Apple will have a lock on the tablet market until 2013 at the earliest. That’s the conclusion of a new study by the market researchers at DisplaySearch, who are predicting that Apple will sell as many as 40 million iPads this year alone. Meanwhile, the analytics firm Canalys says that for every 10 tablets that ship this year, 5 PC sales will be lost, further underscoring a major shift that’s been underway in the computer industry. So if these trends hold, then very soon Apple could be the world’s number one computer maker (that is, assuming you count iPads as computers, which they are), or at the very least in the top three.
The growth in tablet sales, according to a new report by Canalys, comes at the expense of “traditional” PCs, particularly netbooks. For every 10 “pads,” as they call them (suggesting Apple’s trademark may one day be, like “Band-Aid,” a generic term), 5 PCs won’t be sold. 200% more “pads” will be sold this year, as compared to only 8% more notebooks and 14% fewer netbooks. Last year 350 million PCs were sold, so with Canalys projecting that yearly pad sales will grow to 260 million in 2016, this suggests that by mid-decade there will be more pads sold than PCs.
