iPad Rings Death Toll for Laptop Sales

Consumers love the touch screen. According to a recent report from NPD DisplaySearch, we love it so much that touch screen tablets are selling more than laptops. New tablet shipments are expected to outnumber laptops sometime this year.NPD’s report shows that tablets for sale shipments will increase to 256.5 million globally in 2013, a 67 percent increase over 2012. Even more impressive is that they are expected to more than double that number to 579.4 million by 2017.

During the same time frame, laptops shipments are predicted to remain stagnate with last year’s numbers of approximately 203.3 million units. NDP expects laptop sale to fall by 2017 to only 183.3 million.Ultraslim laptops, like Apple’s Macbook Air, will account for 66 percent of laptop shipment, which will gradually increase to 80 percent by 2017. However, the overall decline will continue to push PC sales downward.

NPD also notes that popular operating systems like Windows 8 are not as likely to influence tablet sales as much as low-cost devices. Even the touch screen hybrid laptop/tablets will not generate much interest from consumers.“Windows 8 has had a limited impact on driving touch adoption in notebook PC’s due to a lack of applications needing touch and the high cost of touch on notebook PC’s,” said PF DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim.sdDS12Dsa

new tablets are fast becoming the new hotness in the tech world. The cheaper they become with better computing capabilities, the more consumers will turn to them for basic Web browsing and email checking.Tablets won’t replace PCs as working computers, but there are not that many households that need that much computing power anyway. Acer's senior VP Scott Lin recently confirmed that a new 10-inch Iconia A3 tablet will arrive this summer and was quick to include it in some very ambitious sales plans. The device (not pictured) has yet to be priced or specced (or even seen), but nonetheless, Lin hopes it'll make up some of the 10 million slates the outfit aims to sell in 2013. He also announced a refresh for the $150 Iconia B1 this summer with a dual-core CPU, updated design and 1GB of RAM, and said that 1.5 million units of that model have shipped so far this year.

The company would like to move another 1.5 million by year's end along with 5 million of the recently announced 8-inch Iconia A1 tabs and 2 million Iconia A3s to make up the balance. Considering that competitor ASUS sold 3 million tablets in Q1 and has the hit Nexus 7 to peddle, new tablets seems a lofty goal for Acer -- especially since it only reluctantly leaped into tablets not so long ago.