In our recent report on Ultrabooks and Mobile Computing, we interviewed a number of key players from the mobile PC space and there was intense debate about which form-factor of the current crop will come out on top. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has said recently that ever since the launch of the iPad the company always thought tablets would eventually outsell PCs, and was even more firmly of this opinion two years on. Of course, he would be: Apple shipped 40.5 million iPads in 2011, up from 14.8 million in 2010. Compare this with shipments of Apple’s Macbook in 2011 – of which there were 12.9 million – and you can see why Apple thinks, as the trend-setter that it arguably is, the rest of the market will head this way.
As I blogged a fortnight ago, Ultrabooks like Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga are rejuvenating the notebook class, offering the user experience of a tablet in a notebook form-factor. It is hoped that Ultrabook sales will boost flagging numbers in developed markets, where the tablet sales, not entirely unrelatedly, continue to grow and grow. On the other hand, the price tag of tablets and the consumer-orientated user experience make them more suited to the majority of people’s computing needs.
So will mobile PCs continue to out-ship tablets over in the next five years? Well to find that out you’ll have to read our new report! In it you will find forecasts for each of the mobile computing form-factors – netbook, traditional notebook, tablet and Ultrabook – by Juniper’s eight key regions, as well as forecasts for a whole host of other metrics…
Tags: Apple, iPad, laptop, mobile computing, Mobile PC, notebook, PC, Ultrabook
[...] analysis from Juniper Research asserts that “Ultrabooks like Lenovo’s IdeaPad are rejuvenating the notebook class, offering [...]