Canalys: Half Of All PCs Shipped in 2014 Will Be Tablets; Android 65%, Apple 30%
The growth of tablet sales has been outstripping that of more traditional desktop and laptop personal computers for a while, and now it looks like we are finally approaching the tablet/PC tipping point …
Context & Ripple Effects
Canalys has been counting tablets inside the 'PC' category since January 2011, when its iPad-inclusive methodology showed Apple's 'PC' shipments growing by 241 percent — a definitional choice most rivals did not make at the time. The firm is now extending that framing to its conclusion: on Canalys' own accounting, tablets cross the halfway mark of all PCs shipped in 2014.
The forecast traveled unusually far for an analyst note — pickups at 9to5Google, BGR, MacRumors, The Next Web, EE Times and Benzinga alongside Canalys' own release — because it forces a choice between two market definitions: one where Windows PCs dominate, and one where Android already holds 65% of the 'PC' market.
First-order effects
- On Canalys' definition, Apple holds roughly 30% of the combined PC-plus-tablet market while Android vendors hold 65%, meaning traditional Wintel makers now compete against a category where their operating system runs only a shrinking slice.
- The 65%-to-30% split signals that low-priced Android slates, not premium devices, are driving the volume crossing the tipping point — putting margin pressure on every vendor shipping both notebooks and tablets.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft faces the squeeze directly: if half the PC market ships without Windows in 2014, its Office and Windows licensing model loses reach into exactly the form factor growing fastest, intensifying the urgency behind its own tablet push.
- Component suppliers and contract manufacturers re-weight production lines toward tablet BOMs, which compresses the pricing power of notebook-only ODMs and pushes retail channels to re-plan shelf space around Android slates.
Third-order effects
- The 'PC' category itself becomes a contested metric: whether tablets count changes who leads the industry, so analyst definitions — Canalys versus Gartner-style splits — become commercially consequential for how vendors report success.
- If the pattern holds, developer attention, silicon roadmaps, and enterprise procurement budgets migrate toward mobile operating systems, structurally demoting the desktop OS from platform default to legacy workload.
The trend: Personal computing volume is migrating from Windows-defined machines to mobile-OS devices, with the boundary of what counts as a 'PC' becoming a strategic battleground among analysts, Apple, Microsoft, and Android hardware vendors.