A tablet with a keyboard will never be anything but a top heavy unusable piece of shit. That's not going to kill laptops and desktops.
Lots of people felt the same when laptops started to become popular. They'll always be niche, they'll never replace desktops - too many compromises. The thing is high-end users, including us gamers, we're an itsy-bitsy tiny niche market who don't want to compromise and sometimes can't see how the compromises are totally acceptable for others.
A touchscreen, or to be specific
a small touchscreen isn't a good device (even supplemented by a camera and microphone) for all sorts of tasks including a lot (but not all) content creation but heavy content creators are vastly outnumbered by people consuming that content and that's where mobile devices can more than viable, but sometimes preferable. When I head into the server farm I'm not taking my MacBook Pro, Im taking the iPad because it's small and light and I can see the server status and control it from our custom app which makes the most of touch gestures and tapping to fully control a cluster, a server, a bank of CPUs in the server, or process that's crashed.
I was very much an iPad doubter thinking it was just a bigger iPhone and whilst that wasn't far from the truth back in 2010, now I think of my iPad as a computer without all the bits I don't need right now
and where having a V-shaped product (laptop) that is designed to rest on something is a minus and not a plus. Outside of the work environment, you don't need a keyboard to do shopping, banking, reading ebooks, watching TV or movies, or catching up the friends by vidconf. Then their are kids, the consumers of tomorrow. Even when a computer and TV screen as an option my neighbour's daughter, Chloe, would rather watch stuff on her tablet than on the TV which is bigger and better and
right there in the room. Why? Who knows. When she does want to write something she can bang stuff out insanely quick on her tablet because that's what she's used too.
Nobody here is predicting the 'death' of real computers but it's pretty clear what types of products are selling in greater numbers and that's likely party to do with the price, but also to do with small portable devices with great battery lives being convenient and increasingly more powerful and more capable every day.
Desktops and laptops are high margin products. Server revenue is nice, but especially once AMD/ARM competition starts putting the squeeze on the server products the much higher appetite for performance and room for margins in consumer products will still be relevant to Intel. We're willing to pay a large multiple for a small single threaded performance advantage, datacenters less so. Losing Apple will hurt them, as it will hurt AMD to lose them for GPUs.
Apple desktops and laptops are high margin products, plenty of PC manufacturers who sell vastly more and making vastly less and only survive on volume. Dell had a
operating loss of
$1.7bn last quarter. And you have to remember who pays for the R&D in the PC space because it's not gamers. For about two decades advances in the PC industry have been fuelled by massive sales from Government, the military and industry because they use computers in huge quantities for office and productivity tasks. Prior to that it was only the account who had a computer - when less PCs were less sold and much more expensive - that correlation is important.
But the large reliable PC buying markets are beginning to experiment with today's technology options and if they switch, and some already have, advancement in the PC platform will necessarily slow or become relatively more expensive. I work in a sensitive area of Government and if you told me just three years ago that I would be using a) a Mac (hahaha) and iDevice (lulz) for my job I'd have thought you crazy. But you know what? That's what I've been using for more than a year now. I'm on my second Mac (first an 13" MacBook Air, now a MacBook Pro) and iPhone - naturally with some extra Government security on top. But others people who just bought a Windows PC - because what the hell else are you going to buy - see other people getting shit done using a tablet with bespoke software and they ask questions. I meet with plenty of people from commercial aerospace an defence companies and many of them no longer carry a Wintel laptop but in iPad or just a smart phone. I haven't seen a BlackBerry in years, even a modern-Android powered one.
When the world's biggest PC buying users reduce the number of PCs they buy, it will have a consequence for power-PC users like gamers. It won't happen overnight but it is happening..