Half Of All PCs Shipped in 2014 Will Be Tablets; Android 65%, Apple 30%

The growth of tablet sales has been outstripping that of more traditional desktop and laptop personal computers for a while, and now it looks like we are finally approaching the tablet/PC tipping point, where the cheaper, more portable tablet is becoming the de facto PC: 2014 will be the year that tablets account for 50% of all “PCs” shipped globally, according to researchers at Canalys. Leading the charge will be tablets built on Android - which collectively will account for 65% of all tablets shipped (185 million units) with Samsung at the helm. Apple, with its growing line of iPad devices, will remain the single-biggest tablet brand, taking 30% of the market - and, significantly, the most profitable.
Profit, in fact, takes priority for Apple over market share, Canalys argues. “Apple is one of the few companies making money from the tablet boom,” writes Tim Coulling, a senior analyst with Canalys. “Premium products attract high value consumers; for Apple, remaining highly profitable and driving revenue from its entire ecosystem is of greater importance than market share statistics.”
All well and good, but longer term, the company that keeps market share is the one that keeps mindshare. Consider Microsoft, which Canalys predicts will only have about 5% of the tablet market. “To improve its position it must drive app development,” writes Canalys research analyst Pin Chen Tang. Developers tend to go to where the most avid users are.
Canalys notes that 50% tablet share in PCs works out to 285 million tablets shipping in 2014. By 2017 that number will rise to 396 million units.
To chart how quickly the market is shifting to tablets, consider that in February 2013, Canalys noted that tablets accounted for only one-third of all personal computers shipped. For all of 2013, Canalys had predicting originally predicted that tablets will account for 37% of all PCs shipped, with some 182.5 million android tablets out of a total 493.1 million units, although today it is revising that up to 40%. (I'm sticking to Canalys numbers, by the way, to keep it like-for-like, as other researchers will probably use different data sources and come up with different numbers.)