The impact of tablets on the consumer market and to a lesser extent, the business market is highlighted in a new report from Canalys:
“Canalys today announced that it expects Apple to overtake HP to become the leading global PC vendor before the second half of 2012. Pads, and particularly the iPad, have radically changed the dynamics of the PC industry over the last year, already propelling Apple into second place in the worldwide PC market in Q3 2011. Canalys estimates full-year 2011 global PC shipments to reach 415 million, up 15% year-on-year, thanks predominantly to increasing pad sales.”
If you do the math (as eMarketeer has done, see above) by 2014, one in three households will have at least one tablet and use it on a regular basis. Despite downplay by Intel and AMD, tablets are having impact on media consumption (Kindle Fire marketing trumps its “18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books” and integration with the likes of Hulu and Netflix) and application delivery model such as the iTunes and Android app markets. Microsoft is even taking the tablet into account in the upcoming Windows 8 OS with some rumored iPad features. You would be hard-pressed to find a major company that is not undertaking a mobile initiative where one of the key platforms is the iPad. However, the true impact of the tablet will not be felt for a couple of years. Currently, many families and companies are purchasing tablets to see what the hype is, what can be done with them, and discovering if they are truly useful on a daily basis. After a year or two of use, families and firms will decide if they want to invest in purchasing the next generation of tablet platform (iPad 4/Android 6.0 “New York Cheesecake”) because they believe in its usefulness. It is when those purchases are made that the impact of the tablet on the computing world will be more than a footnote (ie. the Network Computer).
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