Tablets to outship laptops in 2016 SHOCK
Ultrabooks encouraging sales - but not enough to beat the 'pads
More tablet market bullishness, this time from research company NPD DisplaySearch. World+Dog will buy more tablets than notebooks from 2016 onwards.
Still, DisplaySearch isn't as bullish as Microsoft, which last week said it expects the market to definitively favour tablets over notebooks in 2013.
Then, some 715m mobile computers will ship, up from the 374m DisplaySearch reckcons will ship in 2012. Of the latter, 208m units will be notebooks. By 2016, that figure will have risen to 397m, an overall increase of 90.9 per cent.
Tablets, however, will have ramped up from 121m units to 403m, and increase of 233.1 per cent.
So much for the Ultrabook "revolution".
Established and emerging markets alike will increasingly favour tablets, but growth will be higher in the former, DisplaySearch said.
Emerging markets may prove the saviour of the netbook, a category already in decline and, according to DisplaySearch's forecast, due to fall to near zero shipments - well, fewer than 3m worldwide - in 2016… before reviving again to just over 3m units in 2017. ®
COMMENTS
Tablets to outship laptops in 2016 SHOCK
ie. toys are more popular than computers. 'twaserver thus.
Exaggerated
I can't believe it will be true and if it does I'm quite sure the notebook+desktop pc market will continue being bigger in numbers than the tablet market.
In the same way netbooks were supposed to take over the world I don't think tablets will displace notebooks any time soon unless groundbreaking evolutions are produced. For me it would be portrait mode use with wireless keyboard (for working on a letter-like document), preferably A4 sized, as I don't think there is any notebook with rotating screen.
There are too many work items and even entertainment / games that are done more efficiently and/or pleasurably on a true computer. If not a notebook then a desktop computer. It is often very awkward to use the tablet while holding it at the same time. And if you have a stand and a keyboard, why use a tablet where a notebook with bigger screen size is a possibility.
Also smartphones' growth will - even if only partly - cannibalize tablets more than ultrabooks.
Lastly in the same way many owner of notebooks also own desktop pcs, many tablet owners also own a notebook if not a notebook and a desktop pc. I would hazard a guess that very few consumers own tablets exclusively.
Re: Tablet+Desktop+TV?
"Ultrabook=Tablet with a screen? - but tablets can do that already"
But the tablet is only a subset of the ultrabook features, while the ultrabook does everything a tablet does. And of course, everything's controlled in a way that PC's just aren't. And the tablets are so crippled and controlled that you'll probably want a PC anyway.
Save your money and spend it on a bullworker so you can lift that heavy laptop.
On the one hand, yes, tablets may sell more because they can probably be viewed as more personal than computers and laptops. Therefore, you may find households buying one computer for the house and a tablet for each person.
On the other hand, they will sell more until everyone has one and/or the excitement fades away, then sales will slow down as people just replace broken or outdated tablets.
I just surmised that in about 30 seconds. I'm sure they "research" these things in more depth, but I really don't know how they occupy the other 7 hours of their working day. Or how they get paid for spouting such pointless crap.
