While I think there will be desktops and (particularly) laptops for some time still in the future, there is a shift going on where both the importance and impact of "traditional" computers like these declines. It has been going on for quite some time now (all statistics proves this, but you don't have to read boring statistics, it's enough to observe your surroundings for one day, and you'll see what I mean), and it will accelerate in a close future, that's a safe bet. And this no matter the underlying architecture. The user pattern changes, as simple as that.
Lord, here we go again...first off, "observing [my] surroundings" paints a very different picture than "all statistics." I know (and see in the general public) at least as many people who use laptops primarily as use tablets, and I know many more people who are primarily desktop users. I don't know a single person who is exclusively a tablet user, but I know a lot of people who use "traditional" computers but don't have a tablet (myself included.) So if we're going simply off of personally observed reality, as you suggest, I'd have to say that "all statistics" are fairly bunk.
Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, my experiences suggest that the often-quoted trends don't tell close to the whole story. Certainly tablet
sales have boomed in the past couple years, but I suspect that's as much because the past couple years is how long it's been since tablets started being not total crap and had the full force of the Apple marketing machine to make them look cool. And laptop and desktop sales
have declined. But that doesn't say anything about actual day-to-day
use patterns.
I have laptops that are five to ten years old that work like new, and that are perfectly usable for daily basic-use stuff like web browsing and email, not to mention the wide assortment of other software they can run perfectly well. Desktops, even
moreso. So the simple fact that people aren't
buying as many laptops and desktops as they used to doesn't really say anything about how many people are
using them (particularly when you consider that desktops reached a pretty fair saturation point for basic use somewhere in the mid-Core 2 era.)
And I don't think it's anything like a "safe bet" that tablet growth is just going to continue to accelerate forever and ever. Tablets are in a boom phase right now; it started when the iPad made them suddenly cool, and it's been fed by the fact that damn near every manufacturer in the industry has been trying to get in on the Hot New Thing. But every boom eventually goes bust, or sometimes just settles down quietly. When the novelty rush wears off, tablet sales will stabilize at a level the market can actually support, long-term. I don't know where that will be, but I know quite certainly that it
won't continue indefinitely at the growth rate it's seen over the two and a half years since the iPad's release, much less
accelerate, because if it does
it will outpace global population growth. That is quite simply
not going to happen.Use patterns change, but only to the extent that users let them. In the end, people will settle on the solutions that are best for them, whether or not that's what tablet evangelists want to see.
