Canalys - page 2

We’re living in a post-PC age. You know it. I know it. Steve Jobs knew it when he coined the phrase three years ago at the original iPad launch event, and of course, it was the iPad that was in many ways the final nail in the coffin of decades of PC market growth.

Apple’s still the number one PC maker by unit sales, but even the growth of the Mac has been shrinking, while other PC Makers numbers are in freefall. Analysis firm Canalys, which does a lot of business analyzing PC sales, made a bizarre decision a while back to inflate their numbers by including tablets as PCs.

Even by that measure, though, Apple’s still the number one “PC” maker. But because Apple hasn’t released an iPad or iPad mini so far this year, they find that the “PC” Market was flat in Q2 2013.

Android doesn’t look like it’s about to lose any of its market share to competing platforms any time soon. During the first quarter of 2013, Google’s platform powered a whipping 59.9% of all smart mobile devices sold as total shipments hit 308.7 million units.

Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, was installed on just 19.3% of devices — despite the success of its iPhones and iPads.

The App Store and Google Play continued to drive mobile app downloads during the first quarter of 2013, while BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain “distant challengers.”

That’s according to the latest figures from Canalys, which say a whopping 13.4 billion apps were downloaded across these four stores over the last three months, raking in $2.2 billion in app sales, in-app purchases, and subscriptions.

When you combine all the titles in Apple’s App Store with those in Google Play, you have a catalog of more than 1.4 million apps from hundreds of thousands of developers. But incredibly, more than 50% of the revenue made by these stores in the United States goes to just 25 app developers.

Sources familiar with Apple’s plans have revealed to Reuters that the company’s “iPhone 5” will launch with a smaller, 19-pin dock connector that will make room for a headphone jack on the bottom of the device. The move will mean that existing iPhone accessories — which use Apple’s existing 30-pin connector — won’t be compatible with the new handset.

While we can debate how much the iPad cannibalizes Apple’s MacBook sales, there’s no doubt that the device is continuing to kill of the entire netbook industry. While iPad sales are literally selling as fast as Apple can make them, netbook sales continue to plummet – with the first quarter of this year representing a sixth consecutive quarter in which shipments of the small, inexpensive, and often low quality PC notebooks have declined sharply.