Have Tablets Killed the PC Industry?

Are reports of the death of the PC – once the wondrous device that everyone needed on their desktop – greatly exaggerated? There’s no question that thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, the personal computer is becoming less relevant to consumers, at least on the personal front.

According to a recent New York Times report, while mobile devices have certainly dented PC sales, there will always be a certain need for the devices, particularly in business settings. The article notes that tablets such as iPads and competitors will “most likely never satisfy spreadsheet masters, film editors and other workers who depend on multiple screens and the precision of a keyboard and mouse.”

Still, the market for PCs is changing, with the desktop computer and even the laptop, once considered a wonder of portable computing, to a very different realm.

“In my humble opinion, the PC as we have known it is in a continuous decline and being relegated to a utility device for businesses,” Hector Ruiz, the former chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, said.

From the introduction of the personal computer more than 30 years ago, it had, up until fairly recently, been a boom industry. Now the PC industry is in full-on bust mode, despite being predicted to sell some 300 million units worldwide this year. During the second quarter of 2012, global shipments of PCs fell 11 percent, which represented the fifth consecutive quarter of decline. Intel and Microsoft, both strong players in the personal computer market, have had disappointing financial results.

Will the PC market ever come back? There are some schools of thought that say the preponderance of tablets and smartphones simply cause consumers to delay purchases of new PCs, and that most people have not given up on the idea – or the need – of having an up-to-date personal computer on a desktop in the home somewhere. Companies, of course, will continue to buy desktop and laptop computers for their employees who don’t roam. (Not everyone is part of the “mobile workforce,” after all.)

More likely, however, the PC market will attain stability at some new, lower-level point that will become the industry’s “new normal.”