Gartner: Device Shipments Break 2.4B Units In 2014, Tablets To Overtake PC Sales In 2015
The gradual decline of the PC industry, spurred on by the rapid rise of mobile computing, continues apace. Today the analysts at Gartner have published their latest forecasts for global PC, tablet …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gartner's new forecast extends an arc already drawn by its rivals: last November, Canalys projected tablets would make up half of all PCs shipped in 2014, with Android taking roughly two-thirds of that market. Today Gartner goes further, putting total global device shipments above 2.4 billion units for 2014 and calling the crossover point for 2015, when it expects tablet sales to overtake PC sales outright.
The pickup was unusually broad — Gartner's release travelled through The Next Web, InfoWorld, Computerworld, ZDNet, eWeek, GeekWire and The Drum within a day — a sign the PC decline has become the baseline assumption against which every vendor and supplier now plans, rather than a contested thesis.
First-order effects
- PC vendors enter their planning cycles with two independent research houses (Canalys and now Gartner) both telling them tablets are the growth category, squeezing desktop-and-notebook-centric product roadmaps and marketing budgets.
- Tablet-first component and OS ecosystems gain a credible 2015 crossover date, letting suppliers and developers prioritize touch/mobile form factors over legacy PC configurations.
Second-order effects
- PC makers face pressure to hedge by shipping their own tablets or hybrid devices, competing inside a category whose margins and price points differ sharply from traditional notebooks.
- Analyst-forecast competition hardens: each revision from Gartner or Canalys now moves vendor guidance and investor sentiment, making shipment forecasts themselves a recurring market event.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, computing's center of gravity shifts structurally from the PC refresh cycle toward annualized, consumer-style device replacement — the 'fashionized' model where upgrade cadence follows design and ecosystem pull rather than enterprise depreciation schedules.
- The divergence between Gartner's and Canalys's definitions of what counts as a 'PC' foreshadows a measurement problem that will complicate how the industry tracks the converged device market.
The trend: Personal computing is crossing from a PC-defined market to a tablet-and-mobile-defined one, with analyst forecasts setting the timeline vendors plan around.