I recently completed a study that says desktop tower PC market will decline up to 50% over the next 5-7 years. This is a huge shift from the past where PCs grew even through recessions with notebooks experiencing double-digit growth.
All-in-one PCs will grow but not totally offset the decline of PCAT towers and motherboards. AIO price is an issue, but that is because it includes the LCD.
Notebook growth is being truncated by tablets into slow growth. The future mobile device market will tilt heavily toward ultra-mobile devices, including variants of the Microsoft Surface and Intel Ultrabook design. Ultrabook pricing is an issue but will come down and morph with conventional notebooks.
An interesting sidelight is that users will more and more access exploding web/cloud content, rather than creating it. This tilts the market toward tablets and touch technology - away from content creating, number crunching PCs. As the cloud becomes ubiquitous, most users wont need powerful PCs or software.
What do you think?
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