Although this was said to happen later than this year, it now appears that tablets are moving faster and they’re ready to overtake the PCs in the shipments area. IDC has just posted a new report, showing that that the worldwide smart connected device market has passed 1 billion shipments in 2012.
The same report is saying that tablet shipments will surpass desktop PC shipments in 2013 and portable PC shipments in 2014. The desktop PC shipments are expected to drop by 4.3% this year, while portable PCs will remain at a flat growth rate of 0.9%. On the tablet side IDC predicts shipments of 190 million units, meaning the segment would grow with 48.7%.
Smartphones will register a growth of 27.2%, that would bring the number to 918.5 million. Reasons why tablets are beating PCs? Lower prices, since we’ve even seen appealing tablets at $100 and phablets at similar prices. There’s no limit to the form factor variety from Asia and the devices will continue to evolve, getting Retina Displays and quad core CPUs for less than $200.
