The PC Cliff: Analyst Details How the iPad Mini Could Impact PC Sales
By Karla Robinson
November 13, 2012
November 13, 2012
“I believe that the iPad mini and smaller tablets will be even more disruptive to the traditional PC market than the iPad has been to date,” writes analyst Tim Bajarin for Tech.pinions.- Eighty percent of the tasks consumers perform with a PC can be done with a tablet; keyboard accessories enable tablets to do more than just content consumption, he notes.
- Now with the smaller tablets, the ratio has shifted to 90-10. The iPad mini has become Bajarin’s “go-to-device because of its lightweight, small size and literal duplication of everything I have on the iPad as well as the full iPad experience,” he says.
- Bajarin has been interacting with iPad mini users: “Almost all that we talked to told us that the role of the laptop has diminished for them significantly since they got the iPad, and were now using the iPad mini more frequently than their larger iPads.”
- “They said that if the PC were only used 10-20 percent of the time, they would most likely just extend the life of their PCs or laptops instead of buying new ones. And if they did buy a new PC or laptop, it would be the cheapest they could find, as they could no longer justify a more expensive and powerful version if it mostly sat at home and used for such a short time for more data or media intensive apps”
- Some argue that PCs will still be around to fulfill data/media intensive tasks.
- “But if tablets increase their role as the dominant device for consumers to access the majority of their digital needs, than the impact on PC demand has to be impacted down the road,” Bajarin writes. “In fact, some key industry insiders call this the PC Cliff, suggesting that we could see a time in the not-so-distant future where demand for PCs fall by a steep amount, giving way to tablets that will take over their role as the major growth segment and primary of the PC industry.”
- “I fear that a PC cliff is not far off and we are urging all PC vendors to seriously consider the ramifications of what these smaller tablets will mean to their future PC and laptop demand,” he concludes.
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