Apple's iOS will equal Windows "within a year' At its peak in 2004, 54 times as many PCs were sold as Macs. An analysis by Horace Dediu at Asymco, however, demonstrates that users are increasingly favouring new tablet and mobile devices, and that those tend to run Apple software. "Although PC volumes continued to grow, they did so more slowly and the Mac grew faster," writes Dediu on his blog. What coincided with this was the emergence of portable computing. The MacBook became easily differentiable as a "better" laptop. It was not faster, did not have more storage or any key metrics being used to sell PCs. It was just better as an integrated product. The integration manifested itself through a sense of quality and robustness as well as intangibles like aesthetics and "feel."" If we consider all the devices Apple sells, the whittling becomes even more significant and the multiple drops to below two. Seen this way, Post-PC devices wiped out of leverage faster than it was originally built. They not only reversed the advantage but cancelled it altogether," says Dediu. "Considering the near future, it's safe to expect a "parity" of iOS+OS X vs. Windows within one or two years. The install base may remain larger for some time longer but the sales rate of alternatives will swamp it in due course. Dediu claims the "psychological" impact on developers and on Microsoft itself would be significant, and that it would also affect how much incentive there was to consider Microsoft Windows as the default platform. Microsoft itself, however, is working to increase its penetration of the tablet market: its new Windows 8 software is built for tablets and the company claims it will offer more powerful options that devices such as the iPad, which have expanded an operating system whose origins lay in mobile phones.