The youth simply likes touchscreens. We got this theory confirmed by many friends who claim that their kids like their iPads or similar tablets more than computers with actual keyboards. They like to play or surf on tablets, more than on notebooks and God forbid you should mention desktops. According to the latest surveys, one in five US teens has a tablet and most of them use it for gamig, along with browsing. In a sense, this is their Commodore 64, albeit with quite a few more kilobytes.
The reality is quite clear - touchscreen tablets will continue to grow quickly and massively and they will simply cannibalize the notebook market. We saw this with notebooks eating away most of the desktop market, and this is the same fate that awaits notebooks.
When notebooks became the big thing, most people purchased a notebook as an addition to desktop, and the same pattern shows up with tablets. Now most people have notebooks, and tablet is a new device that you get for the reason known only to a tablet owner. There are way too many cons and pros to this device that in fact is a notebook / netbook without a keyboard.
Of course this process will take years, but at some point companies are going to sell more tablets than notebooks. From that point onwards, notebooks can only go down. Oh yes, you can plug a keyboard into a tablet and get a laptop again, of course the one with four to ten times less storage than a regular laptop.
As a matter a fact, a notebook is nothing more than just a portable PC, but we wonder what happens with smart phones. Namely, can these devices merge with tablets in future? Of course, we're not likely to see the answer anytime soon, but with some nice enginering and new batteries, who knows?
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