On Wednesday, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs declared that the tech industry is in the "post-PC" device era as he introduced the iPad 2. A day later, a leading technology research firm gave credence to that assertion, cutting its PC shipment forecast and citing tablets as one of the reasons.
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Gartner Inc. said it expects worldwide PC shipments to grow 10.5% in 2011 to 387.8 million units, down from an earlier forecast of 15.9% growth. The biggest decline will come in laptops sold to consumers, a traditionally high growth sub-sector where shipments are now expected to increase 14.6% in 2011 instead of 25.1%, the firm said.
Competition from the iPad is an obvious culprit. Many estimates call for upwards of 40 million tablet sales in 2011—with Apple's device dominating the market—an amount that would more than compensate for the drop off in PC sales if the two categories were combined. And many other companies are racing to make tablets of their own.
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MarketBeat: Market Response to Gartner's Musings
"The tablet is obviously one of the biggest challenges the PC has ever faced," said George Shiffler, a Gartner analyst.
Still, it's an overstatement to call the tablet a PC killer. Many businesses and consumers who need computers for work are still likely to buy laptops.
Mr. Shiffler, in fact, suspects that laptop growth may kick into a higher gear again after a delay as consumer figure out the best uses for the new devices. Gartner even revised upward its long-term growth rates for laptop shipments, as consumers in developing countries buy more of the machines.
"Our forecasts before the advent of media tablets was for multiple laptops per household," said Jeff Barney, a vice president at Toshiba Corp.'s U.S. computer unit. Now the company, one of the fastest-growing makers of laptops for consumers, expects some people to opt for a tablet over a second or third laptop. Also, consumers may wait longer before replacing an existing laptop.
"Maybe it stretches from every two and a half years to every four years," Mr. Barney said.
Toshiba plans to release a tablet running Google Inc.'s Android operating system in May.
A shift in the market was evident over the holidays: Hewlett-Packard Co. said PC sales to consumers in its January quarter declined 12% from a year earlier; Dell Inc.'s quarterly revenue in its consumer business fell 8%.
Netbooks, a subcategory of small, less expensive mobile PCs, have been particularly hard hit since the introduction of the iPad. In the U.S., netbook sales grew four-fold in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to the same period a year ago, according to technology research firm IDC. U.S. netbook sales declined 48.7% in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Electronics retailer Best Buy Co. said in December that tablets had captured a lot of the attention of "early adopters" instead of other computers.
"Tablets are an exciting new option for consumers right now and a category Best Buy is focusing heavily on," a spokeswoman for the Richfield, Minn.-based retailer said in a statement on Thursday.
"Our goal is to be tablet central, with a broad selection that customers can test and try. The exuberance around yesterday's iPad announcement is really indicative of the excitement we're seeing for tablets overall this year, and we expect this enthusiasm to continue."
Write to Ben Worthen at ben.worthen@wsj.com
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