PC Sales Set For Slow Year: Blame The iPad

Market analysts Gartner must really love the iPad. Not only have they lowered their annual forecasts for global PC sales by 14.6 per cent for the coming year to 440million, but they’ve also provided a rather absurd reasoning for their economic predictions: iPad’s are really, really popular. Who didn’t see that coming?

Unfortunately, Gartner’s reasoning is a little vague, because they essentially assume the impact of an emerging market (Apple tablets) to greatly impact on the main PC market. Guess how many iPad’s are likely to be sold? Solid estimates figure it closer to 30 million. Let’s see now, a quick bit of math tells us that the total estimated iPad figure will still be less than 7 per cent of the total (expected) global PC market for 2012.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s hardly the PC sales killing robot I imagined the iPad to be.

Are traditional PCs doomed? Will Apple morph into Skynet and eventually become self aware, locking us into bloated proprietary formats, forcing draconian censorship laws and…hang on a sec! Let us know below.


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