Tablets will overtake notebooks as the largest mobile PC category this year, says ABI Research. According to the firm, tablets will take 52% of the global market by the end of the year, while notebooks – which will see flat growth – will fall from 51% (2013) to 48% (2015), and to 47% by 2016.
Despite losing share, notebook sales are not shrinking. Unlike tablets, which focus on portability and connectivity, notebooks are all about portability and productivity – which “has yet to be achieved by any other portable mobile computing device”, says ABI analyst Stephanie Van Vactor. Notebooks’ longer lifetime may be part of the reason for their flat result.
Non-traditional notebooks, such as ultrabooks and Chromebooks, will experience a moderate CAGR of 16% from 2015 to 2020. The adoption rate of tablets is beginning to slow, but these devices will show a combined growth of 47% YoY in 2015.
