Skip to main content

Cloud Service Adoption Transforms Personal Computing

Global consumer electronics vendors experienced a challenging environment in 2016, due to the shift in product preferences of savvy buyers. With the exception of Chromebooks, the personal computing category has not had the market demand or device shipments that could sustain the vendors.

Case in point; consumer spending during the holiday quarter of 2016 was clearly not aimed at consuming media tablets, as the market continued its downturn. The fourth quarter of 2016 (4Q16) marked the ninth consecutive quarter that tablet shipments have declined.

Media Tablet Market Development

Vendors shipped 52.9 million tablets in the fourth quarter, which was a decline of 20.1 percent from the same quarter one year ago, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC) .

Similarly, shipments of 174.8 million units for the full year 2016 were down 15.6 percent compared to 2015 -- marking the second straight year of declining shipments of media tablets.

"The sentiment around the tablet market continues to grow stale despite a lot of talk about vendors pivoting their product portfolios toward the detachable segment," said Ryan Reith, program vice president at IDC.


Typical tablets without a dedicated keyboard -- which IDC refers to as slate tablets -- are continuing to lose relevancy across all regions, and as a result the market decline is a truly  global phenomena.

Vendors that have historically led the notebook PC market are also talking about expanding their product portfolios to include more detachable tablets. IDC believes the second half of 2017 will bring a wide range of new detachable devices from the notebook PC OEMs as well as those playing primarily in the smartphone space.

Yet even detachable tablets struggled to maintain momentum in the fourth quarter as flagship products from key players like Microsoft and Apple started to show signs of age.

Outlook for Tablet Market Growth

"The market continues to warm up to two-in-one devices, but we're now getting to a point where the price and performance disparity between detachables and convertibles has started to narrow, and this added competition led to a dampening in the growth of detachable tablets," said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC.

However, the analyst firm expects this to be temporary, as only two of the three major platforms have any significant hardware presence in the detachable market, and as the ecosystems are further refined with future updates and developer support.

That said, expect to see more new Chromebook models introduced in 2017, as the personal computing market continues the trend towards 'good enough' lower-cost portable devices that enable secure access to a multitude of consumer and enterprise cloud-based services. The ongoing market transformation seems inevitable.

Popular posts from this blog

Demand for Quantum Computing as a Service

The enterprise demand for quantum computing is still in its early stages, growing slowly. As the technology becomes more usable, we may see demand evolve beyond scientific applications. The global quantum computing market is forecast to grow from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $7.6 billion in 2027, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). That's a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.1 percent. The forecast includes base Quantum Computing as a Service, as well as enabling and adjacent Quantum Computing as a Service. However, this updated forecast is considerably lower than IDC's previous quantum computing forecast, which was published in 2021, due to lower demand globally. Quantum Computing Market Development In the interim, customer spend for quantum computing has been negatively impacted by several factors, including: slower than expected advances in quantum hardware development, which have delayed potential return on inve

AI Semiconductor Revenue will Reach $119.4B

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) and/or the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will guide Generative AI initiatives within the large enterprise C-Suite. They may already have the technical expertise and experience to understand the capabilities and limitations of Gen AI. They also have the authority and budget to make the necessary investments in infrastructure and talent to support Gen AI initiatives. Enterprise AI infrastructure is proven to be expensive to build, operate and maintain. That's why public cloud service provider solutions are often used for new AI use cases. AI Semiconductor Market Development Semiconductors designed to execute Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads will represent a $53.4 billion revenue opportunity for the global semiconductor industry in 2023, an increase of 20.9 percent from 2022, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. "The developments in generative AI and the increasing use of a wide range AI-based applications in data c

Global Public Cloud Spending to Reach $1.35T

Most digital transformation is enabled by cloud solutions. Worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach $1.35 trillion in 2027, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Although annual spending growth is expected to slow slightly over the 2023-2027 forecast period, the market is forecast to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9 percent. "Cloud now dominates tech spending across infrastructure, platforms, and applications," said Eileen Smith, vice president at IDC . Public Cloud Services Market Development IDC believes that most organizations have adopted the public cloud as a cost-effective platform for hosting enterprise applications, and for developing and deploying customer-facing solutions. Looking forward, the cloud computing model remains well positioned to serve customer needs for innovation in application development and deployment -- including as data, artificial intelligence