
Apple IPad’s ‘Buzz Saw’ Success Cuts PC Sales at HP, Dell - petethomas
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-18/apple-ipad-s-buzz-saw-success-cuts-pc-sales-at-hp-dell.html
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roc
> _"The tablet is going to replace at least the home computer."_

I don't know about that. But what I think is still a huge deal, and far more
likely, is that families will trend back toward one shared PC in the den and
use multiple secondary devices for individual use.

While I don't think you can get away _without_ a home PC, you can certainly
share one more easily when all but a handful of tasks are doable (if not more
enjoyable) on a tablet.

And that's going to hurt a lot of home PC purchasing, with the notable
exception of when the kids go off to college.

~~~
cryptoz
> While I don't think you can get away without a home PC

Are you saying this about today, May 18 2011? If you are, I suppose you might
be right. But by, say, the end of the year, or maybe next year, I think you'll
be absolutely wrong. The tablet market moves fast and soon there won't be a
single task that isn't only doable but indeed more enjoyable on the tablet.

Right now, my Xoom outperforms (measured in my happiness levels, not CPU
speed) all my home PCs for every single task except software development. I
see no reason at all to have a home PC if you own a Xoom or similar tablet. I
just bought the nice bluetooth keyboard which means that now even composing
blog entries or writing emails is nicer on the tablet.

Everything's changing, and fast. It would be shortsighted to suggest that
everyone needs an i7, 4GB of RAM, 2TB of storage and a DVD drive in 2011.
Desktops will become more and more of a niche device, used only by nerds,
while tablets and their descendants will take over the whole consumer market.

~~~
hvs
Tablets can't do serious gaming.

~~~
swombat
99% of people don't give a toss about serious gaming.

The iPad has become the primary gaming device for me - I rarely ever play
video games elsewhere.

~~~
ugh
Also, gaming consoles exist. A PC was never necessary for serious gaming.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
untrue, but it was more than ten years ago...

~~~
ugh
Why is that? You will have to explain your odd view a bit more, I fear.

I can understand that some people prefer PC gaming for one reason or another
but I think I’m quite correct in guessing that those people are a tiny
minority – it’s a niche.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
there was a brief window when online 3d gaming was first taking off and none
of the major consoles supported it in a good way -- the only game in town for
hardcore gaming was the PC. Sure, the dreamcast might have been _able_ to do
it, but everybody was using gamespy to connect to their favorite servers.

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kenjackson
The numbers don't add up...

PC sales are about 85-90M per quarter. iPad was selling at 4.7M that quarter.
If every person who was going to buy a PC bought an iPad it would be a 5.5%
reduction. Consumers are about half the market, so maybe you say 11% of the
consumer market. And that again is assuming EVERY iPad sale is a lost consumer
PC sale. HP dropping 20%+ is bigger than the iPad.

~~~
rick_bc
You forgot about Mac :)

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6ren
> Tablet owners are actually more likely than US online consumers in general
> to have recently bought a PC

[http://blogs.forrester.com/sarah_rotman_epps/11-05-17-hps_ea...](http://blogs.forrester.com/sarah_rotman_epps/11-05-17-hps_earnings_and_the_post_pc_era)

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antidaily
The price point is similar. Both browse the internet just fine. But one has
Angry Birds and FaceTime. One is new and cool. One is dusty, has viruses and
keeps reminding you that your software license may be non-genuine.

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coffeedrinker
Buying an iPad is buying a second device of a kind different than anything you
currently have.

Buying another computer is done to replace one that is obsolete (something
that is less frequent over the last several years).

In other words, computer sales were destined to "fall off" a bit anyway. Once
tablet devices reach a saturation point with limited benefit for upgrading,
they will suffer a similar fate.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You are correct, but the event you're taking about (the "everyone who can
afford one has a computer" event) happened years ago. We're already there.
Destiny is history.

That said, things never really decline, because prices are going down, the
need for computing is going up, and so the market is always expanding and
sales just steadily grow now and forever.

You only ever see these kinds of false "declines" where people are really just
shifting to a different kind of computer.

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nanidin
It seems like a pretty big jump to determine causality here - nowhere in the
article do they mention consumer studies indicating consumers have purchased
the IPad in lieu of a PC. Until they do that, this seems like speculation at
best.

For instance, maybe people realized that a new PC doesn't buy them anything in
terms of performance for their web browsing and document editing needs.

~~~
swombat
Anecdotally, I know several people who have replaced their computers
completely with iPads. They won't be buying new laptops any time soon (and
yes, they use their iPads for work).

~~~
lukeschlather
Anecdotally, I didn't bother to set up two monitors when I started my current
job (since I was the sole IT person) and after about six months I added one
since there are a few lying around and was blown away by how much my
productivity improved.

Granted, I'm doing development, but most tasks involving a computer are
positively impacted by increases in screen real estate. I've had the
bookkeeping office say they won't work with less than two monitors, and one of
them needs to be largish. Given the spreadsheets they work with, I see the
need.

There are plenty of tasks where the lack of real estate might seem to be
unimportant, but what it comes down to is that when you're trying to fit
anything of nontrivial complexity on a screen the size of the iPad, you use
more and more mental energy on context-switching as the complexity increases.

~~~
schmittz
This comment is interesting, because when the iPad first was announced, I had
a lot of people give me the "oversized iPod" line and I tried to explain that
even just significantly increasing screen real estate was enough to open the
device to massively increased functionality. Glad to see some analogous,
anecdotal support.

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rrrazdan
If tablets really are the future of computing, then developing countries can
bridge the digital gap quickly with inexpensive tablets.
[http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/35-tablet-from-india-
look...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/35-tablet-from-india-looks-to-be-
worth-every-paisa-video/)

Imagine 500 millions like these in every Indian's pocket.

~~~
rubinelli
Those Indians, they sure have big pockets! ;^) Jokes aside, that's a good
point. When you have your own computing device, you have the chance to play
around with it instead of just following a script ("click the blue e, type
facebook, press enter..."). These low-cost models lack 3G and have a horrible
battery life, but if they become popular, I'm sure we will see enterprising
individuals opening hole-in-the-wall cafés offering cheap wi-fi and charging
cradles.

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kragen
I worry a lot about this, because users have a lot less freedom with the iPad
than with PCs; they're a lot more vulnerable to Apple, which can abuse its
power in the same way that Facebook can.

If the iPad or something like it wins, disruptive innovation in computers is
dead, because incumbents will control the market, and incumbents don't like
disruptive innovation.

~~~
zmmmmm
I worry too, but the good news is that Honeycomb looks like it may well escape
the near-death experience of launching too early with the Xoom. If you gloss
over the small glitches nearly everyone who uses it loves it.

Fingers crossed we're heading to at least two viable tablet OSes, if not three
(number three being a total wildcard, but I would probably pick windows 8 if
only because eventually business adoption will give the momentum).

~~~
kragen
Honeycomb is still proprietary, isn't it? And Motorola is notorious for
locking down its devices so users can't control them, even if the users _do_
have a version of software that they want to install. (Edit: glad to hear they
aren't doing that on this one.)

~~~
zmmmmm
> Honeycomb is still proprietary, isn't it?

It is proprietary but users have enormously more freedom than they do with the
iPad. Just the ability to side load apps makes a universe of difference.
Further I'd be very surprised if most of the current crop of tablets don't get
the upgrade to (open source) ice cream sandwich at the end of the year.

> And Motorola is notorious for locking down its devices

The Xoom bootloader is unlocked, so presuming ICS gets released it should be
possible for people to flash it on there even if Motorola doesn't want to do
it.

------
kenjackson
Tablets are purely a very short-lived stop gap (think a few years).

The future is phone sized devices with foldable screens. Use it small when
you're on the go. But when you want to sit on the couch or on the bus, you
open it up.

The dedicated tablet becomes a niche product for those people that need the
full power of a dedidicated large machine.

[http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-develops-sweet-foldable-
amo...](http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-develops-sweet-foldable-amoled-
screen-with-no-seam-13151802/)

~~~
jws
Is it prognostication day already? I dissent.

I call the future is: Your world in your phone sized device backed by the
cloud, with the option to use anonymous, mindless larger displays when in
close proximity. (Bonus good future if I can also leap to a processor in an
anonymous proximate device for speed.)

EOM

Reasoning: Producing enough light for a larger display requires power,
requires mass, interferes with the light weight of the phone. Decouple the
display and the phone. Ditto for CPU power and storage.

~~~
kenjackson
_I call the future is: Your world in your phone sized device backed by the
cloud, with the option to use anonymous, mindless larger displays when in
close proximity._

I've seen the future, and that's not it. :-)

Too expensive, and just can't be ubiquitous. How many large displays can you
put in a bus or in the stands of a football game or at McDonalds?

With that said, such devices will exist, but they'll be your TVs in the house.

And on battery life. Even today people can get some decent efficiencies, and
it will get better. Here's what Engadget had to say about the Kyocera Echo (a
dual screen phone, with a 1370mAh battery, which is smaller than the iPhone
4s):

"We took a different approach. We charged the phone fully and then went about
using it as we normally would for an entire day -- checking emails, browsing
through TweetDeck, zoning out on a conference call for an hour or so, watching
a bit of Sprint TV and playing entirely too much full-screen Pac-Man. We'd say
70 percent of our usage had both panels open, which is likely far greater than
what you'd see after the novelty wears off. That said, we managed around 15
hours of use before it petered out, and on a second try -- one that involved
far less dual-screen action -- we squeezed out 22 total hours. "

15 hours isn't ideal, but with some work that we're seeing out of Samsung, I
don't think 24 hours is out of the question in a year or two at all. And
that's with a relatively small battery.

EDIT: You have to love cowards that downvote, but don't dare say a peep.

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rick_bc
The losts are in revenues, not units.

It's entirely possible that people opt for lower priced computers instead of
iPads.

