By now there has been a lot of press about the Post PC Era. Ok I will bite lets do the math.
Let us break down the numbers. The IDC says that tablets sold 14-16 million units in 2010. A lot of people in the media are saying that this is the dawning of a new age in computing aka Post PC. Or some of the more blunt commentators are saying the PC is dead. 16 million is a large number. Let me give you another number 346.2 million. The estimated number of PCs shipped in 2010. Yup more than 21 times the number of tablets.
Ok, but certainly the tablets will cut into the market in the following years. Flashback to 2008 when netbooks were all the rage. The media said netbooks would replace the PC. I bet you that tablets will replace netbooks which are replacing PCs or so the argument goes. Here is a dose of reality again sticking with IDC. IDC projects that netbook sales are down. Netbooks are being replaced with low priced laptops and all in one desktops. The PC market will be over half a billion machines by 2014. Tablets will certainly compose a chunk of the portable devices. The IDC is predicting 50 million tablets in 2011. If you quadrupled sales by 2014 which is highly unlikely that is still less than half.
My point in this is that just reading news is not enough. You need to dig into the research to understand what is really going on in a particular area.