The decline of the global PC market is fueling expectations that so-called 'hybrid,' or 'detachable' tablets will eventually become the next hot item. Chip making titan Intel Corp. is betting that the time is now.

Also known as "2-in-1" computers, detachables are a result of technological marriage; they are built using standard portable PC components, but are light and thin and can transform into a slate tablet, much like an iPad. The machines thus offer the convenience to do both web browsing in one position, and more CPU-intensive activities such as a photo editing and word processing in the other.

Intel Corp. displayed one such machine at the recent Spring Edition of the Kong Electronics Fair earlier this year. The unit easily separated into two parts, enabling the screen to be carried away portably, leaving the keyboard portion behind.

"The cheesy tagline for a 2-in-1 is that 'it's a laptop when you need it and a tablet when you want it,'" says Intel product marketing officer Shantanu Basu. "People who would normally buy tablets are shifting to 2-in-1s because they offer such convenience over a standard laptop. Good touch-panel graphic user interface software makes the system go."

All that said, the 2-in-1 is not wholly new idea, having been around for the last two years. But falling production costs, as well as the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the PC market have finally converged to push demand, say experts.

The fizzling of the PC market has now been confirmed; data show that worldwide PC shipments dropped to under 300 million units in 2015, the largest on-year fall in history. A slew of reasons have been cited for the decline, including a supply glut, longer PC lifecycles, competition from mobile phones and tablets, as well as falling commodity prices and weak international currencies, according to International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide PC Tracker.

Meanwhile, sales of detachable tablets (which are counted separately from PCs), are growing quickly, albeit from a small base. Their impact for 2016 should be larger as detachable tablet volume grows; that should soften the impact of another weak year for PCs in 2016. IDC forecasts PC sales to fall another 3.1% this year.

"The release of Windows 10 earlier this year finally presented an operating system that lives up to the 2-in-1's capabilities," writes Digital Trend analyst Gabe Carey. "The kinks are being worked out, the designs are being refined, and the result will be devices that finally fill the lofty promise of a tablet's convenience paired with a PC's productivity; 2016 could be its time to shine."

Prices for the machines vary widely according to performance and convenience. Weighing just 2.8 pounds and measuring 0.59 inches in thickness, Lenovo's Yoga 900 sports a 6th-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, an eight-hour battery and a 13.3-inch 3200 x 1800 screen. It retails for about $1,200. On the other hand, Acer's Aspire R15 unit has been appraised as a good value at around $600 according to Laptop Mag.

Meanwhile, the PC market may not be in permanent decline, say some industry watchers. "Even as mainstream desktop and notebooks see their lifetimes stretched ever longer, Apple's emergence as a top 5 global PC vendor in 2015 shows that there can be strong demand for innovative, even premium-priced systems that put user experience first," say IDC researchers. They predict that PC replacements sales will eventually pick up again, perhaps by late this year, as security and performance issues come to the fore.