The tablet revolution. The post-PC era. The smartphone explosion. Whatever label you want to apply to it, personal computing is changing. People are spending more time with smaller devices like tablets and smartphones and less time on desktops and laptops. This been evident for awhile, but the trend is still relatively young and the data points are only just beginning to trickle in.
For evidence of this shift, look no further than Apple. The company just reported an absolutely bonkers financial quarter, in which it sold 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads. The two products now make up 72% of Apple’s quarterly revenue and the consumer demand shows no sign of letting up.
As iOS devices sell like crazy, it only makes sense that the amount of Web traffic coming from these gadgets would increase. But by how much? Well, that traffic is now greater than the traffic that comes from Mac OS X, according to data from advertising analytics firm Chikita.
This month, iOS edged past Mac OS X for the first time, accounting for 8.15% of all Web traffic, compared to the 7.96% coming from Mac desktops. Of course, this data does include Android, which probably constitutes a share of Web traffic that’s roughly comparable to iOS. Even so, the combined mobile operating systems likely do not even begin to outnumber desktops overall, as there are still plenty of Windows machines out there.
Indeed, it will be some time before tablets and smartphones truly outnumber desktops and laptops. For now, most consumers are not replacing their computers with smaller devices, but rather supplementing them.
