Analysts and tech observers have been fond of calling Apple's surging popularity indicative of the post-PC era. Apple's iPad sales have fostered the growth of the tablet market with rivals like Amazon and Samsung scrambling with their own tablet devices. Now with Apple set to introduce the next generation iPad tablet sales are sure to skyrocket which begs the question: does this really mark the end of the PC era?

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook certainly believes that a day will come when tablet devices will outsell traditional personal computers.

"From the first day it shipped, we thought - not just me, many of us thought at Apple - that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur," Cook of Apple said recently at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

His statement might seem biased but the figures back Cook's statement up. According to analysts at Canalys Apple became the world's largest PC maker by the end of 2011 and smartphone shipments outpaced PC shipments for the first time ever. There was 158.5 million smartphones sold in the last quarter of 2011 compared to just 414.6 million PC units sold that year. What's even more interesting is that of the 414.6 million PC units about 15% of these shipments were tablets. In the last quarter of 2011 tablets comprised of 22% of the total PC shipments.

Canalys lumped tablets together with PCs but without counting tablet sales, PC sales were flat last year. With tablet sales, the PC market grew 16%. Certainly analysts are predicting that tablet sales will outpace traditional desktops by 2013. Horace Dediu, an analyst with Asymco wrote in a blog post that tablet sales will boom in late 2013 because more competitors will rise up against Apple in the tablet market.

A younger generation will also push tablet sales according to Tim Bucher, an entrepreneur who was with Apple, Microsoft and Dell.

"I think the older generation does not pick up on the way of interacting with the new devices," Bucher said. "I don't know how many YouTube videos there are out there showing everyone from babies to animals interacting with iPads."

However all is not lost for traditional PCs. In fact the next few years could see strange permutations of desktops and tablets that will redefine personal computers. Apple's MacBook Air and Intel's line of ultrabooks are reinventing clamshell notebooks while Microsoft's new Windows 8 software could introduce new computer designs.

"The tablet and PC markets are all going to blur," said Tim Coulling, an analyst at Canalys. "We're going to see a lot of form-factor innovation. We'll be asking what is a tablet and what is a traditional PC?"