A report from analyst company Gartner said that the traditional PC market will slip in 2013 by 7.6 percent as people open their wallets to spend on tablets and smartphones instead.
Gartner said the availability of low end tablets coupled with the features they’re now able to offer is fueling the move from PCs to tablets. Said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at the company: “While there will be some individuals who retain both a personal PC and a tablet… most will be satisfied with the experience they get from a tablet as their main computing device.”
Worryingly for PC vendors and X86 companies, people no longer think of PCs as devices that they have to replace regularly.
She said: “This is not a temporary trend induced by a more austere economic environment; it is a reflection of a long term change.”
Gartner estimates that worldwide tablet shipments will be 197 million units this year, a 69.8 percent increase.
And the Android operating system is set to dominate a mixed market which includes PCs, as this chart shows.
Gartner said that smartphones are becoming more affordable. “The trend towards smartphones and tablets will have much wider implications than hardware displacement,” Milanesi said.
