Tablets are an increasing part of the device market share, with more and more people welcoming big, flat touch screens into their lives with glee. Apple's iPad launched the trend, and just about every other electronics maker followed suit.
It's been speculated about for a while whether the slim touch devices would eventually replace PCs, and we're getting our first glimpse that this might become reality. Forecasts by market intelligence firm IDC suggest that tablets will outsell PCs for the first time in 2015.
The company published two separate reports, one for PC and one for tablets, forecasting the growth and sales of each platform. Though both have slowed recently, PCs have done so much more severely, and you'd have to think there are many more people still without tablets than without a computer.
Whether it's an iPad, Galaxy Tab, Kindle Fire, Microsoft Surface or any other make and model, tablets have increasingly flooded the market since 2010 when the first iPad debuted. It feels like much longer ago to me that the new type of device become so popular, perhaps due to the many iterations and release that have occurred in that time.
Apple has released eight different types of iPad since then between new generations of the device, improvements within each generation, and more recently the iPad Mini and iPad Air. The other electronics makers have done similarly, as constantly improving technology and an enthusiast market mean a consistent reason to release new hardware.
We're starting to see the slowdown of these devices after the initial burst of must-have fever they planted in many people for years. They are poised to pass PCs however, which justifies theories of device convergence, something we see in hybrid devices like the Surface and even in Microsoft's game console, the Xbox One, which wants to be your media center. It will be interesting to see how these trends change or continue over the next few years as more hardware share even more similarities.
Source: Mashable
