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It the market for desktop PCs and laptops giving way to tablets?

Is it time to sell your macbook pro and invest in a tablet instead? It seems that in our modern mobile world the most desirable computing device is the tablet, and as a result sales of desktop computers and laptops are suffering.

In fact sales of desktops and laptops are still rising year on year, but nowhere near as quickly as the growth in tablet sales, which are growing at four times the pace.  If the current trends continue, and there is every indication that they will, tablets will be outselling desktops and laptops by a large margin.

People prefer using their tablets. Even when tablet owners are close to their desktops, they are more likely to be using their tablet, and they tend to use their tablet for 80 percent of the time they spend on any computer. It seems that it won’t be long before computers other than tablets will be used only for heavy number crunching operations such as image processing and large spreadsheets.

As well as the convenience of a tablet, and the desire to have mobile computing power, the trend to tablets is in part a result of the cloud. Currently the cloud means that we don’t need a huge amount of storage space on our computers as all our images, videos and music can reside comfortably in the cloud and we can download and stream them whenever we wish. Perhaps the technology is not quite there yet, particularly in terms of mobile network usability, but as 4G networks are rolled out over the coming months, we should soon be seeing an order of magnitude improvement in mobile broadband.

Once that happens we really will begin to exploit the full potential of the cloud, and it won’t just be for storing our images, sounds and data. We will be using it for real computing, and having huge amounts of computing power on our desktops will be an irrelevance; we will use the big computer in the sky instead.

There is one possible exception, and that is playing games. Will the cloud ever achieve the same sort of gaming experience that we enjoy on consoles and powerful computers? Some people say that it will; that game streaming will be the new way in which we interact with games and other gamers.

Time will tell, but should you choose to sell macbook air in favour of a tablet, you won’t be alone. This year tablet sales will hit 119 million worldwide and projections suggest that this will double by 2014.