Whilst hardly shocking news considering the seemingly never ending decline over the past few years it has been reported that we can expect to watch the PC shipment levels fall by seven percent during 2014. As we, and many others, have written over the past few years desktop PC’s have seriously fallen out of favor ever since tablet computers started to arrive on the scene. To put it into perspective that 7 percent slump will still result in over 270 million computers shipping global over the next 12 months. Whilst this is not exactly a small number when compared to shipment figures for just mobile devices will be over 1.9 billion – yes that’s 1.9 billion!
Our friends at Gartner are predicting a staggering increase for tablet shipments during 2014 of 47 per cent – that will be nearly half as much again as was achieved in 2013!! As tablets, smartphones and small portable laptops have become even more powerful the marketplace that the desktop had carved out for itself is slowly disappearing. The recent CES show in Las Vegas has seen the predicted future unveiled by numerous manufactures and tablets have played a massive part of the show. Samsung seeming led the way with new a ’Galaxy Pro’ tablet that some have called contain the biggest new ideas for tablets since the launch of the iPad. How much of this statement is true and how much is paid advertising by Samsung remains to be seen but if any manufacture can create a tablet that works great for the business world and we can wave farewell to the desktop PC even quicker then we currently seem to be doing.
The days of the desktop PC are surely numbered as the continued decline seems to be unstoppable if the past few years are any indication so just how much longer can it hope to survive? Desktop manufactures such as HP, Dell and many others much surely look at the recent sales figures and the seemingly repetitive announcement at the end of every quarter and predictions for the coming year with concern. Unless consumer demands shift drastically back to the desktop pc it would seem that only fantastic technological advances or innovations can save the format from eventual doom.
