We are clearly now in the “post-PC” era. According to IDC, as reported by Reuters, Q4 PC sales were down significantly from last year:
PC makers sold 89.8 million units worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year, down 6.4 percent from the same quarter of 2011. That was slightly worse than expected by most, and the worst performance for more than five years, when the global economy shuddered to a halt and ushered in the worst recession since World War II.
For all of 2012, 352 million PCs were sold, down 3.2 percent from 2011. That was the first annual decline since 2001, according to IDC, in the wake of the tech stock crash and the September 11 attacks.
Source: IDC (1/13)
So far consumers are largely indifferent to Windows 8 and the Microsoft RT tablet PC hasn’t caught on. According to Samsung execs, speaking to CNET, soft demand will keep the company from introducing a Windows RT machine in the US:
Mike Abary, the Samsung senior vice president . . . told CNET today at the Consumer Electronics Show that the Korean electronics giant won’t be launching its Qualcomm-powered Windows RT device in the US . . . First, feedback from its retail partners indicated demand for such products is only modest. Second, Samsung determined it would take a lot of investment to inform consumers about the benefits of Windows RT.
Later today comScore will release December US search market share numbers that indicate PC search volumes are declining, cannibalized by a shift to mobile. This is from my post at Search Engine Land:
[O]verall query volume appears to be declining as mobile devices cannibalize traffic. According to one [Wall Street] analyst, “The declines of the past four months represent the first declines in total desktop search volume since we began tracking the data in 2006.”
We wrote about this last month, observing that In October 2011 “explicit core search queries” were 18.07 billion. In November 2012 there were more than a billion fewer queries.
In addition comScore data (September, 2012) show that Google Maps on mobile devices now has more usage than its PC counterpart.
However these data pre-date the introduction of Apple Maps. It’s not clear how much Google Maps traffic on mobile has suffered as a result.
What’s happening is a parallel fragmentation of the device market. We’ve moved from PC only to PC, tablets and smartphones. Usage, similarly, is being distributed across these devices and platforms. It’s pretty clear that while the PC/laptop will remain important it will never return to the position enjoyed before the advent of the iPhone and iPad.
January 11th, 2013 at 7:33 pm
[...] to come.” Great, perhaps, but also much more expensive — so presumably Firefox is worth it.by Kara Swisher Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. Earlier this week, Google an…y copy" src="http://allthingsd.com/files/2011/12/monopoly-copy-380×276.png" alt="" width="380" [...]
January 13th, 2013 at 10:17 am
Smartphones and tablets are good for checking emails, writing short messages and following up on your social media networks, but people will continue sticking to PCs to perform more complex tasks. Laptops are becoming increasingly smaller, while smartphones and tablets come in very diverse sizes (to some you can even attach a separate keyboard and turn them into mini-laptops). The line between PC and mobile becomes thinner and thinner, I think it’s just a matter of time before it will disappear completely.
January 13th, 2013 at 2:21 pm
I agree that these device categories are getting closer. Laptops will remain important, as you say, for more complex tasks. But tablets that are tied to the cloud and have keyboards will be able to substitute in many situations.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:12 pm
[...] even today. We know that the great mobile shift has arrived. If we needed any further confirmation, comScore has reported that more people now access Google Maps from smartphones than PCs. This does not mean the end of [...]
January 21st, 2013 at 12:28 am
Dorethea I think that you will be surprised by the amount of jobs and tasks that are being “unleashed” from the desktop/laptop by the myriad of apps that are now available on phones and tablets.
For example, bookwork used to have to be done on a computer and now a lot of the data entry (invoices, etc) now happens onsite using apps. Even apps like zendesk let you do your customer service via phones and tablets.
More and more functionality is being provided by the tablets and phones, rendering the old computers useless for anything but the most complex of tasks.