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PC Market Gartner slashes PC market forecast – my wife would agree

Research firm gartner has cut its PC Market forecast citing a move away from traditional computing towards tablets. I think we are not far off the tipping point. My 11 year old son’s laptop may well be the last PC we buy for the family.

My wife, whose PC is about 8 years old, keeps asking to borrow my iPad. She uses it primarily to look up recipes for family meals and sometimes has it propped up in the kitchen when she is cooking.

Her only other uses for a PC are email, banking and sites such as eBay where she is an avid participant. If the browser was reliable enough, which it isn’t on the iPad without support for flash, a tablet with keypad would be all she needed.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

8 replies on “PC Market Gartner slashes PC market forecast – my wife would agree”

I should add that the UI needs to be as simple as Apple’s. It has to be completely idiot proof and I do accept that that comes with some baggage (not saying that Mrs Davies is an idiot of course).

Interesting thought. Had I owned a tablet when I was younger (back then no such thing existed, of course) then would I ever have ended up writing and developing web content / systems and sites? The versatility to explore those things just isn’t there. In the long run might businesses also lose out due to the dumbing down of IT skills by over simplified computing or will it have the opposite effect? Hmm.

Not just a consumer driven thing. As large organisations move from “a PC on every desk” to “a thin client on each desk and a network link to a huge server farm of virtual PCs” the market for desktops will shrink still faster.

Get an Android tablet then! My wife uses an Asus Transformer tablet now in the house and the desktop PC never gets used. The tablet is sooo much faster. We’ve got the plug in keyboard too, but it rarely gets used.
I also agree that the tablet will probably be the future direction of computing. The UI (both on Andriod and Apple – but I much prefer Android) is so much easier to use than Windows, especially for the first time user. Even my 3 year old uses the tablet now and can navigate through different apps.

Just wondering how she uploads photos to Ebay from her digital camera.

My wife uses computers for pretty much the same as yours but as far as I can see the photo part of it still needs a computer with a interface for the camera, even if it’s only a staging post between the camera and the internet.

biscuit
she still uses a computer. the ipad isnt quite there yet. Mind you the photos I take with my Android are automatically uploaded to Google+ and it may not be long before you can browse there to select photos for uploading (or at least to move onto your tablet for access).
tref

As Mark suggests the flexibility of a full computer is going to be needed for a good few years yet, tablets and smartphones are slowly eroding the requirement to have a PC, but for techies I think the requirement will remain for a good few years.

One thing in the back of my head is the IBM quote that there’ll only be a market for 5 computers in the world. With virtualisation and tablet devices I’m beginning to think they may have been onto something all along…

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