Horace Dediu of Asymco put together a graph plotting the history of personal computing over the last 37 years. Dediu took PC data published by Jeremy Reimer and added smartphone stats along with updated PC and Apple numbers from research firm Gartner. From the data we can see that when combined, Android and iOS account for a higher shipment volume than the entire PC industry. When excluding Macs, the PC industry accounted for just 336 million units shipped in 2011, in comparison to 358 million Android and iOS units. Dediu added that the iPad cannot be considered a niche product. “The absolute volume of units sold after less than two years is enough to place it within an order of magnitude of all PCs sold,” said Dediu. “We can also observe that it has a higher trajectory than the iPhone which became a disruptive force in itself.”
[Via 9to5Google]