Wanna scare a PC maker? Pull out a tablet. It’s become common knowledge that the iPad and other tablet devices are going to eat the PC’s breakfast, but now a lengthy Wall Street report calls tablets “one of the most disruptive forces” for PCs this year. How disruptive? Try 21 million lost notebook sales – just this year.
But what about all of these Android-based tablets appearing? Surely Apple’s iPad can’t dominate for long, right? Apple likely will own 64 percent of the tablet market this year and 74 percent if the Android alternatives disappoint. “We believe the downside scenario for Android shipments is more likely at this point,” Goldman Sachs tells investors Tuesday.
As for Apple, we may learn more about its iPad sales Wednesday, when the tech giant reports its second-quarter financials after the market closes.
[Barron’s]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
2 responses to “Goldman: Tablets Will ‘Disrupt’ 35 Percent of PC Sales”
In the not too distant future the PC as we now know it will be a relic of the past. As hardware, chips, SSDs, batteries, etc. gets smaller, and smaller we’ll have tablets that are much faster with much more power and memory that anything available today. We’ll have a small box that wi-fies (or whatever we’ll call it then) throughout our home or work building and can communicate with many tablets. Simply thing of it as like a present-day iPad but with the power, memory, etc. of a Mac Pro … except even better than that.
That super powerful, very light and very thin tablet will be available in various sizes, and will either be hand held and touch-screen controlled, or it will be set into a holding device to set on a desk and be controlled by a wireless keyboard and mouse.
This is what Jobs means when he says the post PC era.