Mary Meeker: Smartphones Will Surpass PC Shipments In Two Years

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mary Meeker gives a ten-minute slideshow packed with great data showing the monetum and direction of different Internet trends. This year, a big focus of her presentation was on mobile. Specifically, she put up the slide above showing a Morgan Stanley estimate that global smartphone shipments will eclipse PC shipments in 2012, with more than 400 million smartphones expected to be shipped that year, compared to less than 200 million last year. This prediction is reasonable. Smartphones are cheaper and phones, in general, are more ubiquitous. To the extent that all phones are becoming smartphones, they will be much more accessible and portable and than PCs (laptops included). They are certainly becoming just as capable, at least as far as surfing the Web is concerned, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of apps available for platforms like the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.