Three Charts on the Supremacy of Mobile

There has been a certain arc to many of my recent columns regarding the schism between desktop and mobile operating systems. For what it’s worth, there is simply a feeling I’ve been having about mobile operating systems the more I think about what is happening globally at a platform level. I want to share three charts I feel signal the direction we are heading.

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This chart tells the history of where we are up to the end of Q2 2015 when it comes to operating system shipments. The percentage represents the share of a particular operating system as a percentage of all smartphones, tablets, and PCs shipped that year running a particular OS. I have grouped together Windows and Windows Phone, simply because Windows Phone alone would not have been worth charting. Also, it makes a specific point about Microsoft. I did not group Mac OS X into Apple’s share to make the point that iOS, by itself, has surpassed the number of devices it is shipped on — thus far in 2015, more than all of Microsoft’s operating systems combined. As you can see from the chart, this is the first time in decades an Apple operating system has been shipped on more devices than a Microsoft operating system. Due to the degree of negativity in the PC market in 2015, this is likely to be the case through the end of the year and I don’t see it changing from here on out.

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This chart makes for good controversy. I have lumped together the annual sales of PCs, smartphones, and tablets by vendor. As you can see from the chart, those who make smartphones are on a very different trajectory when it comes to the shipments of personal computers than those who make PCs only. Looking at the trajectory is a key part of this chart.

SPvsPC

Lastly, time spent, on average, on PCs and smartphones by region. I have this data from our research broken out by specific country. There is no country where PC usage is on the rise. It is flat, at best, in certain markets and declining in all others. The overwhelming majority of devices being shipped and humans using a smartphone as their only or primary computer is what is affecting the directionality of this chart but it is a key data point to internalize none the less.

The times have changed. Microsoft won the battle for the desk, Apple won the battle for the pocket. While Google’s Android has the market share, it is actually unclear what Google has won yet from Android, other than preventing Microsoft from being relevant in mobile.

This story is not over. The ultimate winners from Android may not be Google, in the same way Microsoft winning the desk empowered companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo to win the desk as well. Yet it’s clear the battle for the pocket is the most important one for the next decade. It is a market big enough to sustain many winners but, outside of Apple, it is still unclear what winning looks like in Android. I expect in 2-3 years we may have a better idea, but certainly it will look different than what winning for Apple looks like.

These last few years will go down as the inflection point for the mobile computing era.

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Ben Bajarin

Ben Bajarin is a Principal Analyst and the head of primary research at Creative Strategies, Inc - An industry analysis, market intelligence and research firm located in Silicon Valley. His primary focus is consumer technology and market trend research and he is responsible for studying over 30 countries. Full Bio

3 thoughts on “Three Charts on the Supremacy of Mobile”

  1. Despite smartphones far out-shipping desktops, it’s interesting to see that in terms of absolute time spent, desktops are still used significantly more than smartphones. I also find it interesting that the time spent on desktops is more or less the same among regions, whereas time spent on smartphones skew heavily towards emerging markets.

    This would suggest that emerging countries use desktops just as much as developing nations, which doesn’t agree with the idea that emerging countries have significant “mobile-only” usage.

    Although the shipment data makes it look like smartphones replaced desktops (and using “share” as opposed to “units” in the graph exaggerates this point), the time spent conversely suggests little correlation.

    I am personally of the opinion that for the majority of usage, desktops and smartphones occupy totally different contexts; desktops dominate office use whereas smartphones dominate personal use. Hence growth in smartphones does not necessarily cause desktop usage to decline. It simply allows us to use computers and the Internet in a more personal setting.

    I would welcome a further analysis which breaks down time spent by context. I expect that to clarify what is actually happening to the desktops and smartphones.

    1. The key point here, and your right in your first observation, is those in emerging markets, and even developed ones with PCs still use them, and usage is not declining dramatically. What’s being offset in overall time is those who are getting on the Internet without a PC. The balance is shifting because of that dynamic.

      In most cases the smartphone was an additive in Internet time spent by PC owners. Although there is ample evidence in pure consumer markets PC time is declining but again not rapidly.

      Keep in mind these charts include business workers estimating their time spent on said device as well. I can’t do this, but I’m confident if I eliminated those who sit at a desk and work at a PC all day from this data the charts would skew heavily mobile.

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