In 2010, Steve Jobs made the analogy between PCs and mobile devices with the original trucks and cars. He explained that when we were an agrarian nation and automobiles were new, everybody wanted a truck. Automobiles were expensive things and you only bought one if you needed it to do heavy work. That, however, was temporary. Eventually, people began buying cars and before you knew it most people bought cars.

As the analogy goes, the desktop PCs are the trucks and the emerging classes of tablets and pocket computing devices, such as iPhones, are the cars. When he made the analogy, it made a lot of sense to me but I felt like it was still something pretty distant into the future. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Looking at my new iPhone, it has a 64 bit processor and is more powerful than anything I could’ve imagined just a few years ago. Moreover, software developers are getting smarter about ways to implement these touch devices in a way that’s quick, efficient, and just better than a traditional PC. (Don’t believe me? Check out Editorial.) I don’t think the desktop Mac is going away but I do feel the swing as more people decide their phones and tablets are “enough”.

This was brought home for me today with some reporting by Horac Dediu. Including iOS and Android devices with traditional computers, in Q3 2008, there were 92 million units shipped, 90% of which were running Windows. Jumping to Q3 2013, using the same devices, there were 269 million units shipped of which Windows was 32%. There were more traditional computer shipped in 2008 than in 2013. You don’t even need fancy statistics to verify this. Just look around you, and you’ll find several people that get by just fine with a mobile device alone.

I’m not saying that laptops and desktop computers are going to go away entirely. There’s a big group of people that are always going to want that kind of power, including me. However, the shift from trucks to cars is in full swing and as the mobile devices get even better hardware and smarter software, this is going to become even more obvious.