what market?
From the figures and the fact that you use GBP as currency it seems that you are talking about the UK market. Are you? Do we need to fall into the US syndrome where US and planet earth tend to merge into a single entity?
The PC market bounced back in the first quarter of 2015, mainly thanks to a big uplift in notebook sales. According to research from tech distribution sales data compiled by Context, the market rose by seven per cent on the year. Notebook sales were up 26 per cent to 644,304, while desktop sales remained flat at 237,700, and …
Give it a rest already.
Egyptians had their Pharaohs & 'ruled the world' at one time
Greeks
Romans
Attila & his Hun buddies.
The British Empire
US domination. Influence? Americanization? Whatever it is, it's in decline, and everybody knows it.
Next up: Asia - specifically China. Unless something major happens, Middle East being a wild card. Hell, we could be banging rocks together for communication this time next year.
In any case, I'm currently digging Raspberry Pi projects - where do they fit in? I've purchased four kits in the past month for this and that - a very cool *British* concept.
Actually, I think that is what is meant by "longer than expected lifecycle"
PCs as well as tablets are good enough these days that there is no urgency to replace them, either because of functionality or obsolescence.
Laptops (and does that include Chromebooks by any chance?) seem to be taking a while to catch up, but they will reach the plateau soon.
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I wouldn't say that the lifecycles are longer with tablets than they are with Laptops. I mean I'm writing this on a 2010 ThinkPad and I can still run the latest and greatest software. With a 2010 tablet I'd be stuck with whatever firmware image the vendor provides, which, even with better vendors, is probably from a few years back.
In a way the mobile market is a lot like the home computer market in the 1980s. You see lots of vendors essentially producing the same product, but essentally incompatible with the others. Just like CP/M we now have Android to smooth out the worst compatibilities. However upgrading such a device to the current version of Android, or another system all to gether is near impossible. The process would involve recreating proprietary binary blobs and porting it to every single model individually.
We've just got too much perfectly usable kit already?
Looking around my living room now I can see at least 9 desktops/laptops/tablets/phones. That's not counting the others hidden in cupboards and under the bed. The oldest items are maybe from 2008 but still do the job perfectly.
Saturation point was reached a long time ago.
The idea that tablets were cannibalizing PC sales in a major way was always fallacious. Tablets are an add-in device, good for surfing the web and reading your email from the couch. Now that tablets have hit saturation, they're not going to be the huge seller that the shortsighted idiots in the industry thought they were.
I personally don't plan on replacing my tablet until I break my current one, could be 10 years. And I figure that if a techie like me feels like that then most people are probably less likely to replace their tablets.