A sweeping statement from the chip maker, but the change in tune is to be expected considering the way tablets have factored in the overall decline of notebook demand.
Slates, as impressive as they are, make do without physical keyboards. But this has not stopped the tablets from eating up the market share of laptops and ultrabooks. If anything, they are poised to become the dominant mobile platform in the next couple of years.
But all through this, an increasing number of hybrid tablets have also started hitting store shelves, each offering varied sorts of hinges and other such mechanisms that help converge the form factors.
Demand for hybrids is low, but is slowly showing signs of progress.
And this is a trend that AMD foresees really multiplying in the years to come. The company’s UK Retail Business Development Manager, Andrew Muscat, talking to T3 claimed that he fully expects hybrid tablets to be the only kind of tablets in the market, as early as 2016:
“You’re going to see a shift I think. While tablets are good you’re still restricted when it comes to content creation; there’s always going to be a need for notebooks. I think it’s moving a lot more towards taking tablet technology and effectively turning it into notebook technology.”
What this essentially means is that the more things change, the more they stay the same — tablets are poised to become the very thing that they have slowly been supplanting. Soon most slates will become more and more like notebooks, if we are to believe AMD.
A sweeping statement, like I said, but then again, that’s usually the thing about forecasts.
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I can send messages and do very basic content creation on my Windows phone. Even with the larger display of a tablet, using an on screen keyboard really is a major hassle. Using a Surface tablet you quickly realize the joy of having the detachable keyboard for some serious work.