The war for mobile computing supremacy seems to be going according to plan. Back in January this year, NPD DisplaySearch foresaw this much when it said that tablet shipments would greatly exceed those of notebooks in 2013.
Now the same analyst firm is back with updated number. And they are even more damning for the laptop camp. The tablets will just not have a simple advantage — they are projected to ship twice as well as notebooks and ultrabooks.
The shipment figures are expected to come in at 364 million units, meaning around 1 million tablets will be sold per day on average this year.
At the same time, notebook shipments will end up roughly in the range of 177 million units.
Besides, where is the fun in just predicting numbers for one single year, right? The situation will only escalate over the next few years. Tablets are now expected to reach shipments of 589 million by 2017, while laptops will be stuck in the range of 176 million.
Sure, these are just forecasts — and everyone thought notebooks would have taken over the world by now. But that was before tablets moved in to ruin the plans.
That’s not to say that the tablet party will not be ruined by augmented reality and wearable computing devices. Devices like Google Glass and the rumored Windows Watch, for instance, could bump in to disrupt the tablet numbers. Besides, increasingly powerful smartphones also pose a viable threat.
