Android tablets to outsell laptops by 2017: IDC Hot on the heels of news that the PC market is withering before our collective eyes, box-counter IDC has emitted data suggesting the tablet market is also slowing down. The news isn't all bad, as can be seen in the graph below and its prediction that nearly 400 million slabs of various sizes will sell each year by 2017. But …
This post has been deleted by its author
punters will have been sold another greatest breakthrough in computing since Windows Vista, and tablets will have been good for turning them into tile roofs.
nooooo, you got it all wrong, they're here to stay, says The Great Man from The Company at the Top, serving a Gospel to his audience (tickets from $1000 at the stalls)
I've just got an android phone - now rooted to Linux. It will be a phone in my pocket and I will be able to plug it into a monitor,keyboard and mouse and usb storage when I need them. Apart from a presence on a distribute server farm somewhere its almost all I need to run my business and life. I have access to just about every linux package I could ever want - even Java! I can turn it into a full blown music workstation, recording studio and media player as an when I like. Without letting some tosser at Google or whoever wrote the poxy app was written know anything about me or my habbits.
I can even run OpenOffice for people who need 19th century documents.
Its a pretty powerful computer and it can do computery things and I'm not sure why Android was ever needed.
And for a giggle I can make the desktop(?) look like an Apple device so no-one steals it.
In 2017 MS wont be getting much Android tax as a £50 phone or tablet with linux on it will sell a lot better than the same hardware with Android for £60 and will be more than good enough for most people.
"Android tablets to outsell laptops by 2017"
What? It took overpaid bean counters to work that one out?
What do 99% of the great unwashed do with their PCs? Twat/Fakef**ker, bit of banking, masturbate, games and such. You don't need a hulking PC for that anymore.
Why spend £loads on a PC when a £Cheap tablet allows you to do the same.
For posting to Facebook, Twitter (or The Reg), I still find something with an actual keyboard far better than an annoying touchscreen keyboard. Plus it's more comfortable to have something that sits on my lap rather than having to hold in my hands. (And I know you can get stands/keyboards for tablets, but these mean you then have to use it on a desk - kind of ironic that most "desktops" OSs these days are used on people's laps, and handheld "tablets" end up being used on a desk...)
I agree with you on cost - this is one factor that will make tablets become very popular. It makes the elusive $99 personal computer finally possible. Plus I suspect it means people will upgrade them more often, especially as they are also a newer technology (which means more sales, but not necessarily a larger installed userbase).
I just hate the whole "tablets vs PCs" thing. I love the Nexus 7 I bought this year, but it didn't stop me using my laptop, it's something I use in addition. If tablet sales overtake laptops, that doesn't mean laptop sales have fallen to zero. The new 2-in-1/convertibles make the whole distinction a bit blurred anyway - is the Asus T100 counted as a "PC" or a "tablet" in these stats? Did we have the whole "PCs are dying" doom and gloom when laptops started selling more? No, it was just a different form of personal computing.
How many discarded tablets will you have thrown away by 2017? ARM based appliances don't have a very long shelf life. It's like PCs in the 90s. Every year's performance improvements are drastic enough that you want to buy a new device even if you can't quite afford it.
My current PCs will probably still be perfectly useful in 2017.
It would take just one fashionable product that needs USB 3.0 to change the game, given over a billion of the PCs in use every day lack modern hardware but also lack good reasons to refresh even as reach 5, 8 years old.
Not saying its going to happen but shows how dependent these analyst predictions are on the assumption that nobody will make any interesting products, hardware or software, for the PC in the next few years.
Does it really matter if the unwashed masses switch from buying cheap crapola laptops that end up in the landfill in 4 years (half that if the owner is a klutz), or cheap crapola tablets that cost half as much and end up in the landfill in half that time?
Either way, it's stupid people buying low end tech and using it to consume vapid and/or sexual content ("dick and drivel"), and throwing it away when it craps out.
It only matters to the manufacturers in the junk business (as Tim Cook called it, in just about his only decent quote as CEO)....
Seems highly reminiscent of their predictions for a late, suprise success of Windows in the phone market. They basically make these numbers up to suit don't they?
This prediction from 2009, for the year 2013 is really quite wrong, which calls into question why we're even bothering to report their newer predictions:
http://wmpoweruser.com/idc-predict-strong-windows-mobile-growth-windows-mobile-7-success/
I agree that these predictions are often quite useless and seem quite simplistic, based on simple linear extrapolation.
Though on the Windows prediction for 2013 - what are the actual sales so far for 2013 then? Q3 2013 was over 10 million ( http://www.windowsphone-news.com/windows-phone-tops-10-million-sales-in-last-quarter/ ). First two quarters were less than this, but whilst it clearly won't be as high as the predicted 50 million/year, I wouldn't say that this prediction is "really quite wrong" - I'd say it's not bad, considering this was made 4 years ago.
What they didn't see was the complete loss of Symbian (due to Nokia switching to WP, which in fact is what has fuelled the recent growth of WP), or the demise of Blackberry, with iphone being slightly ahead of WP, and Android way ahead of everyone. And I suppose if you want to be completely pedantic, their Windows Mobile prediction was completely wrong, because it's now Windows Phone...
> their Windows Mobile prediction was completely wrong, because it's now Windows Phone...
Which is a large part of why they didn't sell as many as the prediction. Microsoft dumped WM6.x and replaced it with a completely incompatible WP7 (but still CE based and thus rather limited). This then was dumped and replaced by a mostly incompatible WP8.
With the RT/WP 'convergence' scheduled for 2015 this may result in yet another incompatible system.
This dump and replace 'strategy' disrupts the developers and enterprise users who build their own in-house apps, which then cascades down to general users.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
