If Asymco isn’t already in your RSS feed, it should be. His newest entry concerning the latest numbers from Gartner and IDC PC shipment numbers points out some interesting trends that are being completely ignored by the other analysts looking at the same numbers. It also has possibly the tallest chart I’ve seen on the web.
Views on this market depend entirely on how you (arbitrarily) decide to segment it. Are the new tablets “media tablets” or just the next logical evolution of portable computing and thus extremely personal “Personal Computers”. And while we’re at it, can we just be honest and say the iPad market?
The confusion in the analyst and pundit community over the Post-PC era seems to see everything in absolutes, whereas every shift in generation has been a layer added on top of the previous generation. Each era is not defined by the extinction of the previous one, but rather that the new one becomes the primary computing tool for the majority of users, while still reserving the previous generation for all of those tasks better suited to their characteristics.
This is why the flow from mainframes to minis to workstations to PC’s to notebooks to tablets has relegated each of the previous generations to specific niches where they meet specific needs. They certainly haven’t disappeared. IBM is still making mainframes to the tune of nearly $100B in 2010. PC’s and notebooks will be with us for a long time to come. But the new growth is coming from the post-PC tablet that is accessible to the much larger public.
And stop calling them “media tablets”. Personally, media consumption (defined as audio and video) is pretty far down the list of my uses for the iPad. My primary use cases (in no particular order) are as a:
-
reading device
-
writing device
-
document review device
-
task management device
-
email client
-
web browser
-
chat client
-
RSS reader
-
SSH client
-
VNC/RDP client
-
gaming device
-
remote control