Death of PC exaggerated, sales look OK
Talk of the death of the desktop personal computer is premature, and the 'post-PC' era is not here just yet, according to industry executives at Reuters Global Technology Summit.
Sales of PCs this year may not match growth rates for smartphones and tablets, but key manufacturers believe businesses and emerging markets will keep the PC at the center of the computing experience, at least for the next few years.
"As wonderful as tablets are, it doesn't replace a workstation or a high-resolution display," Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive of chip designer Nvidia Corp, told the summit in New York.
Just as cameras on phones have not stopped growth in high-end digital cameras, Huang said tablets will not replace powerful PCs.
"Even as we build these mobile devices -- and clearly it is consuming some parts of the PC market -- it feels like it is consuming the lower-performance part of the PC marketplace, for browsing content, content consumption."
It is not yet clear how much tablets are contributing to waning PC sales, which are estimated to have fallen about 1 percent in the first three months of this year, the first decline in almost two years.
Industry watchers are still unsure whether that was a temporary slip or an early sign that other devices -- such as Apple Inc's iPad -- have become more important.
"We're in this new world where instead of being PC-centric, there's no single device that dominates," said Rob Glaser, founder and chairman of digital media firm RealNetworks Inc, who now also works at venture capital firm Accel Partners.
"In terms of importance to media creation, delivery and consumption, 'superphones' like the iPhone or the Android phones are -- plus or minus -- as important as the PC is today, and in the ascendant," Glaser told the summit in New York. "You can say without hesitation that three years from now, while the PC will still be important, it will be the second-most important device for content creation and consumption."
PC SALES REBOUND
With this sort of theory in mind, sales of tablets and smartphones are expected to grow much faster than PCs over the next few years.
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