"In fact, PC sales have been declining for the last several quarters, with market research firm Gartner recording a 4.9 percent decline in the most recent quart

"In fact, PC sales have been declining for the last several quarters, with market research firm Gartner recording a 4.9 percent decline in the most recent quarter ending in December. The reason for that continued decline, according to Gartner, is that consumers are increasingly using tablets to do the things they might have done with a PC even a year or two ago." Sorry, but no. If I take a look at my collegues, friends and family all of them are still using desktop computers (The majority PC's, but some macs) and the main reason they dont buy new PC's as often these days is because they just dont have to. The computer they bought three or four years ago still has enough horsepower to drive most new games at decent settings, and none of them have any problems driving the newest enterprise software. The reason such old computers are still powerful enough is two-fold: 1. Innovation is slowing down. The processing power of a computer does not increase as fast as it used to. New software isnt as demanding of the current generation of hardware as it was a few years back. Simply put: Hardware has no reason to push the envelope anymore to the same degree as before. Software for regular folk just does not need more horsepower for now. 2. Consoles. Of the few software areas that has traditionally pushed PC hardware development it was computer games. The newest game used to be an awesome thing. You had a new-ish computer couldnt keep up with the newest and greatest. Only some could afford to upgrade their rigs enough to run the newest games at max resolution and settings. Consoles that compete with PC's effectively put a roof on that. Games being developed today nearly always are developed for release on the PC and a console. As the current generation of consoles is a few years old it is easy to see which hardware is the limiting factor. This means that even with med-budget computer hardware today you can take the latest and greatest game and play it at maximum settings without breaking a sweat because the game is primarily developed with the inferior console hardware in mind. So simply put, PC sales are not dwindling because of the tablet. It is dwindling because the pressure to upgrade just is not there anymore.