many of them Android-powered, which have gotten smaller, with smaller displays, and more mobile. This is the year market analysts have predicted that sales of 7.9-inch iPad Minis will outpace those of regular iPads, and IDC sees the sub 8-inch tablet market expanding even further into 2017.

Worldwide Tablet Market Share by Screen Size Band, 2011 - 2017 

Source: IDC Worldwide Tablet Tracker, May 28, 2013

While some PC companies struggle to adjust to the trend - and some, like Dell, just might not make it - this news is not the death knell of the PC. The increase in tablets is largely driven by consumers who need a cheap, elegant, general-use computing device to meet core needs, but IDC notes that PCs will continue to play an important role in the next generations of computing, especially for businesses. And IDC predicts that both the portable PC and combined PC market will eventually stop losing sales at such an incredible pace and finally level off by 2017.

And as more tablets gain PC-like features, it's going to be increasingly hard to tell what is technically a "tablet" and what's a mobile pc or laptop. Microsoft's Surface tablets blur the line between tablet/laptop from the high-end tablet side and HP's upcoming SlateBook x2 seems like a low-cost touchscreen laptop running Android.

Perhaps the tablet is just the current manifestation of Moore's law, which effectively says that computing technology gets better, faster, smaller, and less costly every couple of years. With new tablet features becoming more common - like accessories which go beyond just the touchscreen, and processors which provide more processing power without sucking so much battery power, and laptops getting less heavy, less expensive, and staying just as powerful, the line between tablets and laptops will probably disappear. So in the end, while we'll probably lose the huge beige boxes, the personal computer will stay very much alive.

(IDC via Mac Rumors)