iPad, Other Tablets Will Hurt PC Sales, Gartner Says
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Led by the Apple iPad, consumer affection for tablets will continue to hurt PC sales, according to Gartner, which has lowered its forecasts for the next two years.
Led by the Apple iPad, media tablets are drawing consumer interest, and dollars, away from PCs, forcing Gartner analysts to lower their projections for 2011 and 2012. In a March 3 report, Gartner said it now expects worldwide PC shipments this year to grow 10.5 percent over 2010-instead of the 15.9 percent predicted earlier-reaching 387.8 million units in 2011, and by 13.6 percent, versus 14.8 percent, totaling 440.6 million units in 2012."We once thought that mobile PC growth would continue to be sustained by consumers buying second and third mobile PCs as personal devices. However, we now believe that consumers are not only likely to forgo additional mobile PC buys but are also likely to extend the lifetimes of the mobile PCs they retain as they adopt media tablets and other mobile PC alternatives as their primary mobile device," Gartner Research Director George Shiffler said in a statement.
While Gartner views PCs and tablets as competitors, other
firms have instead begun lumping them together-a practice that leads to
more happy results. Canalys, which
grouped PCs and media tablets in a Jan. 26 report on the fourth quarter of
2010, found the PC market to have grown by 19.2 percent year over year, while
Gartner announced a 3.1 percent growth and IDC a still more depressing 2.7
percent.
"Any argument that a [tablet] is not a PC is simply out of
sync," Canalys analyst Daryl Chiam said in a statement on the report. "With
screen sizes of 7 inches or above, ample processing power and a growing number
of applications, [tablets] offer a computing experience comparable to netbooks.
They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist. As with
smartphones, some users will require a physical keyboard, while others will do
without."
Chiam added that each new product category creates a shift
in market shares. Just as Acer, Asus and Samsung benefitted from the netbook
market they helped create, Apple is now riding high on the success of its iPad.
While Hewlett-Packard has long sat atop worldwide and U.S. PC shipment
rankings, when media tablets are figured into the equation, it's Apple that
takes the first chair.
During the third quarter of 2010, tablet shipments reached
4.5 million units, with 93
percent market share going to Apple, ABI Research reported Feb. 23. While
the industry's leading brands-among them Motorola, Samsung, Research In
Motion, HP and Lenovo-will this year be
working to chip away at that percentage through the
introduction of their own tablets, Apple has no intentions of giving up
a single percentage point without a fight.
Introducing the market's newest competition at a Cupertino, Calif., event March 2,
Apple CEO Steve Jobs jokingly asked if 2011 was the
year of the copycats-before adding that he believes it will instead be
the year of the Apple iPad 2.
