No product in Apple’s history has sold faster than the Apple iPad, about 55 million units so far. “It took us years to sell iPhones, Macs and iPods,” says Apple CEO Tim Cook. “This thing is on a trajectory that's off the charts.”
That inevitably raises questions, such as whether tablets as a product category will displace PCs. Apple has definite opinions. The tablet market will be bigger than the PC market, ultimately, Cook argues. Right now, it is hard to argue with that forecast.
Cook says he does 80 percent to 90 percent of his work on an iPad. It wouldn’t be hard to see that being the case for many knowledge workers or executives who mostly consume content rather than create it, sales forces that mostly use screens to make presentations, or customer service personnel who mostly interact with information, rather than creating it.
In consumer settings, as there are many people who find the way they use Internet apps can be handled by a smart phone, others might find that, most of the time, the things they “use PCs” for actually can be done on a tablet.
The extent to which that means they will buy more tablets, and fewer PCs, is probably not debatable. People are shifting discretionary spending into purchasing of tablets. In multi-PC homes, that probably means “most” of the devices will, over time, come to be tablets, not PCs.
Most multi-PC homes will continue to have a PC. But the incremental spending likely will be on tablets, one might argue.
Perhaps in large part, the iPad resonated with consumers because they had been “prepped” for the device. “The iTunes Store was already in play, the App Store was already in play,” Cook says. “People were trained on iPhone.”
“They already knew about multi-touch,” for example. “Lots of things that became intuitive when you used a tablet, came from before.”
Cook says he does 80 percent to 90 percent of his work on an iPad. It wouldn’t be hard to see that being the case for many knowledge workers or executives who mostly consume content rather than create it, sales forces that mostly use screens to make presentations, or customer service personnel who mostly interact with information, rather than creating it.
In consumer settings, as there are many people who find the way they use Internet apps can be handled by a smart phone, others might find that, most of the time, the things they “use PCs” for actually can be done on a tablet.
The extent to which that means they will buy more tablets, and fewer PCs, is probably not debatable. People are shifting discretionary spending into purchasing of tablets. In multi-PC homes, that probably means “most” of the devices will, over time, come to be tablets, not PCs.
Most multi-PC homes will continue to have a PC. But the incremental spending likely will be on tablets, one might argue.
Perhaps in large part, the iPad resonated with consumers because they had been “prepped” for the device. “The iTunes Store was already in play, the App Store was already in play,” Cook says. “People were trained on iPhone.”
“They already knew about multi-touch,” for example. “Lots of things that became intuitive when you used a tablet, came from before.”
What seems to have happened is that the tablet enables about 80 percent of the activities people use PCs for, even if tablets do not enable the final 20 percent of activities that have to do with content creation.
It isn't that PCs do not have unique value. It's just that what most people do, most of the time, seems not to require all that value. So, yes, it would be reasonable to predict that, in the future, tablets will outnumber PCs.
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