Touch Mac From Apple 'Inevitable' As iPad Growth Halts: IDC Analyst

As iPad shipments sink, what will Apple do next? An IDC analyst believes a touch Mac is one answer.

"I don't think the iPad as a category grows," Ryan Reith, program director with IDC covering mobile devices, told me in a phone conversation on Wednesday. And the iPad Pro is not necessarily the long-term solution, he says. "The way that we tend to view the iPad Pro is that it's kind of a stopgap solution until they get a Mac line to the point of a touch screen and possibly detachable keyboard."

Reith continued. "I think [a touch Mac] is inevitable. There's nothing from the supply chain or from Apple that supports that right now -- I just think it's inevitable...I don't know if that's two years out or what," he added.

You could argue that the 12-inch MacBook gets pretty close. Though it doesn't have a touch screen, it has the portability and feel of a tablet. And the keyboard's extremely-thin keys emulate the kind of detachable keyboard you get, for example, with a Microsoft Surface. (I've been using the 12-inch MacBook for the last month and a half so I can say that with some authority). And Apple offers a Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro, making it a kind of tablet-laptop hybrid.  But Reith believes Apple is playing a waiting game to see what works and what doesn't. "In the typical Apple fashion, they're going to take their time and when they do it, they'll...do it the right way," he said.

Apple will have to do something to kick start growth. On Tuesday, the company said it sold 16.1 million iPads in the most recent quarter. That's well below the 21.4 million sold last year in the same period and about 2 million units short of the sales analysts had expected.  And overall the tablet category is in a free fall (see this chart showing iPad peak and steady decline), as IDC indicated when it last reported on quarterly tablet shipments.